The Epson P-2000 is a multi-function device that I use primarily to download and review pictures from my digital camera but it’s actually capable of quite a bit more. I purchased it after taking a 4-day camping trip a few years ago. It’s much more convenient to download my digital pictures from memory cards to this than to lug around my laptop and have to worry about running out of power. More…
In this post I set up a few basic ideas about what skills a good MOD writer should have. To save you some time they were:
- Knows php
- Practices good programmign techniques
- Knows phpBB
The last one is probably the most important. Someone that knows php that doesn’t know phpBB is going to have a harder time getting started. But none of these are what I consider the most important attribute. What is it?
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The server logs report IP Addresses used to visit this site. My comment/spam process has started logging the IP address as reported by the server. My question is this: is it possible to spoof that data? Meaning, is it possible that the IP addresses that are recorded by this process are wrong?
This from someone who owns a dog and is owned by two cats. 
Just found it amusing today, hope you like it even if it is old.
How To Give a Cat a Pill
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So phpBB3 goes RC (Release Candidate) and they showed off the new proSilver style. Nice. 
Don’t know what I’m talking about? I can’t imagine that you come here before going to phpbb.com, but if you haven’t been lately go. Now. Don’t read anything else here, just go.
(Edit March 19, several hours after the original post)
As was pointed out by a number of folks… whether phpBB.com is using RC or not, the download page still has the Beta 5 package. Details are in the comments.
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I continue to analyze the blog comments that get caught by Akismet and look for patterns that I can use. One of the very common patterns is, of course, the huge number of links, and I’m working on an idea for that. Another thing I have noticed is that a large number of blog comments post their links in both html and bbcode format. I can use that.
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Regular blog readers might notice that the frequency of updates has dropped in the last several days. It’s not because I have lost interest, or that I have nothing to say (I always have something to say 
). Rather it is because I am involved in a project for my current client (real database client, not anything phpBB-related at all) that is going through a code-freeze and then our initial “go live” preparations followed by the actual live release.
Not much time for anything else.
I hope to resume my posts about my search tuning efforts along with other phpBB-related topics soon.
Post Updated March 18, new notes at the end, thanks.
I recently completed some code that moves the “stopwords” into a database table and changes the way they are applied to a post or to the search process. At the same time I also moved the search synonyms into a database table. During testing I was very interested to find out that the way I thought the search synonyms were applied is not the way they are actually applied at all. This post will clarify how the synonyms are used, and point out something interesting about the internal consistency of the phpbb search_synonyms.txt file.
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Yesterday I posted about moving the stopwords file into the database and changing the way the stopwords (and search syonyms) are processed. Then I rebuilt the search index for my largest board. The results? I reindexed 298,070 posts in about five and a half hours. Read more for details… More…
From this post earlier in the Search series I made this statement:
The changes also reduced the amount of time required to rebuild my search tables by 4%. As it turned out later on, the reduction in time was not because of the uniquefy process, but something completely unexpected. You will just have to come back for the next installment to find out what it was. 
The “uniquefy” process was based on the idea that when you’re getting ready to store your post words you don’t need duplicate words to be processed. They just take extra time for no benefit. So I wrote a MOD that would include logic to “uniquefy” the list of words from a post before they were processed any further. I thought that was where the 4% performance benefit was coming from. I was wrong.
I am now ready to reveal the secret. 
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March 25, 2007
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