phpBB • Creating Communities Worldwide

You probably have already heard about it: the next release will include a host of new features. This post will present one of them in detail, showing the idea and the impact on users, style and MOD authors.

Most admins are experiencing problems with spam, which is taking away lots of energy that would be better spent on the enjoyable parts of administrating a community. We tried our best in the arms race against spambot programmers, but have to admit failure with our previous approach. Since 3.0.x became as popular as it is, any default visual confirmation gets broken almost instantly. After long discussion in and outside the teams, we came to the conclusion that diversity is the answer: every board admin should be able to use a non-default anti-bot measure without it being a pain. Read the rest of this entry »

In the Support forums hundreds of support posts are made daily. People who have a problem, or just a question they’d like to ask. It’s hard to answer all of those questions. Sometimes we need more information in order to get a better view of the problem to solve it.

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In the past few weeks, a Trojan (Troj/JSRedir-R) has become the most prevalent malicious infection to ever hit websites. According to Sophos, this Trojan accounts for 42% of all infected web pages in the past two weeks. This Trojan typically targets PHP sites, and is not caused by a vulnerability in the scripts you run. Once the Trojan is on your local computer, it searches for FTP credentials and then uses them to modify the files on your website. FTP clients that store their passwords in plaintext, like FileZilla, are particularly vulnerable to this.

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I touched on this in an article at my own site last month, but it is worth mentioning here as well.

This blog currently covers a wide range of topics relating to how to run your forum (How many forums should I create?, How Many Moderators Do You Really Need?, etc), to technical aspects about phpBB and MODs (Injection Vulnerabilities, Templating just got easier, etc) and even general posts about the phpBB project itself (Talkin bout Area51, Londonvasion Re-Cap – phpBB Ascraeus, etc). We would like some feedback from the community to get an idea about the sort of things you would like to read in the blog posts.

Our questions to you is: are there any topics in particular you would like to see posted in the blog? Are there other categories of articles (besides the ones mentioned above) which we need to focus on more?

Please give us your feedback by replying in the comments box below.

Thanks!

Because phpBB is a very large product, it needs to be supported. People who have a problem/question and they come here to find an answer or solution. Have you ever looked at the support forums? If so, you might have seen that there are many many topics a day and just a few people answering the topics, which is great of course.

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I touched briefly on this in the very first blog post here at phpBB.com. If you’ve just set up phpBB, how many forums should you create?

As I said in that blog post, the key is to start small and increase the number of forums you have over time. There is nothing worse than going to a forum which takes a minute to load, takes twice that long to scroll to the bottom of the page and has dozens upon dozens of inactive forums with either a handful of posts or none at all. Even though there might be a couple of very active forums amongst it all, many people will still think your forum is inactive. Read the rest of this entry »

Not giving private support has been a policy on phpBB.com since I joined over three years ago. There is, in fact, a rule against contacting team members for private support:

Support is offered only via these forums and #phpbb on irc.freenode.net. Do not contact team members privately (via any method) to ask for support. Users found to be contacting team members asking for support will be warned.

While this may sound a little stern (it is by far the most warned offense here at phpBB.com), the reasoning for this is actually quite true.

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Recently we got many bug reports about problems with the IE8 beta browsers. The problem is that we cannot accommodate beta browsers in our software – the next beta will break our adjustments. But why have we chosen to include some other IE8 features? The answer is simple: security

This post will give you insights into one of the more obscure security implications of file uploads.

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As anyone who has spent a decent amount of time in and around the support forums knows, there are an endless amount of questions being asked, and very few people who take the time to answer them (a big thanks to those of you who do!) Because of this, the time any of us can spend there is very much worth its weight in gold. Many of us (myself included) start developing certain methodologies we use when handling support requests in order to quickly and efficiently solve the problem before us. Here’s how I do it.

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