Mark's Blog

Meik has announced the availability of the phpBB 3.0.3 package over at phpBB.com. There are a couple of major new features, such as template inheritence as explained over at the phpBB Blog and a post based queue.

If you are starting a new board, you’ll want the 3.0.3 full package. Most people who are updating boards will require the automatic update package. If you are an advanced user there are also other options open to you. All of these packages can be found via the Olympus downloads page.

Remember, if you get stuck pop over to the very friendly people at the 3.0 support forum and I’m sure they will do their best to assist you in any way they can .

A small outburst of joy that you can probably only share with me if you are either a Burnley football supporter or a bitter rival of Chelsea .

Regardless, we’ve beaten them in the Carling Cup Round 4 right at the wire during penalties. Utterly brilliant, just brilliant .

As some of you may already know, I’ve been running a honeypot for quite a while now to collect data for the bbProtection service as well as using it to monitor interesting spam patterns.

The pot is a basic install of phpBB3 without any modifications, and with user registration set to no authentication. There is currently one forum that spammers are able to leave messages in and a link to another pot run by Dave “drathbun” Rathbun. Dave’s pot currently has around 30,000 posts, an absolute mammoth amount of spam in the relatively short time that it has been set up.

So, it is with a little twinge of sadness that I report that the pot has reached 10,000 spam posts inside it. I suppose I am currently fortunate in the fact that I currently don’t have any boards of my own to run and so don’t really see the spam problem on a day-to-day basis. But for someone like Dave or any other board owner out there this is clearly a real problem.

Hopefully bbProtection will go a long way to solving this problem and allowing board owners to concentrate on running their communities rather than sorting out spam, but for now I’ll keep running the pot and see what flies in .

As some of you may be aware, my grand tours of Cuba in 2007 and Egypt in 2008 brought many interesting photos back to Blighty which are located on my Flickr account.

So, as a part of the stream of updates I will be selecting various photos to display on the blog. These are the best of the bunch so you can look at the best ones without spending hours trawling through and finding them yourself . Randomly selected photos will be along the sidebar, however you can also view them all by viewing the photoblog tag .

If you have seen a photo that you think should be featured then why not let me know and it might just happen .

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them

Laurence Binyon (1869-1943), For The Fallen (1914)

Good Morning/Afternoon/Evening to you all,

After many months of staring at a blank page with some exciting stickmen dancing in a rather repetitive fashion you have a new blog to read!

I am going to attempt to keep updates on this to a semi-regular basis, however mundane or uninteresting my life currently is at that particular point . In the meantime, I ask of you a favour. If you are aware of anyone who is using the old RSS feed please direct them to the new location at http://blog.markbarnes.org/feed/.

In the meantime between now and whenever the first “real” post will arrive I hope you will stick around so that we are able to share our thoughts and expressions together .