Mark's Blog

Simple message; if you’ve got phpBB installed somewhere, it’s time to update to 3.0.7.

It’s really, really easy these days so you have no excuses .

Shameless plug on its way for my own services but this is my blog so ho hum

I’ve recently been working on a few bits and pieces under the Island Geek brand; namely setting up Blesta to put on sale some of the phpBB services that I currently offer.

As you will see it is the usual affair of phpBB installation/configuration options as well as MOD installations. For the more enterprising customer there is also the option of a dedicated support contract, something that I know has been highlighted to me as something that people who run fairly large boards are interested in. If you aren’t that comfortable getting involved with the nuts and bolts of the software then having somebody who can is reassuring.

Now, this may be a plug but I’m here to give you an offer as well. The coupon markblog09 will get you 10% off anything you order – think of it as a late Christmas present. For something like our hosting product where buying 12 months already gets you 2 free this is a considerable saving on top. The code is valid until the end of January ‘10 so feel free to pass it among your friends who you think may be interested.

Another milestone clocked up for spammers across the world as the phpBB3 GD CAPTCHA has been officially cracked, causing an explosion of extra spam registrations and posts that most phpBB3 owners haven’t seen thus far. Unfortunately it was only a matter of time before the spammers’ automated tools were tailored to be able to read the phpBB3 CAPTCHA; however if you are keeping up with phpBB development you would have seen some interesting improvements going into trunk for 3.0.5 that hopefully will help with this spammer plague that we all seem to have come down with.

In another spammer experiment I’ve added another phpBB3 board with the GD CAPTCHA enabled on its default setting to the rotation script that governs which honeypot the spammers get sent to. The CAPTCHA settings are the same ones that are distributed with the phpBB (3.0.4) download package (GD set to on, foreground noise set to off, and X and Y noise set to 25).

Of course, I’d love nothing more than to present all of you with the opportunity to use bbProtection however we aren’t quite at that stage yet. However, now would be a great time to lend us a hand by contributing to our ongoing “bbProtection Needs You” campaign; more information available on that over at the bbProtection Blog .

Well, January looks set to be an incredibly busy month especially with regards to travelling off this little island of ours .

The 6th sees the first leg of the Carling Cup semi-finals, with Burnley fielding a team away at Tottenham. Hopefully we will be playing a little better than our recent run of form, two losses in two games isn’t a good thing by any standard.

The 14th brings the BETT trade fair, relating to IT in education. A team of four students, including myself, are going up to support and assist the Eduprint team; however more about that in a future post.

The 21st rolls in with the second leg of the Carling Cup semi-final, with Tottenham bringing up a team to East Lancashire to face the mighty claret and blue army. After this game we’ll know for sure if we’ve made it to the final at Wembley or not, here’s hoping .

Finally to round off the month the 24th is the Scotland phpBB meet, so I’ll be heading up to jump across the border. This one really isn’t to be missed if you are available and have an interest in phpBB; a number of team members will be there so it is a great opportunity to put usernames to faces and have a generally good and enjoyable time.

So as you can see, 4 trips away in 4 weeks; a very busy month all round .

Remember the highly successful and entertaining Londonvasion held in June of this year? Well, Daniel (Greenweaver) and Kenny (cherekoee red) have decided to hold a general phpBB get-together and meet up in Scotland next January .

If you are available and interested in attending there are numerous phpBB team members that will be popping along including Raimon, camm15h, NeoThermic, ToonArmy as well as everyone’s favourite nub Paul. I’ll also be attending so come and join the fun.

As with any event like this, it doesn’t matter if you are a novice or an expert; everyone is welcome to attend, socialise and learn more about the great community we call phpBB.

For more information on when and where it is see the topic located in the events section over at phpBB.com. If you want more details then I’m sure Daniel or Kenny will be happy to answer any questions either in the topic or via PM .

It’s time to do the update dance again; Meik has announced the release of the phpBB 3.0.4 package.

We are very pleased to announce the availability of the “one year anniversary” phpBB 3.0.4 package. With this release we would like to thank everyone who supported phpBB the past years.

No exciting shiny new features in this release, however there are a number of bugfixes included alongside some performance enhancements.

As per usual, if you are starting a new board you’ll need the full package whereas if you are updating the automatic update package should suffice. If you have any problems then head over to the 3.0 support forum.

Remember: If you fail to update BertieZilla will come around and spread yummy honey all over you .

It’s been a grand old 8 years to the day since phpBB1 hit the software shelves of the Internet and started to gain the interest of users and developers alike. Since then we’ve had many changes; phpBB2 was launched, phpBB 2.2 became 3.0 “Olympus” before finally being sent out of the door last year.

› Continue reading

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 .

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 .