phpBB • Creating Communities Worldwide

When I was more active in the support forums, it seemed like phpBB users were primarily made up of teenagers looking to set up their first dynamic website on Lycos or other free hosts — there were even knowledge base articles on how to make phpBB2 work on those hosts.

I had thought of OSS projects as the domain of teenagers and college students. A hobby people give up for full-time jobs later in life. So I was a bit surprised when I asked NeoThermic, keeper all statistics and Support Team Leader, the average age of a phpBB Team member. It is about 28.4 years (with a very large standard deviation of eleven and three quarters). This could be due to a relatively low churn rate. Many team members have been with us for many years.

But, it seems to me that phpBB’s audience is aging as well. It is less common to see someone trying to set phpBB up on a free web host.

I’m not saying this is a good or a bad phenomenon. I do think a board is better off when it is operated by a dedicated administrator with resources at his or her disposal. Resources pay for high quality hosting, for instance.

However, I’m not sure this is unique to phpBB. Many of the contributors to other large OSS projects like phpMyAdmin have been doing so for many years. But I’m curious whether anyone else has noticed the maturing of the people who contribute to open source projects.

I believe that Joomla! has noticed, because they are recruiting students. Google has done the same, with their Summer of Code the past several years.

A while back battye wrote a post about how to select moderators. I thought that it was a really good post. It spawned a few comments, one of which included a question about how many moderators do you really need. I thought that battye’s response was interesting. He said:

I would probably go with one moderator per 50 active/regular users.

Based on that, I am very much understaffed. To be clear, battye does provide a bit more detail in the rest of his response, including some ideas about time zone coverage and other aspects of running a board. I am taking that bit of a quote out of context because I felt like I wanted to write more than a simple comment / response to his post.

I feel like there are several important factors that can be used to determine how many moderators you need, and some of them are probably more important than others. The factors are:

1. Number of active users
2. Number of posts per day
3. Average age of board members
4. The level of “passion” inspired by the subject matter of your board

I would like to add that this is probably not an exhaustive list but these are the four main elements that I have seen in boards that I participate in. I would like to provide more specific details about each of these, followed by some of my own thoughts on how you determine how many moderators you need. I don’t think it can be summed up in a simple equation.

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One of the advantages of a face-to-face meeting is that feature requests and feature discussion can be much more effective; at least if it is about minor window dressing as opposed to huge changes. To curb the wave of requests right here: you should have been there, the opportunity has passed . People watching the SVN repository may know already: there were some major changes in the past two weeks. A lot is moving right now in the active branches, but that’s for future posts.

Today it is a great pleasure for us to unveil a new feature for the 3.0 branch, to be released with 3.0.3: Template Inheritance.

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Londonvasion was the first ever in much more than one sense. For the first time:

• people from all over the world and with different backgrounds assembled to talk about our baby - phpBB.
• a large part of the phpBB group assembled in one room.
• almost the entire development team met face to face.

So what did we take from London?
Lots of feedback from the people who use phpBB. Noth gave a heart-warming presentation about it working, and Andy Miller presented his plans around phpBB. We heard a lot about the tiny things that the community finds irritating, illogical or or just not working as they should. It was fascinating to have members from both the Joomla! and Drupal communities adding their respective viewpoints.

What will we do with it?
Well, we sat down, debated things, designed features, came up with solutions, considered scalability - in short the things that are only possible with the developers assembled in one room.

What will be result?
Well, there will be code. There will be improvements to existing features and other new features which people asked for to solve various problems they were encountering.

Thanks to all the people who gave us feedback, wishes and participated in the very fruitful discussions.

Your forum is growing quite nicely and your user base is building, but there comes a point where you need a helping hand. This is where moderators step in. Moderators are members of the community with more privileges than a normal registered user, but without the ultimate control that an administrator possess. Moderators can undertake important forum tasks, such as locking, deleting or moving topics, issuing warnings or even issuing bans. They enforce the rules of the forum, and are essentially on the front line. Moderating can be thankless job, but despite this, most people relish the opportunity and the extra responsibility.
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The MOD team always gets a lot of questions, feedback and more from MOD authors. This is mostly after a persons MOD was denied for a certain reason, we change something, or just about one of the policies we have.

We get a lot of questions from them if we do anything with the feedback, or if we actually listen to it, I want to explain here how we handle this kind of feedback.

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Yes, it is no secret that phpBB’s reputation regarding security has not yet recovered completely. We take every report about possible vulnerabilities seriously and are deeply grateful about reports on our security tracker. We give full credit for all undisclosed valid reports made on our trackers.

Even if one is not sure about what happened, the nice guys from the Incident Investigation Team will help you figure it out. If in doubt: report.

The things floating on the web and frequently washing up in our tracker are usually not valid, however. Ready for the fun? Here comes the first installment of “Exploits from the crypt”:

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Many modification authors complain about the process involved in getting a modification into the MODs Database. It can be a long and tedious process. The Modification Team doesn’t try to make this process as difficult as possible just to annoy authors. There are many reasons why we validate MODs before accepting them into the MOD Database. Some include secure and bug free code, uniform zip files and guaranteed to be installable on a vanilla phpBB.

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The number one question most administrators ask is “how do I attract users to my website?”. Unfortunately, there is no magical answer which will apply to everyone, but there are things which you can do as an administrator to ensure visitors to your forum will stick around long enough to register.

Once you have chosen your niche and set up your forum, you have a blank canvas. As a site administrator you have two levels to work on:

• A technical level, and;
• A user level

On the technical level, you are the webmaster and the forum administrator.

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