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…

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…

One of the frequent questions that comes up on phpbb.com is whether phpbb offers SEO or Search Engine Optimization features. I rarely (if ever) get involved in these discussions because they often degenerate into a “great taste / less filling” sort of argument. (Please see the “related links” section at the bottom of this blog post for an explanation of the reference if you don’t understand it.) Earlier today I read a reply by user “Eelke” that provides a nice viewpoint on the subject:

If you are in a subject area where there is heavy competition from other boards, you may want to try every trick in the book. If you’re not, than carefully consider whether the stuff you are applying really is worth the extra hazzle[sic]

More…

One of the things I did before going “live” with my first board was add code to increment a page-view counter. Initially the code was in includes/page_tail.php but later on it was added to the banner code. I have been actively tracking daily page view activity over the past year or so. I have a nightly script that emails a report of the daily activity to my blackberry every night at midnight. But I had not looked at the cumulative total for quite a while.

Tonight I looked.

It’s over 100M page views for the life of the board.

The board launched in August of 2002. My page counter officially started on August 12^th. On that day we had 2,123 views. On August 15^th, which was the official launch announcement, we jumped all the way up to 8,757 page views for the day. On August 29^th which was the day the mailing list was sent a note about the list being retired we hit 13,155 views, and then 19,441 for the following day. We didn’t come close to twenty thousand daily page views again until the following July, almost a year after the board launched.

Now we are averaging over 100,000 page views daily and have a cumulative total of 107,710,630 as I type this. That’s a lot of database queries!

A while ago I posted about a software product that lets you run backups and store them on Amazon.com’s S3 data center service. It was an interesting idea, but mostly it got me thinking about how to determine an optimal backup strategy for other board owners. I do my backups every night. I guess I should actually say I never do backups; I have a script do them for me instead. That’s one aspect to consider when setting up a backup strategy for your board.

For this post I would like to cover what are probably some fairly obvious concepts for experienced board owners. The first question that needs to be asked is: What do I need to include in my backup strategy?

More…

Recently I had someone suggest that I look at a service from ShareThis.com. What I found after reviewing their service was that it would allow me to add a flash pop-up menu to any page of my board. This menu provides an easy way for people to promote my site for me, which is about the cheapest form of advertising there is. The pop-up includes links to Facebook, Twitter, and dozens of other “social” sites, and I’m sure the service provider intends to add more as they become available. However when I started researching what it would take to put ShareThis on my boards, I ran into a slight bit of confusion. Their terms of service page said this:

Registration. In order to have access and use of the ShareThis Widgets, registration is not required but is strongly recommended.

Yet in order to “get the button” they required me to register. When I sent a note to the support group, I was told that they no longer offered a “no-registration” option for their service. Why do they require me to register at all? In order to provide analytics and reports that show how many people are sharing content from my site, they need to have a unique identifier for my account. Since I’m not (at this point anyway) really interested in more reports and analytics, I decided to pass.

Now that I knew what to look for, I quickly found AddThis.com. It seems to be the same type of service but they offer an option that does not require me to register in order to use it. I spent a few minutes looking over their site and quickly selected the options and format that I wanted to use. I already have a toolbar with various icons at the top and bottom of my topic pages, so it was really easy to add one more icon to the mix. Here is the final product in action:

With this new icon, when someone sees a topic they like they can easily add it to their favorites, their Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, or any of the other social media sites supported by the service. How hard was it to add this code to my site? Not hard at all. More…

Most discussion board software packages include a “private” message feature. One of the first things I did to phpBB2 was rip that feature right out. I had my reasons, and the resulting board has been active for more than seven years now so it has worked out okay. In fact it was earlier this year that I got my first question about why the feature was even missing.

At the same time there are valid reasons for folks to want to send a message to another board member without posting in public. Over at the phpBB2 Refugees site I got more immediate and vocal feedback. (Note: that link requires a login to the phpBB2 Refugees board.) As a result, the feature is in the process of being updated to include some new features. It has also been renamed from the “private” message system to the “personal” message system instead. Why is that? More…