When the team was discussing the original agenda for Londonvision one of the topics that was to be on the list was combatting spam. It is a topic that I’ve blogged about many times over the years, so I have some definition opinions on the subject. I suppose that’s a good thing, because when I arrived on Friday morning Marshalrusty mentioned that with all of his organizational tasks he had not had the time to prepare a presentation. He offered the slot to me.
As anyone who has ever been in the same room (or country) with me knows, I love to talk.
It’s part of what I do in my job (part-time trainer, full-time consultant) and it’s a very real part of why I am particpating on the board in the first place. So I was happy to create a topic.
In a nutshell, I talked about three different aspects of combatting spam:
- Prevention
- Detection
- Elimination
I believe the presentations will be posted on phpbb.com, and I will certainly post my presentation here as well. But to summarize: Prevention techniques keep unwanted content from reaching your board in the first place, and I shared some statistics from my Checkbox Challenge MOD. We also got into a discussion about some of the other MODs for phpBB2 and I talked at some length about the new features of phpBB3 that make most (if not all) of the phpBB2 MODs obsolete. Detection relates to identifying spam content that appears on your board, and Elimination techniques relate to cleaning things up once a spammer has been detected.
I won’t recreate the entire presentation here, but it did seem to be well received and I hope it will be useful once I get a copy posted.
After I was done, we had a brief talk from one member of each team about how the user community can get more involved with the phpBB project. The developer team suggested that more help testing was always welcome. The more tests that can be done in different environments, the more solid the code becomes. All developers like to deliver solid code.
Most of the rest of the teams talked about being active in the respective areas (MODs, Styles, or Support) and doing a good job. Those that do a good job get noticed, and those that get noticed can get invited to the teams.
Next, we finally had a presentation from a user rather than a team member. Noth started his presentation about the user experience of updating to version 3. In a nutshell, he was quite happy with the upgrade.
Paul is now delivering a presention on how to write a MOD, which looks like some good information for those folks that are always asking, “So, how do I write a MOD?” Now we’ll have something to point them to. 
I think that the rest of the afternoon belongs to the MOD team, and whatever time is left will be used for an open discussion panel. Probably one or two more posts “live”, and then probably I will do a wrap-up post when I get home. 