phpBB • Free and Open Source Forum Software

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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