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?

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…

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…

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…

One of the reasons I wasn’t around much earlier this year was I was in the process of moving a bunch of sites over to a new server (including this one). In most cases the move went without a hitch. In one particular case there was an interesting bug that didn’t show up right away. It was related to the banner system I wrote for my largest board. Fortunately it was an error on the “good” side, so I didn’t make any sponsors angry. More…

Here’s a tip: if you encounter a problem with code that someone else (such as myself) has written, and you write to them asking for help, try to be more descriptive in your error report than this:

On localhost works but not works in linux server.

Localhost: all pages works
Sever linux: none pages works

So basically they’re telling me that the MOD works on their localhost installation, but once they upload it to their linux server “none pages works” which, I guess, is a bit of a problem.

But without my ESP module addon for the PM system, I am unable to determine exactly what the problem is, so I was forced to ask them for a specific issue. So folks, if you have a problem with my code, tell me what it is. If it’s supposed to do X and it does Y instead, tell me that. If it’s supposed to do X and it’s not doing anything, tell me that.

But don’t tell me “it doesn’t work” and expect much help.

I got an interesting request for a feature on a new board I’m working on tonight. This is a phpBB2 board (of course ) and I am using a variation on subSilver. That template is “fluid” meaning the width will expand to fit the size of the window. Years ago having a site expand to fit the window was okay. Now that some people are using 1600×1200 pixel resolutions it can be hard to read. The human eye / brain simply can’t scan a line of text that far without losing track of where you are. I solve this myself by running my browsers at less than full screen, but that’s my choice. If someone else chooses to run their browser window stretched over two high-resolution monitors that should be there choice as well.

Where is this going? Based on the remarks made earlier tonight I worked out a really quick and easy MOD for phpBB2 (and the idea would work just as well for phpBB3). It’s a few bits of code that allow users to set a fixed width for the board (by pixel count) or opt for a full screen display. It took about an hour from initial concept to execution.

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Have you ever received an email with an advertisement for something unsavory followed by a paragraph of seemingly nonsense text? The reason for the extra text was the spammer was trying to get past one of the more common email spam filters known as Bayesian Spam Filtering. The process of adding text is called “poisoning” the filter, and it’s yet another tactic in the ongoing war between legitimate content providers and spammers. I was asked at Londonvasion 2008 whether I felt that there would ever be an effective way of dealing with human spammers. My comment at the time was that the best defense against spammer posts (human or otherwise) is an active and effective moderator team. Could this sort of algorithm be adoped as an anti-spam technique for board posts? Yes, I believe it could. To the best of my knowledge nobody has yet tried to do that for phpBB2 (my google-fu may have failed me, but I did look). I would be very interested to hear of such a project if it exists.

The problem with this and other anti-spam techniques is that it’s based on words rather than content. This may seem like splitting hairs… after all, isn’t my content made up of words? Yes, yes it is. And that’s the problem. Confused yet? I hope so, because it gets worse from here.

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