Things have been really busy in real life, which I suppose goes without saying. I have two boys that are growing up and going through cub scouts and sports and school and everything else.

Yet, here I am. I am back to reconsider whether I need to upgrade from phpBB2 to phpBB3 for my main board (which as I write this is very close to collecting it’s 700,000th post, and is running almost one million page views a week). I am back to see if I can figure out how to integrate FB “likes” into my board, and how to allow folks to add Linked-In to their profile. That last one, at least, should be easy.

Things have been humming along quite nicely, although the spam frequency has started to go up. Seems that my Checkbox Challenge is either less of a deterrent, or human spamming is on the rise. For that, I guess I need to look at my server logs and see how long those folks are taking to get through the registration process. Fortunately there is still no answer for the Spammer Hammer, which makes it easy for my moderator team to quickly and easily eradicate all traces of the spammer from the board.

And gmail? Is it still the number one source of spam attempts? It would be interesting to check. I have not looked at those statistics in months (years?).

And I missed Libertyvasion. I had intended to go, but all of a sudden August was here and I had not made any plans, so I stayed home. I have watched some of the sessions posted to Youtube, and it did look fun. I will hopefully be ready for the next one. Anyone know when / where that will be?

Note from author: ironically I started writing this well over a year ago. Given the amount of attention given to this web site for the past year+ it seems to be a good point to finish and release the post.

I read a great article a few years back that – at least to me – had come up with a great term to describe dead web pages. Any page – blog, board, or otherwise – that had not been updated in quite some time was called a “cobweb”. I found it funny.

Tonight I was browsing my way around the blogosphere and happened upon a blog that I have not visited in over a year. Guess what? No updates, not one, in that entire time. But it gets better… in this particular bloggers blogroll (a list of blogs that this blogger, at least in theory, has some interest in) not a single one of them had been updated in over a year.

I currently maintain five blogs. This one has been running for several years. My first blog is just for family members and has been running since December of 2004. I have a blog related to my professional work which has been very active and in fact has been quoted in industry magazines. I have a photography blog that seems to be last on the list for updates, and I have a “manly” blog which is where all of the “cool gadget” posts have moved to rather than being posted here. Do I update all of them all of the time? No, unfortunately I don’t have the time. But I do try to update those that seem to have an audience (as made evident by the fact that there are comments on posts).

Why is this important? A blog, like a discussion board or any web community, needs to have a pulse. The pulse can be slow as long as it’s regular. A blog that does not have regular updates, or a discussion board without community involvement will soon die.

Not long ago I was chastised for not logging in to the phpBB2 Refugees site for quite some time. As a member of the community it should not be important that any single person logs in every day. At least that’s my opinion. However, as the administrator / owner of the community, it was a problem. There were a number of spam posts that had built up and I had not taken the proper steps to select a team of moderators. That, certainly, was a problem. I felt like the board activity was low enough that I didn’t have to check in every day. Every day became every other day, which became once a week, which became one a month, which became… well, not much. I had created a contact form, but the contact form went into the moderator private forum on the board and to an email address that I forgot to set up when I moved to a new server. So that didn’t do much good.

Long story short, there were (quite understandably) some upset members on the board. I get that. As such, I have taken the following steps. First, I promoted a regular member of the board (who I have known via this blog and the phpbb.com community for a long time) to a moderator. Second, I set it up so the email notification of spam works again. Third, (actually I did this first) I logged in and cleaned up all of the spam using the Spammer Hammer. And fourth, I have logged in more regularly on that board and have tried to start writing on this blog once again. We’ll see if it lasts, or if it’s a momentary disturbance in a cobweb.

See you next year.

So as I was going through the upgrade I did a bit of reading on the web and found an article that discussed an option named WP_POST_REVISIONS that can be added to the Wordpress configuration file. The setting cannot be configured via the Admin panel which I think is an oversight. However, it is quite flexible.

The first option is to turn the post revision feature completely off, which is done with this:

define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', false);

Next, the value can be turned on (which is already the default) using:

define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', true);

Finally, if the value is on the blog owner can limit the number of revisions that are stored using the following format:

define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', 5);

I found an interesting statement on the Wordpress codex that I found detailing this option.

Revisions are stored in the posts table. I don’t yet know what kind of impact that will have on post queries. We’re going to turn the switch to “on” on WordPress.com sometime soonish and we’ll have a better idea about what kind of damage, if any, it does.

I found this… disturbing. In comparison, the phpBB developer group tests all of their code at phpbb.com, which is certainly one of the largest and most active phpBB boards on the planet. I would have preferred that the Wordpress developers have done performance testing for this feature before inflicting it on the rest of us.

But at least I know how to turn it off now.

Related Links

• Wordpress codex entry about WP_POST_REVISIONS

To digress a minute… I have Urchin statistics installed on my server. I had the package before, and ultimately I disabled it because of the amount of server horsepower that was required to keep up with the processing. It seemed that my log files were not being rotated properly, so when they got really large urchin started to choke on the volume of data. Since moving to my new server, I have been trying to get urchin started up again. I finally got it going this week.

As a result I thought it might be interesting to see browser statistics and how they vary from one site (audience) to the next.

My main board is a corporate board. What I mean by that is the audience for that board probably is browsing it from work, using a company supplied computer, with a company mandated browser. For this board, IE is used for 62% of the sessions. Firefox / Mozilla combined are 25%. Safari is about 4%. Of the IE users, here is the breakdown by version:

IE6 52.8%
IE7 36.8%
IE8 9.6%

There are still users with IE4 and even IE3 showing up in the logs.

But those users come from a corporate world. Viewers that come to this site (phpBB Doctor) are much less likely to be in that arena. I expected Firefox to be a much higher percentage of viewers here, and I was surprised to find out that wasn’t the case. IE is 44%, Opera (which doesn’t even show up on my other site in the top 5) was 12.5%. Firefox shows up 4th on the list at 5.6%.

The big disclaimer that I need to put on these numbers is they are for only one week. To add to that, I have not been very active on my blog in quite a while so some of the traffic has died down a bit. Still I found it interesting that Firefox was 4th on the list.

I will come back to this subject and post an update in a couple of months and we’ll see what happens.

I have also completed my spring/summer conference season (which this year included trips to Orlando and Sydney, Australia).

The first project this summer that I have planned is to rewrite the PM system for phpBB2. It has been requested as a feature at phpbbrefugees.com and – believe it or not – after seven years of not having it, it has been requested on BOB, my largest phpBB2 board. So I will be able to write something up and use it for both boards. I will probably start that project in early July, and hopefully finish before going on vacation in August.

Yeah, life is busy.

PM Spammers

It turned out that the real answer was much more benign… it was the notification of new private messages popping up. Normally I deactivate (or remove) the PM system from my boards, but since this is supposed to be a standard phpBB2 install I left it in place. The PM spamming started on October 10^th it seems. However, the initial attempts did not include the board administrator account. After the initial success there was another round on November 16^th, the 19^th, and again several days later. Altogether I have 329 spam PMs on the board now.

The PMs are from four different users from six different IP addresses. I checked and there are really only four locations associated with the IP address information: Moscow, The Ukraine, The Netherlands, and another hotbed of spammer activity, the state of Illinois. Someone with a Comcast high-speed internet connection is a zombie, it seems. I left the PM system enabled for now, just to see how far this goes.

Flood Interval Update

The real reason I logged in to the board today was I changed the posting flood interval. If you’re not familiar with it, the “flood” is a time limit for consecutive posts from a single user. It is designed to prevent a user from overwhelming your board with frequent posts. The default setting is fifteen seconds. Based on my analysis, bots seem to be programmed to run every 30-45 seconds. So I set the flood interval to 60 seconds earlier today.

It will be interesting to see how the bots react.

Checkbox Challenge Update

In other news…

I noticed on one of my regular (but fairly dormant) boards that there was a user named “vitamary” registered recently. I saw here on the phpBB Doctor blog (which is linked on the other site I mentioned) several spam comments caught by Akismet from a user vmary82@gmail.com. Both the board and this blog have a variation of the Checkbox Challenge in place, and both have been victims of VitaMary.

I also saw another interesting blog comment that was not caught by Akismet but was in my approval queue. The complete context of the post was the single word “test” and the email address related to the comment was gmail. I posted recently about the abuses coming from gmail, so the two of these items combined made me just a bit suspicious. I looked up the IP address associated with the comment… and it was from Russia.

To be brutally honest here, I started to post and release the Checkbox Challenge MOD at phpbb.com but stopped. Why? Because I was being selfish. I wanted to keep the technique all to myself. If the technique became popular enough to attract the attention of the bot writers, then I would have to do something different. Now I believe I have at least some preliminary indications that someone, somewhere, has taken an interest in my little bits of code and is trying to make their bot just a bit smarter.

Oh, well, I can always fall back to a suggestion from the web comic at xkcd.com: