Forum Friday – The Forum Gets a Tune Up

Every Friday I like to talk about a topic on the Tech Savvy Forum in more depth. Unfortunately, the forum itself has been in major need of an overhaul for the past 4 months, and because of this there hasn’t been a lot of activity. Or rather, I should say there hasn’t been a lot of genuine activity. Over 1200 spammers, bots, and ne’er-do-wells have signed up to spam the boards with ilicit advertisements and random junk.

So, it was with great relish this past week that I finally downloaded and installed the latest Beta release of phpBB, one of the more popular open source forum softwares on the web. I’ve been running phpBB2 for the past two years, making sure to keep it regularly updated, but the last update came months ago, and it was still not enough to keep spammers and hackers out. So rather than wait until the official release of phpBB3, I’ve upgraded to the 5th release candidate, meaning it should be highly stable at this point (considering it’s been in development for years).

What does that mean to you, then? Probably not much, but it makes me feel confident that the fabulous discussions and great resources in the forum will be preserved for at least a few more months or years, until the spammers catch up with this latest improvement in security. It also means that I was able to turn registration back on, which should allow new members to join with relative ease. Already two new people have joined, with one new member asking some excellent questions about how to go about upgrading her small school from 15 old Apple computers to at least 15 new computers and possibly 15 laptops. So if you have a few minutes, check out the freshly tuned up forum, and offer some hepful advice for our newest member!