phpBB • Free and Open Source Forum Software

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 »

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!

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 »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »