Anyone want to bet how long it takes the automated posting bots to infect twitter?

In an effort to get some projects back on track (including this blog) I have resigned my position on the moderator team at phpbb.com. I have nothing but fond memories of my time on the team, especially the trip to London last summer to meet folks and get the opportunity to discuss anything and everything.

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.

I have not been able to do much of anything related to phpBB for the past month and a half, and I apologize for that. I am only now getting back to things and expect to ramp up activity here and at the Refugees site shortly. My apologies.

A while back I wrote about a device called the Snap Server. It’s essentially a box with two hard drives inside and an ethernet port outside. It makes it really easy to add network storage.

Last week one of the drives failed to start up. The disks were fine, they just weren’t getting any power. Of course with any older hardware getting spare parts can be problematic. I finally tracked down the current owner of the technology (it had been sold a few times since I purchased the original units) and asked them for a quote on a replacement power supply.

They told me $135.

I told them thanks, but no thanks.

Instead I purchased two brand new Netgear Duo boxes. This is a similar device except that’s it made for users to be able to swap drives in and out. The Snap had a sticker on it that voided your warranty if you opened the box and installed larger capacity hard drives without their permission, mainly because they wanted you to pay them for their (overpriced) larger drives. Netgear’s device is not only made to be updated / upgraded but the drives are hot-swap, so you can pull one out and plug in a new one at any time.

Cool stuff.

I purchased two Duo devices and four TB drives from Amazon and got a really good deal. I now have 2TB of backup storage (had one before) and the overall purchase for everything was less than what I paid for one of the Snap devices years ago.

As an added bonus, the Netgear devices are whisper quiet. I can actually hear myself think in my office now, which is a bit disconcerting.

Will the battle never end?

Apparently not.

I have seen a new style of spam coming in on another blog that I have. Based on past experience, I normally expect the spam to include links to various sites that I have no interest in. These sites will normally promote things like products I don’t want (or need).

Lately, however, I have been getting spam comments that include links to “linked in” or other social networking sites. What’s the point of that? <sigh> The comments include anything along these lines (these are actual spam comments)

After reading through the article, I just feel that I really need more information on the topic. Can you suggest some resources ?

The style of writing is quite familiar . Have you written guest posts for other bloggers?

The topic is quite hot in the net right now. What do you pay the most attention to while choosing what to write about?

My friend on Facebook shared this link with me and I’m not dissapointed that I came here.

… and many more like this. The good news is that the comments were held in the moderation queue. The bad news is that these comments were all made on a blog that is protected by the checkbox challenge code that I use here. I have plans to go out and analyze the server logs to see if the comments were made by a human or a bot, based on time spent on the various pages.

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.

Our web site for continued support of phpBB2 reached 100 registered and activated users a few days ago. We also have several thousand posts. Based on the statistics I collect we have also seen a few days with more than two thousand page views.

We’ve had some interesting discussions that are not strictly limited to phpBB2, so you might want to check us out.

I doubt that anyone reading this is unaware of the recent attack on phpbb.com. One of the more interesting side affects of the exploit is finding out just how poor people are at picking passwords.

More…

My big board crossed that milestone earlier today.

Our users have posted a total of 500045 articles
We have 37396 registered users

This is a phpBB2 board that started in June of 2002, formally launched in August of 2002, and has been growing strong ever since.

Welcome back from the holidays, I hope everyone had a good year. I did, and am looking forward to the challenges that 2009 brings. One of those challenges is, of course, how to deal with the retirement of phpBB2.

As promised, the support forums at phpbb.com for version 2.x were closed this month. The formal announcement is here if you want to read the full text. The important part is (in my opinion) this paragraph:

The phpBB2 support forums have been locked and will remain available in this “archived” state for a number of months, purely for reference purposes. Most phpBB2 resources have been removed from the Support Section of the site and further pruning will take place within the next few weeks. phpBB2 Knowledge Base articles will be reposted in the archived forum.

There is no specified end date for the 2.x support forums given, but the implication is quite clear: at some point even the locked forums will be dropped or at least hidden from public view.

The 2.x MOD Writers and MOD Requests forums were locked several months ago. The MOD Development 2.x forum remains open for replies to existing topics, but no new topics can be started. On February 1st even that forum will be closed. So where does that leave me?

I am in the process of porting the phpBB Doctor MOD Catalog over to phpBB2 Refugees and will be moving all of my MOD development and support to that site, at least for public MODs. Private MODs for paying clients will continue to be hosted on the board on this site. I am going to update each of my MOD topics (both dev and released) at .com to link to the new topics once I get them set up so people will know where to find me.

The Styles and MODs forums are guaranteed to remain visible until May 1, 2009, as stated in this topic. After that point they may (their words, emphasis added by me) be removed from public view.