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Archive for July, 2009

Developer Meeting

Posted by naderman in Development, Events with the tags , , , , , on July 26th, 2009

The phpBB Development and Management Teams met in Cologne, Germany last week for 4 days of exciting brainstorming and coding.

We discussed future phpBB releases and worked on phpBB 3.0.6. Our plans for 3.0.6 have previously been discussed on this blog, but we decided to add even more. One feature we decided upon and implemented during the meeting was PM reports. This feature allows users to report private messages to moderators just like posts. A reported private message will then appear in a new MCP module so moderators can read the message and act upon it. This is particularly useful for users who want to report spam PMs. From this feature emerged another: emptying a user’s outbox. This option, in the Manage Users section of the ACP, allows the deletion of all unread PMs sent by a spammer.

Yet another idea we had during the meeting, which has already been announced, is the Best CAPTCHA Plugin Competition. I would like to urge all MOD developers to participate in this competition since a large variety of CAPTCHAs is the most effective measure against spammers. With the new CAPTCHA API, creating a CAPTCHA plugin is really simple. The example Q&A CAPTCHA Plugin, which will ship with phpBB 3.0.6, was also created during the meeting.

Details of the decisions made regarding the future of phpBB will be published in separate blog posts over the next several weeks, so make sure to check back for news! Of course, the meeting was also a great opportunity for us to get to know each other better. Most of us had already met at Londonvasion last year, but it was great to catch up with everyone again! We visited the Chocolate Museum and climbed the tower of the Cologne Cathedral. All in all, we had lots of fun too. During the meeting, we were happy to invite bantu to join the Development Team.

View from the Kölner Dom
View from the cathedral
At work
Team at work
Chocolate Fountain
Chocolate fountain

Group Photo

Andreas (bantu), Dominik (dhn), front: Jim (TerraFrost), back: Nils (naderman), Meik (Acyd Burn), Marek (APTX), Chris (ToonArmy), Henry (kellanved), Carolina, Yuriy (Marshalrusty), Igor (evil<3)

New Community Feature: Meet the Team

Posted by Brainy in Uncategorized with the tags , on July 16th, 2009

In an effort to increase our connections with the community at large, the phpBB Teams are glad to announce the creation of our newest community effort – a series of question and answer sessions entitled “Meet The Team”. This series is focused on helping you, the end user, learn a bit more about us, the programmers, supporters, moderators, and designers that help keep phpBB.com running smoothly and phpBB the most popular free bulletin board on the internet.

This series, with regular updates (depending on team member and question availability), will focus on asking team members the questions you want to know about them. These questions should not be directly phpBB-related (when does the next version of phpBB come out, etc.), but should instead be on a more personal note (what is your favourite ice cream flavour, favourite movie, most recent thing you purchases, etc.). We will try to answer every question you ask us, provided they have some genuine reasoning behind them, are not overly invasive of privacy, and that they are not directly phpBB-related (as above).

If you wish to contribute to the questions for the first portion of this series, please visit this phpBB Discussion topic. While you’re there, feel free to look over previously-asked questions and second them if you too would like to see them answered. Upon the completion of each portion of the series, a new topic will be posted to gather further questions for the next portion.

Thank you for your interest in getting to know the phpBB Teams — we hope to let you know a bit more about ourselves soon!