We have a topic on my board with the title “Please do not post in this topic”. Needless to say, this topic has survived for nearly three years, even in the “off topic” area where topics are pruned after 14 days of no activity. So lately I have been trying to have some fun with it.

First I added some javascript to the page (but only for that topic) that made the Reply and Quote buttons move away from the mouse. That made it impossible to click on the button, but you could still tab to the buttons and invoke the required code. Yesterday I switched the normal images for the buttons with the spacer.gif and sized it to zero by zero pixels, essentially making the button invisible. I also altered the tab index to -1 which according to a few sites I read makes the button disappear from the tab sequence.

Of course there are still several ways for folks to post in the topic. That’s sort of the point, to see how long it takes folks to figure out how to work around the challenges I have put in place. For example in the first version someone could disable javascript and the buttons would no longer move, giving them another way to click the button rather than using the tab key.

To continue the fun, I am looking for suggestions for other ways to challenge folks, and keep them from posting in that one topic. The key is there has to be some sort of loophole, as I’m not trying to completely lock folks out.

Any ideas?

A while back I wrote a post about Google Adsense where I discussed the mix of revenue between Adsense for Content and Adsense for Search. It included this graphic:

At the time I didn’t have a good explanation (or even a theory) as to why this was happening. As luck would have it, I’m now getting zero dollars from Adsense for Search and am still waiting for a response from Google regarding the matter. While trying to determine what the issue could be, I have been reading the support forums for Adsense. I saw a post that suggested why my search revenues were rising. More…

phpBB3 includes a “report a post” feature that was often requested in phpBB2 and available as a variety of MODs. I wrote my own that integrates with other MODs that I have implemented. But one of the things that I did different (and that I prefer) is that I provide a visual indication when a post has been reported.

Just a few minutes ago I was on phpbb.com and saw a post in the General Discussion with the title “Is this new home page nice?” Anyone that has been around phpbb.com for a while knows that this sort of post – even in GD – is against the rules. I figured that someone might have reported it already, but there’s no indication that such an action was taken. I decided to go ahead and report the post.

When I clicked the proper icon, here’s the message I got:

This post has already been reported.

Well. If that’s the case, why not tell me? More…

That’s how much this article says that Google has outstanding in unpaid dollars for Adsense.

The Google Float is the amount AdSense publishers have accrued in earnings but have not yet been paid. You know, all those people that haven’t reached the $100 mark that triggers a payment. The figure is currently at $532,547 million. That’s over a half billion dollars. If Google killed AdSense, they would have to pay that all out.

One interesting thing about the AdSense float is that it increased last quarter by 3%. In the 2 previous quarters it decreased. I wonder if this was due to all the AdSense accounts that were disabled recently.

Tell me there’s no incentive to start figuring out ways to avoid paying out those funds.

I myself have seen one strategy… Google simply stopped paying me. That’s not the actual process, but that is the net result. I have more than one post about how the search links from Google had been starting to pay more than Adsense for Content. A couple of months ago (September) Google fixed that: the took 100% of my search earnings (yes, that’s correct, I wrote 100% as in all of it) for a “search costs” adjustment. This fee isn’t new… or rather the ability of Google to apply this fee is not new. It’s covered in several places on their site and in their terms and conditions.

What are the fees mentioned in the Terms and Conditions?
Adjustments

The problem that I have with this is after almost five years of zero adjustments I find it irritating, frustrating, and in fact downright suspicious that Google has decided that my “costs of search” now equal my entire search revenue amount.

For two months in a row.

I sent Google an email. I got a form letter back.

I have removed Google from my sites.

I’ve seen this on other boards but only recently have I started seeing it on my own: people that edit the first post (or potentially even all of their posts) of a topic and remove all of the content. They might leave behind something like “…” because as we all know you can’t have a truly empty post. The net result is the topic is then worthless because nobody knows what we’re talking about.

With phpBB3 the moderator team can lock a post to prevent further editing. But once the original content is gone it doesn’t help. So tonight I started thinking about how and where to store post revisions in order to recover from this sort of action. More…

A few weeks back I wrote about including a new “social widget” from AddThis on one of my boards. Today I removed it. Why? Because a few weeks ago their code started screwing up. Since I was referencing their code rather than hosting my own copy, I inherited their problems.

That’s not something I am really happy about. More…

I don’t like most current CAPTCHA techniques. There is nothing that frustrates me more than trying to use a web site and being presented with this:

Yes, that is an actual CAPTCHA image that I was presented with. If anyone can figure out what that one is supposed to be saying, you have better eyes than I do. More…

Anyone who has worked with database date/time fields probably recognizes the number from the title of this blog post. If not, it’s simple: there are 86400 seconds in a day. Why do I care about this? Because there are all sorts of fun things that I can do with that number. More…

While I have not started in-depth MODding on phpBB3 yet, I do read the phpBB3 MODders forum from time to time just to start to get the flavor of how things have changed. The other day a database (query) question came up and I suggested an answer that I originally thought was only slightly different from what had already been proposed. However, after being asked which of the two solutions would be the least CPU intensive I did a bit more investigating.

I discovered that one solution was clearly better than the other, but only if the proper index was created.

Disclaimer: I tested on phpBB2. The index that I created does not exist in a standard phpBB2, nor does it exist in a standard phpBB3 install, so I suspect this post applies to both. More…

A long time ago I wrote a MOD for my phpBB2 board that puts a nice red banner at the top of the posting screen if you are getting ready to “bump” your post. Bumping is defined as posting two (or more) times in a row without someone else replying in between, and without waiting 24 hours first. Does it work? From a functional standpoint it certainly does. From a procedural standpoint, not so much. More…