Will the battle never end?

Apparently not.

I have seen a new style of spam coming in on another blog that I have. Based on past experience, I normally expect the spam to include links to various sites that I have no interest in. These sites will normally promote things like products I don’t want (or need).

Lately, however, I have been getting spam comments that include links to “linked in” or other social networking sites. What’s the point of that? <sigh> The comments include anything along these lines (these are actual spam comments)

After reading through the article, I just feel that I really need more information on the topic. Can you suggest some resources ?

The style of writing is quite familiar . Have you written guest posts for other bloggers?

The topic is quite hot in the net right now. What do you pay the most attention to while choosing what to write about?

My friend on Facebook shared this link with me and I’m not dissapointed that I came here.

… and many more like this. The good news is that the comments were held in the moderation queue. The bad news is that these comments were all made on a blog that is protected by the checkbox challenge code that I use here. I have plans to go out and analyze the server logs to see if the comments were made by a human or a bot, based on time spent on the various pages.

Here’s a tip: if you encounter a problem with code that someone else (such as myself) has written, and you write to them asking for help, try to be more descriptive in your error report than this:

On localhost works but not works in linux server.

Localhost: all pages works
Sever linux: none pages works

So basically they’re telling me that the MOD works on their localhost installation, but once they upload it to their linux server “none pages works” which, I guess, is a bit of a problem.

But without my ESP module addon for the PM system, I am unable to determine exactly what the problem is, so I was forced to ask them for a specific issue. So folks, if you have a problem with my code, tell me what it is. If it’s supposed to do X and it does Y instead, tell me that. If it’s supposed to do X and it’s not doing anything, tell me that.

But don’t tell me “it doesn’t work” and expect much help.

Our web site for continued support of phpBB2 reached 100 registered and activated users a few days ago. We also have several thousand posts. Based on the statistics I collect we have also seen a few days with more than two thousand page views.

We’ve had some interesting discussions that are not strictly limited to phpBB2, so you might want to check us out.

I doubt that anyone reading this is unaware of the recent attack on phpbb.com. One of the more interesting side affects of the exploit is finding out just how poor people are at picking passwords.

More…

My big board crossed that milestone earlier today.

Our users have posted a total of 500045 articles
We have 37396 registered users

This is a phpBB2 board that started in June of 2002, formally launched in August of 2002, and has been growing strong ever since.

Welcome back from the holidays, I hope everyone had a good year. I did, and am looking forward to the challenges that 2009 brings. One of those challenges is, of course, how to deal with the retirement of phpBB2.

As promised, the support forums at phpbb.com for version 2.x were closed this month. The formal announcement is here if you want to read the full text. The important part is (in my opinion) this paragraph:

The phpBB2 support forums have been locked and will remain available in this “archived” state for a number of months, purely for reference purposes. Most phpBB2 resources have been removed from the Support Section of the site and further pruning will take place within the next few weeks. phpBB2 Knowledge Base articles will be reposted in the archived forum.

There is no specified end date for the 2.x support forums given, but the implication is quite clear: at some point even the locked forums will be dropped or at least hidden from public view.

The 2.x MOD Writers and MOD Requests forums were locked several months ago. The MOD Development 2.x forum remains open for replies to existing topics, but no new topics can be started. On February 1st even that forum will be closed. So where does that leave me?

I am in the process of porting the phpBB Doctor MOD Catalog over to phpBB2 Refugees and will be moving all of my MOD development and support to that site, at least for public MODs. Private MODs for paying clients will continue to be hosted on the board on this site. I am going to update each of my MOD topics (both dev and released) at .com to link to the new topics once I get them set up so people will know where to find me.

The Styles and MODs forums are guaranteed to remain visible until May 1, 2009, as stated in this topic. After that point they may (their words, emphasis added by me) be removed from public view.

No more blog posts from me for the rest of the year, as I will be taking some time off. See y’all next year! Happy holidays, and wishes of happiness and success to you and yours in the new year.

A few weeks ago I posted about increasing the flood interval on my honey pot board. My theory was that since bots seem to have a fairly regular posting process I could cut down on the number of spam posts simply by changing the flood interval.

It didn’t seem to work.

More…

I found Episode #88 of phpBB Weekly in my iTunes library this morning, so I went over to their site and it has been released there as well. As always, Douglas and David provide enough distractions to avoid being boring and I felt like that the message I was most interested in getting out there was accomplished.

If you aren’t subscribing to the podcast via iTunes (or other similar option) then you can listen to the discussion on their site.

It was not the first time I have been on the podcast, but it is the first time that something I have done was the subject of the podcast. That was fun.

Today we officially launch the phpBB2 Refugees site. The past few months have been used to test and tweak the code as well as set up some of the documentation and lay the groundwork for future growth. As mentioned previously, I got to talk about this project on the phpBB Weekly podcast last Saturday.

The site will open with a focus on building the community and setting up for support. The next phase will include special handling of MODs and Styles, and we hope to have those ready to go early next year.

So come on over and check us out, see if you like what you see.