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Douglas returns on this episode of phpBB Weekly to lead the second segment in our “Building a Successful Community” series. Once again stealing/borrowing some content from Patrick O’Keefe’s book, Managing Online Forums, Douglas and David talk about developing user guidelines for your community. They talk about the importance of having user guidelines to help your community get along and succeed, and then go through a number of ideas and suggestions for things that you might want to include in your user guidelines (depending on the makeup of your community, of course).

During the discussion, they also touch on some other important topics, such as dealing with users who try to post advertising and spams on your board, dealing with copyright violations and protecting yourself from the wrath of the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act), ensuring that you know when/how you have to deal with COPPA (Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998) law, and having a Privacy Policy.

David also welcomes the newest member of the MOD Team, david63, who now brings the phpBB teams’ “David count” to four, not including former team member David Smith (smithy_dll).

And, Douglas introduces phpBB Weekly’s newest contest, the “President Bertie” Election Contest, which will be launching on this website on Tuesday (so check back to find out how to participate).

Other Links Mentioned in This Episode
Bertie Bear for President Facebook Group
Privacy Policy Generator
phpBB.com Rules (for inspiration)
StarTrekGuide Rules (for more inspiration)

The MOD of the Week is RSS Feed 2.0 by leviatan21, and the Style of the Week is parrot by darkbeing-designs.

phpBB Weekly is a proud member of the Tech Podcast Network. Check them out for other great technology podcasts.

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We start out this episode of phpBB Weekly first by taking a look back at last weekend’s MOD Authors Convention and briefly recapping some of it (see last week’s episode for full coverage of the event). Then, we tackle a topic that we didn’t get to last week: a discussion about CAPTCHAs in phpBB, as well as some of the difficulties of utilizing CAPTCHAs in open-source projects, along with a look at some of the other efforts at preventing spambot registration on various websites. The moral of the story: whatever you do, turn on User Activation in your phpBB Settings, because no CAPTCHA is perfect.

Then, we turn to the first part of our segment on “Building a Successful Community,” in which Douglas and David discuss the things that a user who wants to create a brand new community needs to plan out from the start, and the skills and qualities that new administrators will need for their community to be successful in the long run. Most of the content for this segment comes out of Patrick O’Keefe’s book, Managing Online Forums.

The MOD of the Week is th23 Domain by th23, and the Style of the Week is Black Pearl by Mighty Gorgon.

phpBB Weekly is a proud member of the Tech Podcast Network. Check them out for other great technology podcasts.

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The news media is busy traveling from one convention in Denver to another in St. Paul, and that means that they’re all ignoring the most important convention of all: the 2008 phpBB MOD Authors Convention! Well, we didn’t, and our panel of experts (Douglas, David, and Paul) report live from the MOD Authors Convention, providing their analysis of the events and presentations of the convention, as well as wondering why the MOD team didn’t nominate someone to run for president.

Anyway, we did discuss the various sessions at the MOD Authors Convention and talk about some of the highlights that were discussed. For example, in the “future of MODding” session, there was a certain amount of discussion about the possibility of introducing “Junior Validators” into the validation process. If this went forward, this would be like allowing certain users to be able to participate in the “testing” phase of validation, but not the line-by-line/security/etc. phases, and could also serve as a way for the MOD team to evaluate possible new additions to the team.

We also recapped the announcement that Paul hinted about last week, which was that the MOD team’s MOD pre-validator (MPV) tool is now publicly available. We discuss MPV in detail, including how it works and how it compares to the previous mEAL tool that was chiefly written by David Smith (smithy_dll).

There was also discussion at the convention about the phpBB Wiki (which was formally announced towards the end of the day), which will serve as the primary source of development, MODding, and (possibly) styling documentation for phpBB, and like all wikis will be user-contributable. We talked a bit more about the Wiki and how the MOD team’s goal of streamlining its documentation (we’ve talked about this a few times recently) ties into this new announcement.

And of course, this episode took place during the second “phpBB3 MODding & Best Practices” session, which was supposed to be David’s session, except he kinda played hooky from that so he could join in on this episode. However, he does summarize the main points from his session for us, answers a few questions from us, and fields requests from our chat room and from the #phpbb-mod channel to publish his session as a book.

Additional links mentioned in this episode:
MAMP/MAMP Pro
Wiki article: Creating Modules for phpBB3
Wiki article: Adding Modules to phpBB3

And finally, we ran out of time to mention it on this episode, but you should really check out the recent blog post on CAPTCHAs in phpBB, which gives a very interesting look at the evolution of phpBB’s CAPTCHA (aka “visual confirmation image”) and some of the inherent problems with CAPTCHAs and other anti-spambot security techniques.

The MOD of the Week is Tabulated Survey at Topic Head by asinshesq, and the Style of the Week is prosilver Special Edition by Styles Robot (or, more accurately, the phpBB.com Styles Team).

phpBB Weekly is a proud member of the Tech Podcast Network. Check them out for other great technology podcasts.

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We return from our three week break energized and ready to go with our fall “season” of phpBB Weekly, and we kick it off with the realization that there’s a whole bunch of news for us to cover from just the past few days.

The MOD and Styles Databases have been upgraded with the ability to subscribe to individual MOD updates by e-mail (and, according to Paul, there’s a secret RSS feed as well). Speaking of the databases, thirteen phpBB3 styles have finally been approved for the Styles Database. In addition, the Styles Team has announced a new styles validation policy regarding how they will handle new releases of phpBB and how it will affect style validation. The Londonvasion videos are now available as well, and David shares some of his recommendations for the best ones to watch if you don’t have time for all of them.

The MOD Team will be holding its third annual MOD Authors Convention next Saturday, August 30 in the #phpbb-mod IRC channel. We briefly describe what sessions will be presented at the convention on this episode, and will be providing complete live coverage of the convention on next week’s episode. And finally, PHP 4.4.9 has been released, signifying the last release of PHP 4 as the PHP Group drops support for it, plus PHP 5.3 is in early release candidate stage, and we discuss some of the development team’s recent changes in the Subversion repository in response to the new version of PHP.

We then bring you a tutorial on the ways you can optimze search engine optimization (SEO) in phpBB3, from our local SEO expert, David Lewis, whose blog post on SEO and phpBB3 just appeared on the phpBB.com Blog.

Links from the SEO Tutorial and Other Recommended SEO Tools:
Google Webmaster Tools
Google Analytics
SEO MOD
Advanced Meta Tags MOD
What are Google Sitemaps?

This week’s MOD and Style of the Week are the winners of the recent phpBBHacks.com Idol (which means that these two authors won over $1200 worth of prizes for their products!). The winning hack/MOD is Log Connections by Elglobo and the winning style is Soul City by Abble CoSa NoStrA.

phpBB Weekly is a proud member of the Tech Podcast Network. Check them out for other great technology podcasts.

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We start this episode with some updates from the Subversion front. Recent updates in Subversion are showing that phpBB 2.0.23 and phpBB 3.0.1, both primarily bugfix updates, are going to be on their way soon. Also, in the weird description of the MOD team, the MODs Manager (codename “Blinky”) was “leaked on purpose,” as revealed in this Star Trek Guide thread. You can now check out the MODs Manager on the new phpBB Code Forge. (We also learned that the Code Forge is powered by a program called Redmine.)

However, the focus of this episode is a tutorial on BBCode. In this show, we discuss the reasons why BBCode was created and why it’s more secure to use than HTML (which is also why phpBB3 does not allow HTML to be used), and then discuss a bit about how adding custom BBCodes in phpBB2 and phpBB3, along with a recap of the significant changes coming to BBCode in Ascraeus.

Links Mentioned in the Episode:
BBCode (Wikipedia article)
phpBB BBCode Guide
Adding Custom BBCodes in phpBB3 (Flash Tutorial)
phpBB2 Multiple BBCode MOD
Popular Custom BBCodes for phpBB3

The MOD of the Week is First post on every page for phpBB3 by rxu, and the Style of the Week is envision for phpBB3 by AkaNSu.

phpBB Weekly is a proud member of the Tech Podcast Network. Check them out for other great technology podcasts.