Things were a bit slow in May, at least for the first two weeks. Curiously all my work was for existing clients. The theme of my work in May: getting rid of spam and preventing it.
- Client #1
- May 4. I helped fix an outgoing email issue on GoDaddy hosting. phpBB notifications were being blocked by GoDaddy from going out, something that you would never know if you don’t call their technical support line and press them. GoDaddy detected malware on the domain but after running a scan could not find any. They required that the customer certify that there was no malware on the site before unblocking outgoing email. In response I created an email forwarder for the domain and made this the board contact email. Not having an email address for outgoing mail associated with the domain is often the root of these problems. Customer called GoDaddy, they reenabled outgoing email and notifications started going out again.
- May 12. Issues with spam posts on the forum despite using the reCaptcha V2 spambot countermeasure setting in phpBB. Customer was paying extra for a GoDaddy Securi service that automatically detected and removed suspected malware, but which removed some valid software introducing issues. Securi zeroed out some software files that kept me from logging in. After I eventually figured out the problem, I replaced the two files and I was able to log in. Earlier I had removed copies of mods in the store folder (used when the board was using phpBB 3.0 software) that were flagged by GoDaddy as malware. There were recent spam posts and it’s unknown how they happened. It’s possible the spammer solved the reCaptcha manually. I deleted about 150 inactive and likely spam registrations via SQL. I provided user with a list of posters since 4/1/18 so he could make a judgment as to whether these were spam registrations. I provided instructions on removing these users and their posts. I reinstalled Tapatalk since it was not working. I had to do it through File Manager since FTP wasn’t working. mChat extension wasn’t working either. I tried to reinstall that too but it didn’t work. I needed to reupload all phpBB software files since components were probably removed by Securi. Noticed navigation icons were removed too. Talking with GoDaddy they disabled the firewall and got me FTP access again. I re-uploaded folders where Securi had changed things. This seemed to fix remaining issues. After purging the cache, mChat started working and icons reappeared. Uploaded Cleantalk but not enabled. Providing instructions for configuring it if client wants to use it. Had GoDaddy disable firewall. Customer may want to stop paying for it.
- Client #2
- May 12. Since my last work for client they moved their forum to a dedicated server. Could not get in with FTP credentials. Used file manager instead. Installed release candidate of Thanks for the Posts extension. It will work with Tapatalk if the mobiquo directory is replaced. Did that and tested and it seemed okay. Installed a beta Modern Quote extension. Hid the portal page link because a sidebar would not show on right due to styling issues. Changed server settings, cookie settings and .htaccess file to accommodate HTTPS. There were some issues with getting cookie settings to work correctly. I also had to change some URLs in the posts table to https and fix some ads that were showing http in the URLs. To accommodate a Discord chat widget client wanted on the sidebar, I created a .css file it uses and linked it in in overall_header.html. I placed it at the bottom of the right sidebar in a custom widget in the Board3 portal, but there were connection issues since the service was not authorized that the client fixed. I fixed a phpBB Gallery integration issue. In the config table, the row containing phpbb_gallery_num_comments was blank when it needed an integer, trigger a SQL error. Set it to 1 since there was only 1 comment in the gallery so far. Fixed edit mchat post issue so an admin could edit the chat post due to white text on white background. Applied mChat patch to force the window to scroll to bottom in mChat. Fixed background and text color of Discord widget with an inline style to the widget since the board portal stylesheet was overruling it. Clock widget bottom part did not refresh on Chrome, but does on Firefox. Not sure it can be fixed (browser quirk) so client removed it. Checked background color issue for multi-quote. It’s black for me. Does not appear to be permissions based.
- May 13 – Changed the background color for Gallery display, was white, commented out in CSS. User provided a watermark and I added that. Changed cookie name, forces a new login.
- May 14 – Sorted through issue with Gallery watermarks (should be applied to subsequent images) and virtual URLs it creates. Disabled Image upload extension.
- May 16 – Mostly answered new questions, changing some settings such as a PHP maximum upload size. Installed Search User Topics extension.
- May 28 – Client asked me to update the version of Tapatalk to 2.1.10. However, it didn’t integrate well with version of mobiquo supporting the Thanks capability. To get things stable, we eventually reverted back to Tapatalk version 2.0.8.
- Client #3
- May 16 – Time consuming phpBB upgrade on dreamhost.com virtual private server from phpBB 3.0.14 to 3.2.2. Over 1.2M posts, took 3 days! Running a database update quickly failed. Tried the command line interface instead. Even then it was excruciatingly slow. Broken SSH connection overnight meant a restart which bogged down. A chat with tech support finally revealed the upgrade slowness issue: insufficient RAM for the database. Bumped it to about 600MB and the conversion finally completed. Everything was straightforward thereafter. Used the black style which I changed to make red type rather than blue to match the look under phpBB 3.0. I replaced the logo. I added the latest Tapatalk extension and enabled it. I added Cleantalk extension and gave instructions on how to enable it with a key from the website. Turned on its spam firewall feature. I created a robots.txt file to deny all robots. I enabled reCaptcha V2 spambot countermeasure. Changed group color for administrators so they could be seen easily in styles.
- May 17 – Additional work. MySQL too many connection errors kept happening. Spent time with tech support on this issue. MySQL settings cannot be changed for the VPS type of account. Some users were reporting bogus login errors. Disabled Cleantalk and think that will solve the issue until Cleantalk is properly set up. Added prosilver_se style for visually impaired users who can’t see dark style well. Installed Quick Style extension so styles could be easily changes. Changed blue text colors to white but cannot change color of icons since they are images — would need new set of icons colored correctly. Client wants to jump to the first unread post of a topic when clicking on topic icon. Found a hack for it but advised against it.
- May 18. Investigated some new issues. The search index unavailable message when posting, but post was saved. Changed search index to phpBB Native. Installed Naruto shipuuden style and tweaked it to place logo and make it look right.
- May 19 – Answered some questions. Installed Thanks for the Posts (Release Candidate) extension. I did more tweaking of newest style to make it look more uniform.
- May 20 – Answered a lot of questions. Think the too many MySQL connections issue is either related to Tapatalk’s mobiquo directory or needing to change the storage engine for tables to InnoDB. Updated Cleantalk extension to latest minor version. Changed PHP from 5.6 to 7.0. Uploaded version of mobiquo for Thanks for the Post extension.
- May 21 – Installed ShareOn extension. I found a way to get to MySQL prompt for potential change of tables storage engines to InnoDB. Changed a lot of forum permissions. Explicitly gave Thanks for the posts permissions where necessary. Verified it worked in Tapatalk with the replacement mobiquo folder they provided.
- May 22 – I changed all table storage engines from MyISAM to InnoDB. The search wordmatch table took about six hours to convert. This resolved the MySQL too many connections problem, probably because tables were being locked and unlocked more efficiently and at the row level instead of the whole table level. I also installed the Media Embed plugin. I wrote a little blurb of instructions for client’s users and provided a screenshot for using the Media Embed plugin.
- May 24 – I installed Advanced BBCode Box 3 extension to make it easier to embed videos.
- Client #4. To address a persistent spam problem, I installed the latest version of Cleantalk and changed spambot countermeasure to reCaptcha V2.
- Client #5. To address another spam problem, I installed Cleantalk extension on two domains.
- Client #6. Client had a major spam attack with thousands of spam posts and spam registration. Configured reCaptcha V2 on phpBB 3.2.1. Then installed Cleantalk extension. However, there were issues while removing spam with Cleantalk, first hosting timeouts, then duplicate rows in phpbb_notification_types table. Emptying this table eventually worked. Removing spam was a combination of some SQL on the backend plus Cleantalk extension.
