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Don’t ask why David has this pipe dream of a short episode of phpBB Weekly, but this episode sure didn’t turn out to be what he was looking for. Which might be a good thing. While we did ramble off of our expected script a bit, we had a pretty good, in-depth discussion in the middle of the show.

phpBB 3.0.2 has been released, and we discuss what’s new and the various bugs that have been fixed, along with a few minor new features.

We then go into a bit of a discussion about the duties that the phpBB MOD team has and discuss a bit about their documentation and how their phpBB3 MODding documentation differs a bit from the docs that they had back when phpBB2 MODding was the “in” thing.

Also, the phpBB Blog has been unveiled as a new way to bridge the gap between the team members and the community, as well as a partial replacement for the now-dormant Official phpBB Podcast, and David leads us in a short game of musical chairs. You’ll just have to find out what that menas for yourself.

Finally, in our Londonvasion Update (and yes, we remembered the jingle this time), David shares what his personal travel itinerary will be in London, and we share our finalized Londonvasion plans and Douglas talks about Londonvasion Central.

There is no MOD or Style of the Week this week.

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

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Douglas was off taking a test during this episode, so he couldn’t make it, but then again, David forgot that it was Saturday, which is why the live stream of phpBB Weekly never happened! Whoops. Anyway, David managed to grab together a couple of team members to talk to for what could almost pass as another episode of the Official phpBB Podcast. So, on this episode, he’s joined by Paul Sohier (of the MOD Team), Yuriy Rusko (Marshalrusty of the Support Team), and Ashley Pinner (NeoThermic, Support Team Leader).

Anyway, this past week, the inevitable phpBB 3.0.1 was released featuring dozens of bugfixes, including two security-related fixes. As this marks the first non-RC-related update to phpBB3, they spend a little bit of time reviewing the process for updating from 3.0.0 to 3.0.1 and the importance of keeping your boards up-to-date. In addition, they discuss other common support issues with upgrading and how upgrading relates to the importance of keeping core code changes in MODs down to a minimum for compatibility.

They then discuss the recent alpha release of a MOD by naderman (of the Development Team) of the Sphinx Search Plugin for phpBB. Sphinx is a free open-source SQL fulltext search engine that is now another option that you can use for indexing your board’s content on your search page, and will quite possibly be showing up in phpBB 3.2 “Ascraeus.”

Yuriy gives us a quick update on the latest Londonvasion details (and by the way, you should also check out phpBB Weekly’s latest Londonvasion plans), and David tells us about Star Trek Guide’s new MOD Manager, as well as how you can obtain the “Borg Invasion” style that was used for STG’s recent April Fools joke.

No MOD or Style of the Week was selected this week, but we promise that we will make up for lost time next week and get back into the MODs and Styles selections.

Technical Note: Apologies for the background sounds in this episode–David discovered after the fact that he forgot to turn off his Skype sound effects!

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

Hello everyone,

I’ve gotten some notification from TalkShoe that they are making a minor change to their setup. Effective immediately, if you are not registered on TalkShoe and you enter the chat room as a guest (i.e. as Guest 1 or Guest 2, etc.), by default you will be blocked from having the ability to participate in the chat until I unblock you.

As was explained to me by Dave Nelsen (TalkShoe’s CEO), they have been hearing from many other calls on the network who have been affected by these anonymous guest chatters who have come in and typed a lot of porn and profanity into the chat, but once the hosts blocks them from the chat room, this person just has to close the window and reopen it to enter into the chat room as another guest, thus causing hell for the host of the TalkShoe call.

Luckily, phpBB Weekly hasn’t (yet) been affected by this, however for now, this change is universal (in May, they will be providing the ability to toggle this option once they build the toggle into the system). In the meantime, if you try to join in on the show as a guest chatter, you will not be able to chat by default until I notice and unblock you. It is annoying for me, and it’s annoying for you, but that’s what happens when a couple of rogue users spoil it for everyone. (I’m sure many of you have similar experiences in your own communities as well.)

If you would like to get around all this annoyance, feel free to register for free to TalkShoe. It only takes a minute, and once you’re registered, not only will you have your own username for us to identify you with, but you will not be blocked upon entering the chat room, and so neither of us will have to worry about this new obstacle.

Anyway, that’s just an FYI for you all to take note of. Hope to see you on Saturday!

It’s been about three and a half months now since phpBB3’s gold release rocked the galaxy, and so now the hype has simmered down and the devs have rested up and the first big wave of post-release bug reports have rolled in. So now, three and a half months after the release, the Development Team has been working hard on the inevitable 3.0.1 release.

Confirming what David has promised us for these past few months, the Dev Team will be quietly issuing “quality assurance” release candidates of every minor release in an effort to avoid repeating instances of having to issue a new release within days of a previous one (as happened twice in the 2.0.x line and once during phpBB3’s RC stage). Anyone can help themselves to these release candidates (and the QA “Quack and Assassinate” Team will be forced to dive through them), and they will likely materialize into a full version of phpBB 3.0.1 by the end of the week. There will be a mailing list to subscribe to if you want to help test out release candidates when they come out (they will not normally be published on the announcements forum to the general community). As a reminder, while the RCs are not fully complete, the chances are that they will fix more problems than they cause; the purpose of the QA testing is to ensure that they don’t introduce any significant new problems.

So far, the list of changes for 3.0.1 features fifty bugfixes–it’s obvious that the dev teams have been busy, in addition to their recent release of 2.0.23 plus working on the development of Ascraeus.

We have been planning something special for this Saturday’s episode of phpBB Weekly, and thus, we will not be able to discuss phpBB 3.0.1 on our show this week. However, this is just a note to you to keep an eye out for the new release and update! (You know, I hear that the new auto-updater is like super-easy and totally rocks!) If you’re interested in helping to test out the release candidates, feel free to help yourself.

Hello everyone!
I am really excited to be able to announce that after being down for 18 days, phpBBWeekly.net is back online!
On December 4th, something happened to my cPanel username/password causing them to change. I’m not sure what happened to cause the change, but I certainly had nothing to do with it.
So why did it take 18 days for the site to come back up? Well, I had bombarded my web host for weeks with support requests, and never got a response. Yesterday, I finally got angry enough about it that I did a WHOIS on my host’s domain name, found a phone number, called them up, and found out that my host strangely still had my old Mac.com e-mail address on file–an e-mail address which expired five months ago. (Their policy–which is a good one–is to only accept support requests from the e-mail address which they have on file, for security reasons.) So, once the guy on the phone updated the e-mail address I had on file, my support request got a response, and my username and password got reset, and now the site is back online.
So, I guess I do kind of owe my web host, Kazix.com, an apology, because I had honestly started telling people that they had packed up shop and left town. That wasn’t the case at all–just a bit of a miscommunication, which caused the outage of the past 18 days.
Anyway, phpBB Weekly episodes #042 and #043 will be posted on here shortly, and then hopefully we can move on from all of this. I’ll just consider the fact that the site is finally back up a nice little early Christmas present.
Again, I’m very sorry for the outage and tried everything I could to get it out of the way ASAP. Thanks for continuing to stick around with phpBB Weekly!
–-Douglas Bell