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:

Conversation with DavidMJ on phpBB3 Caching

I apologize for the delay in catching this issue, but I’ve been flat out sick for the past several days.