One of the boards that I help administer is seeing a new form of spam that I call fake signatures. It’s very irritating, but quite creative. The people (or person?) doing this are joining the board and getting past the checkbox challenge, so I assume they’re human. They are posting what at first glance looks like legitimate content. But there are symptoms. More…

One of the more popular MODs for phpBB2 (and now a standard feature for phpBB3) is subforums. The original forum structure for phpBB2 includes the following hierarchy:

Board -> Category -> Forum -> Topic -> Post

With the very popular Simple Subforums MOD (sometimes called SSF) you can get this:

Board -> Category -> Forum -> Sub-Forum -> Topic -> Post

For some people that one extra level is enough. You can enable posting at the parent forum or the child forum level if you want. Several years ago I wrote my own sub-forum MOD for use on my largest board. It works okay. Like the SSF MOD I only coded for one level. Unlike the SSF MOD mine is optimized from a query perspective, and doesn’t require the eXtreme Styles MOD. I think both of those are advantages to my code over SSF.

But what if there was something else… something in between a full-fledged sub-forum implementation and a basic configuration? I have written a new MOD to do just that, and am currently using it on my largest board.

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Today I got a note from my host. Seems that they’re concerned that I am going to overrun my monthly bandwidth, given that I have used 80GB of traffic so far this month. Their estimated bandwidth usage for the month was over 1300GB.

Hm. Here are their numbers:

Current usage as of 05-15-2008: 80.7 Gigabytes
Allowed usage: 1200 Gigabytes
Estimated usage: 1,372.1 Gigabytes

Half-way into the month, have used 80GB… I’m not quite sure I see how that math works.

One of the features missing from phpBB2 is a Merge Topic option. Forum moderators can delete, lock, split, and move topics. A locked topic can be unlocked. A moved topic can be moved back to its original location. But there is no “undo” for deleting or splitting. If there was a way to undo a “split” it would most likely be called a “merge” which - if available - would also provide a way to merge two similar topics together to combine a discussion. In the next few posts I want to talk about how I designed and wrote a MOD to address the missing merge feature in phpBB2.
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The phpBB Group announced their first-ever user conference back in April. An excerpt:

What is Londonvasion 2008?
Londonvasion 2008 is the first ever live phpBB conference. We are very excited to present you with this unique opportunity to meet fellow community members, as well as the phpBB team.

The conference will be held on Sunday July 20th in a hotel across the street from London Heathrow Airport (UK). Doors will open at 9:00 AM and the event is scheduled to end at around 17:00 (5 PM).

We welcome speakers and presentations on any phpBB related topic; please contact me if you are interested. A full list of planned discussions will be made available prior to the event.

If you’re wondering, I do plan to attend. I am hoping to be able to speak as well, although with the recent retirement of phpBB2 I am going to have to consider changing my topic ideas. Stay tuned for details, and be sure to register if you can.

I have another site that doesn’t yet have an active phpBB board attached to it, but it does have a blog. So I added my Checkbox Challenge for Blog Comments and all is well. A few weeks ago I started getting all sorts of emails from my comment form, of all places, all plugging various blogspot blogs. $%@# spammers, don’t they realize that the only one that’s going to see the comment form content is me? as in one person?

I have since added my Checkbox Challenge to the contact form, and the spam has been 100% eliminated. I read more about it here as well.

But I don’t get it. Forum posts? public content. Blog comments? also public content. Comment forms? Nobody gets them but me. What a waste of time.

I have been doing a lot of thinking about how to best prepare for the phpBB2.x retirement. The first conclusion that I have come to is that I won’t start any new MOD development topics. It took me well over a year to complete development and release for the Page Permissions MOD, and I don’t anticipate that I would be able to (or interested in) releasing my other 2.x MODs on an accelerated schedule to avoid the pending shutdown for MOD submissions. As a result, I have tabled the MOD development topics at phpbb.com.

However, some of these MODs might still prove to be useful. So what to do?

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Well, I think everyone knew this was coming:

Today we are announcing our retirement plans for phpBB 2.0.x. This is advanced notification so that everyone can stay informed.

Commencing Wednesday 1st October 2008, phpBB 2.0.x download links will be removed from the download page at phpBB.com. Anyone wishing to obtain phpBB 2.0.x can continue to obtain the 2.0.x package at sourceforge.net.

Commencing Thursday 1st January 2009, phpBB 2.0.x will be formally retired, and support will no longer be actively provided for 2.0.x. Converting from 2.0.x to 3.0.x will continue to be supported.

Security patches, if required, will be provided until Sunday 1st February 2009.

The reason for the early retirement is the PHP Group’s decision to retire PHP 4. phpBB 2.0 mainly runs on the PHP 4 codebase and it would be unwise to require people to have an unsupported version of PHP installed in order to use phpBB.

Teams will announce how they will handle the retirement in the coming days.

I have some thoughts on this. I always have thoughts. I’ll be posting them in the coming days, after I have time to digest what this means for me personally, for the phpBBDoctor site, and what I think it means for phpBB overall.

Stay tuned.

I got mixed responses to this post a bit ago when I asked about future phpBB2 MOD releases. I realize that based on site statistics there are more than three people that read my blog, even if there are not that many that leave comments. After thinking about it I decided to go ahead and solicit feedback from the much broader audience at phpbb.com.

As a result I currently have two [DEV] topics open. A topic marked [DEV] does not have any code attached; it’s supposed to be a way to get feedback and ideas from the community. So far the response has been … underwhelming. I don’t mean that the responses I got were bad (they were quite good) but that the number of responses has been low. This is probably understandable given that I posted in the phpBB2 MOD Development forum.

[DEV] Mark Topic Unsearchable

[DEV] Post Notes

I don’t think this is a surprise that the general community is moving towards phpBB3. Many folks that are planning to stay on phpBB2 are probably more interested in seeing existing MODs upgraded to version 3 so they can also upgrade… rather than adding still more “new” features to their phpBB2 boards. We’ll have to see how things go.

This is the last post in a series that started with a few observations about the concept of “Auto Group” MODs and why I think they are bad, followed by some posts about the design for the “Forum Auth by Post Count” MOD that I have released for phpBB2. All of the related posts are linked at the end of the post in case you want to go back and read the full story. In this post I will talk about a basic strategy in programming that should be followed: putting reusable code into a function or procedure.

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