phpBB Weekly

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Episode Duration: 1:21:24
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples) and David Lewis (Highway of Life), with guests Russ Jackson and Paul Lush of StopForumSpam.com

phpBB Weekly is always at its best when we have special guests on, and this episode was no exception. We are joined on this episode by the co-developers of Stop Forum Spam, a website that maintains a blacklist of known forum spammers, submitted by forum administrators who catch these spam registrations. Russ and Paul discuss a bit about how Stop Forum Spam works, why they built it, and we have a bit of a discussion about how spammers operate. (And as you can guess from the episode title, we spend a little bit of time along the way ranting about Gmail’s lax treatment of e-mail spammers and about the bad design of Google Wave.) Overall our recommendation is that while Stop Forum Spam is not a tool you should rely 100% on, it can help you identify forum spammers when used in conjunction with other methods, such as the newly registered users group, custom profile fields, CAPTCHA plugisn, etc.

Also Douglas provides an update on his phpBB “Monumental” Meetup in Washington, DC on March 13, which got a nice little mention on phpBB.com last week. And he offers a preview of OSCONvasion 2010, which will take place in Portland, Oregon in late July.

The MOD of the Week (and one of the best ways to integrate Stop Forum Spam on phpBB3) is Anti-Spam ACP by EXreaction, and the Style of the Week is Absolution by PixelRaider (recommended by Tuvok on StarTrekGuide). We also give a special mention to the phpBB Standalone Template Engine by nanothree (recommended by rotsblok on StarTrekGuide).

Be sure to join us on Saturday 1/16 when we will take an in-depth look at the phpBB4 “Rhea” discussions!