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What are phpBB’s strengths and weaknesses?

On: February 29, 2020February 29, 2020 By: Mark

phpBB is great but not perfect forum software. phpBB has many upsides, but it has downsides as well. In the interest of fairness, I thought I would document some of them.

These will also appear in my Mastering phpBB Administration book, which is undergoing professional editing at the moment, so consider this a bit of a preview. I’m hoping in a month or so it will be published. Here’s an except from the draft of the book on its strengths and weaknesses, as I see them:

Strengths:

Longevity. It’s been around since 2000.
Market share. According to the phpBB Group, phpBB is the #1 bulletin board solution in use. If you type “bulletin board software” into a search engine, generally phpBB is at the top.
Support. The phpBB Group’s support forums are outstanding. Responses to questions are quick and almost always helpful.
Security. While no software can guarantee it is free of security vulnerabilities, phpBB’s combination of open source software, code peer reviews and their extensive automated nightly build tests minimize unexpected security issues.
Rock solid. While most phpBB boards are relatively small, with just tens of thousands of posts, some are huge with millions of posts. As of this writing, phpbb.com’s forums alone have over 4.2 million posts. It needs to just work and almost all the time it does, at least if you use the latest version of phpBB, stick with approved extensions and your web host’s technical infrastructure doesn’t change too quickly. When phpBB fails, it’s almost always due to hosting changes beyond its control.
Features. If you need a feature, it’s likely available in phpBB, with one major exception (see the next section.)
Familiarity. Since you have likely used it before without knowing it, there is no steep learning curve.
Fanatical devotion to open standards. The phpBB Group goes to great lengths to ensure phpBB works across all browsers and devices. It does this by carefully adhering to the latest web standards and daily automated testing of builds in development.
Responsive. It behaves seamlessly on mobile devices, intelligently sizing down to the device’s screen size, yet with no loss of functionality.
Uses top-tier integrated third-party libraries. Under the hood, phpBB uses a host of other top-notch, enterprise-class software libraries. For example, it uses a Twig templating library from Symfony for rendering web pages with dynamic content.
Supports lots of databases. Typically phpBB is used with the MySQL or MariaDB database management systems (DBMS). But if you want to run it on the Oracle, Postgres, Microsoft SQL Server or even the SQLite DBMS, it will work and function virtually identically.
Permissions system. There is probably no better permissions system available anywhere. It’s incredibly feature rich, if more than a bit obscure.
Extensions. Since version 3.1, phpBB supports extensions. Extensions are new features that you can add to phpBB that can be turned on or off once you install them, all without affecting its base code. Extensions are not currently quite as easy to use as WordPress plugins, but they are getting there. And the number of approved extensions just increases with time.
It’s maintained and updated. If a security issue is uncovered, it tends to get fixed promptly with patch instructions to use until there is a new release. Over time, new releases will update phpBB so that it works with the latest changes to technology.

Weaknesses:

No multi-threading. While a poster can quote from a previous post inside of a topic, you cannot see a group of related, indented replies to a post within a topic. Hopefully this will show up as a feature one of these days.
New features are added slowly, if at all. While phpBB is a rock-solid bulletin board solution, it is not easily changed. This is in part because it is so feature-rich. Features that are added tend to be relatively minor and incremental. Rarely do you see big, new features. The extensions system introduced in phpBB 3.1 was one of these rare and big changes to phpBB.
Standalone. phpBB doesn’t integrate with other software solutions. For example, you can’t integrate it into WordPress or Joomla, at least not elegantly. It’s not available as a WordPress plugin.
Updates and upgrades can be painful. While better than it was, updating and upgrading phpBB is often a challenge. Most of my consulting business involves helping clients on these issues. Web hosting limitations also can introduce problems during these time-critical activities. For many users, the improved update process in phpBB 3.3 will do a lot to address this.
Setting up a bulletin board is mysterious and somewhat painful too. This is one of the major reasons I wrote this book. Mostly, bulletin board administrators learn by doing. It’s so much better to do things the phpBB way … except you can get a hundred different opinions on what the best way is. I’ll risk the wrath of the phpBB community (they are a passionate, but very helpful bunch) by telling you what I think the best way is, and why. I will help step you through these phpBB mysteries based on more than a decade of practical experience.
Complicated to administer. While using a phpBB bulletin board is not complicated and usually intuitive, administering a phpBB bulletin board can be very complex. With so many features, it’s hard just to know what they all are or where to find them. Certain very powerful features, like its granular permissions system and its ability to bundle permissions into roles are totally awesome, but rarely delved into. Sometimes an administrator won’t even know a feature exists.

So know what you are getting into. If any of these are major issues, you might want to use another bulletin board solution, or just not bother to install phpBB in the first place.

Getting rid of old spam is hard

On: January 30, 2020November 17, 2021 By: Mark

Updated November 17, 2021 – My spam remover extension, which uses the Akismet service (may require paying Akismet to use the service) can reliably remove a lot of legacy spam.

phpBB is now pretty good at keeping spam users from registering and posting. In the phpBB 3.0 and 3.1 days, its defenses turned out to be pretty weak. The GD Image spambot countermeasure (still the default) was easily hacked. phpBB has at least added settings to let you tune it better, making it harder to hack. It also started supporting Google’s reCAPTCHA, but the version in phpBB 3.1 was quickly hacked and phpBB was not agile enough to quickly integrate its versions 2 and 3 reCAPTCHAs.

This led to the an inundation of spam on certain forums, mostly bogus spam registrations but also lots of spam posts in some forums. Some administrators countered by requiring all new users to be approved by an administrator. But when inundated with hundreds of these in a short period of time, it’s a hassle to delete them all, or discern the real new users from the spam ones. For a few years, I made quite a bit of money removing spam for clients.

With phpBB 3.2 things slowly got better, at least if administrators used best practices. Best practices were to use reCAPTCHA version 2 “I am not a robot”, or the Question & Answer, providing the questions were sufficiently difficult. A malicious human could still take the time to solve the questions, but these were unusual. There were also a few extensions that could help. The Sortables CAPTCHA was one of the more useful ones.

My go to for years has been the Cleantalk extension, which requires subscribing to their service. But now there is also an Akismet spam extension, which also requires a subscription, which can be free for personal sites.

All this is good at preventing spam, but how do you get rid of months or years of spam posts? That was my dilemma this week working with a client.

The latest version of the Cleantalk extension has a feature that removes spam users and their posts. But I discovered it has a few serious limitations:

It bases its judgment based on the IP of the poster. The user’s last IP is stored automatically. It doesn’t examine the post text. Over time, IPs that used to be marked as spam get cleaned up, and when this happens these IPs are no longer flagged, so spam registrations aren’t caught.
Its interface for finding these users is slow and can easily time out, which means sometimes it can’t succeed. It also lacks pagination.

Why this particular client ignored this problem for a few years, I don’t know. But cleaning up the database was a big challenge. The only real way to do it is to manually look at every post and flag those that were spam, then use moderator tools to get rid of them.

This was time prohibitive, but if these could be removed presumably people would start posting again and Google would rank the site as legitimate again, bringing in new people.

The next best solution I found was to try to identify when the spam started. This took quite a bit of analysis, but looking in the most posted forum on the board it looked like it started on Feburary 10, 2018. So I used phpBB’s Prune User feature to remove users and their posts that registered after the spam started.

This seems to have gotten rid of the spam. But it also removed accounts of some legitimate users, and their posts as well. Those who had accounts before then were unaffected and their posts remained.

phpBB needs a real solution which so far doesn’t exist.

But I think I have found a solution … if I write the extension. If you are an extension developer, please go ahead and develop it, just tell me so I don’t waste my time.

It turns out that the Akismet, the biggest solution out there and used widely in WordPress to moderate comments, has a Submit Spam API. So in theory, if you pass the needed information to it including the poster’s IP and the post text, it can render a judgment on whether it is spam or not. If these posts can be flagged, they can then be removed.

One possible issue is that the service requires sending it a User Agent string. phpBB does not store this. Perhaps a fake user agent string could be supplied, but would this render a correct judgment? If no, this solution wouldn’t work. Also, it requires an Akismet key to use, which might require some boards to purchase the key. This may be a limiting factor for some.

As I have time I hope to see if this is a viable approach finding and removing spam posts in phpBB.

phpBB 3.3 is released!

On: January 8, 2020January 18, 2020 By: Mark

Two days ago, the phpBB group released its latest minor version of phpBB: 3.3, also known as Proteus. You can learn more about it on its launch page. To give you some perspective, phpBB 3.2, the last minor version, was released on December 9, 2016. So it’s been three years since the last minor release of phpBB.

I looked at a development version a couple of weeks back. So I was kind of taken by surprise by 3.3’s sudden release. Minor versions tend to introduce some new functionality, and Proteus does. It’s just that for most administrators and users, it won’t seem like that big a deal and things will look and behave pretty much the way they always have. As with phpBB 3.2’s introduction, most of its changes are covert, rather than overt. Unless you know what you are looking for, you won’t notice much.

New logo

One hard-to-miss feature, at least if you use the default proSilver style, is the phpBB logo is different. It’s now a Scalable Vector Graphic (SVG), which makes it look crisp and shiny in all resolutions, including retinal displays. It looks a tad bigger, but also more white and almost glossy. Also, the logo includes the words “forum software”, which is new. Previously, the logo was a transparent GIF and it said “Creating communities”.

New phpBB logo

Updating is getting easier

Updating phpBB is getting easier too. It won’t compare to updating WordPress, which takes place entirely behind the scenes and can be done with a single click. The exact mechanics of how it will work is unknown until 3.3.1 is released. But the launch page says:

“With our brand new installer updating will be easier than ever in phpBB 3.3! Upload a single folder to your board and all your files will automatically be replaced.”

This will be welcome because updating has always been a hassle. Over time, it may affect my income a bit since a lot of it comes from updates. I expect a lot of my customers will still want me to do this as a service.

You will still need to upload one file, an archive. I also expect there will be a number of other manual steps, because there will always be issues of overwriting custom changes to styles and extensions that may have issues. You will probably have to back up your styles and extensions folder manually before updating. Time will tell.

New PHP requirements

Proteus requires PHP 7.1.3 or higher, and cannot use a version of PHP greater than 7.4. So many administrators will have to upgrade PHP first, which may be an issue for those using PHP 5.4 and 5.6. They will finally have to take the plunge.

Most likely a lot of these boards will have an issue: they will need to edit their config.php file to tell phpBB to use mysqli drivers instead of mysql drivers. So far, fixing this issue has not been intuitive.

Overall, taking the plunge to PHP 7 is good: twice the performance compared with PHP 5 and phpBB can use many new features in PHP 7 too. I have noticed some extensions have issues with PHP 7, however, for example the AWS S3 extension.

Upgrading from phpBB 3.2

The upgrade process from 3.2 is pretty much unchanged from 3.1 to 3.2, and will be more manual in nature than the newer upgrade process. You can see the steps required here.

Improved Emoji support

From a user’s perspective, the exciting feature is likely to be increased Emoji support. Previously, only certain Emoji characters could be used, and only in post text. Now you can use virtually any Emoji character, and you can use them in topic titles too. However, you cannot use Emoji in the subject line of topic replies.

The Emoji in topic titles permission is enabled by default. If you want to disallow it, the easiest way is to change a user role, like Standard Features. ACP > Permissions > Permission roles > User roles > [Role name]. Click on the green wheel for the role. See illustration:

Over time, phpBB forums will look a lot more colorful and visual.

No support for IE before IE11

Also with Proteus, phpBB essentially gives up caring about Internet Explorer versions 7-10. It’s not that phpBB won’t render pages with these older browsers, but certain features won’t work or may behave quirkily. This is because to do fancier things, phpBB relies on a Javascript library called jQuery. It now uses a newer version of jQuery which is not compatible with these older browsers. The phpBB Group’s rationale is that since Microsoft won’t support old versions of Internet Explorer, they don’t have to either.

Some other features they are highlighting:

Clever quotes. Quotes can show a link to the post and post author. It can also show the date and time of the quoted post.
Improved reCAPTCHA. Previously only reCAPTCHA V2 Checkbox was allowed for a reCAPTCHA solution. Now you can use the Invisible reCAPTCHA V2. One consequence of this is that the V2 Checkbox is no longer supported, so as part of upgrading phpBB to 3.3 you should have to get a new set of reCAPTCHA keys from Google’s reCAPTCHA site that support this method, and plug them into the Spambot Countermeasures area in the ACP.
Notifications are supposed to be very fast now. The whole notifications process has been reengineered. It’s unclear if this means email notifications are sped up. I’m pretty sure they will go into phpBB’s mail queue like they do now, so your Email settings should apply.
FontAwesome improvements. In phpBB 3.2, phpBB supported a rather limited set of scalable FontAwesome characters. The number supported are now much larger, and they will all look fine on retinal displays.
Symfony 3.4. This is behind the scenes stuff, but phpBB 3.3 uses a newer version of the Symfony PHP libraries, including its heavily used template engine.
ACP Statistics screen is now responsive. As noted in my first look, the statistics panel in the ACP now splits statistics into two groups, which has the benefit of making the screen responsive. You can see the new look below:

Should you upgrade?

You probably don’t want to upgrade right away. This is because some of your extensions may not work and if you made changes to your style, those won’t carry over so they will need to be replicated.

However, the same day the phpBB Group also released phpBB 3.2.9, which brings over some of these features including Emoji support. You might want to update to that version for a few months until extensions and your style becomes compatible with phpBB 3.3.

What will be new in phpBB 3.3?

On: December 25, 2019 By: Mark

If you’ve been waiting for phpBB 3.3, you’re not alone. The phpBB Group is famous for not setting release dates. They arrive when they arrive. There is no big company like Automattic is for WordPress behind phpBB.

I took a development version of 3.3 (3.3.0-RC2-dev) for a spin today to see what’s new. And the answer is not too much, at least so far. There are only two things I noticed right away:

The phpBB logo is now a Scalable Vector Graphic. This means it will scale nicely and always look sharp and fresh.
When you access the General tab in the Administration Control Panel, statistics are laid out differently and are arguably a bit confusing. Two tables with statistics? The first block contains counts. The second one contains metadata. It could be better laid out

What phpBB 3.3 “Proteus” really seems to be about is keeping it up to date. So far I don’t see any new features. A one-click update is supposed to be in 3.3, but I don’t see it. I suspect it got deferred for phpBB 4.0.

How is it keeping it up to date?

PHP 7.3 and 7.4 will be supported. These versions of PHP have been out for a while, but phpBB wouldn’t work reliably with them.
PHP 5.6 and 7.0 will not be supported. The minimum supported version of PHP will be 7.1.
The reCAPTCHA Invisible CAPTCHA will be supported. Currently, only V2 Checkbox is supported. This means CAPTCHA can happen implicitly. You shouldn’t need to click on a checkbox to prove you are a human.
Two new password hashing algorithms will be allowed: Arg2i and Arg2id. Passwords are not stored in the database in plain text. But using these newer algorithms, passwords become harder to crack. The 2id version is also much faster than the 2i version.
phpBB is dropping support versions of IE below IE11. That’s because the versions of Windows these run on are no longer supported by Microsoft, so they feel free to let them go
As a consequence of the above, jQuery 3.4 will be included. This version works with newer versions of browsers and pointedly does not support ancient versions like IE7.

If there are other new features, I’m not finding them. For most users, except for the phpBB logo, it will look and behave as it did under 3.2.

Understanding roles, part five – forum roles

On: November 18, 2019November 18, 2019 By: Mark

As the name implies, forum roles control the privileges to forums. Forums are the key structure in phpBB and where most of the action happens, so there must be a lot of ways to finely tune access to forums.

Forum roles are most typically used to control forum privileges as they simplify the process. I will also demonstrate a way of circumventing these roles to set more granular forum permissions.

User roles provide a broad set of permissions, many of which extend to work users do in forums. Allowing attachments to posts is one example. Since roles are bundles of permissions, permissions in forum roles may override some user role permissions.

Pre-defined forum roles

The following forum roles come built in to phpBB:

No Access. Can neither see nor access the forum. This should be applied when you want to hide a forum from appropriate groups and users. You most typically use it to hide forums from guests and bots.
Read Only Access. Can read the forum, but cannot create new topics or reply to posts. You often see this role applied to guests.
Limited Access. Can use some forum features, but cannot attach files or use post icons. This role is often applied to newly registered users.
Limited Access + Polls. As per Limited Access but can also create polls. This role is also often applied to newly registered users.
Standard Access. Can use most forum features including attachments and deleting own topics, but cannot lock own topics, and cannot create polls.
Standard Access + Polls. Like Standard Access but can also create polls.
Full Access. Can use all forum features, including posting of announcements and stickies. Can also ignore the flood limit. Not recommended for normal users. This is often applied to more privileged users such as moderators and administrators.
On Moderation Queue. Can use most forum features including attachments, but posts and topics need to be approved by a moderator. This role can be applied to a problematic poster known for making inflammatory posts.
Bot Access. This role is recommended for bots and search spiders. It does allow bots to read the forum, so if you don’t want bots to read the forum, the bots groups should use the No Access role.
Newly Registered User Access. A role for members of the special newly registered users group; contains NEVER permissions to lock features for new users. This gets around a quirk in phpBB where newly registered users can start new topics (which have to go through moderation) only because they are also in the registered users group. It’s strange that phpBB is not configured this way by default.

There is one other implied role: No role assigned. As the name implies, it indicates a lack of permissions in the defined context, so other forum permissions if they exist are used instead.

Setting forum roles

Generally, it’s best to attach roles to groups. Attaching roles to users can be done, but it makes it hard to fix permissions issues. Most likely, roles already exist for groups accessing your forums. However, when you create new forums, you often need to attach some roles to the users that will use them, generally through group forum permissions: ACP > Forums > Forum based permissions > Group forum permissions.

First, select the user group whose roles you want to change or add. In the Look up usergroup dropdown, select the group then press Submit.

On the next screen, select the forum or forums you want to add or change roles for, in the appropriate Select a forum select list or dropdown. The dropdown is used to select a set of forums inside a category. Then press Submit.

Finally, you have an interface for changing or adding roles for each forum for the user group selected. See screenshot below. In the Role dropdown, select the role to be applied for the forum and user group. When all are set as desired, press the Apply all permissions button at the bottom of the screen.

Creating new forum roles

You can define a forum role using similar procedures for user, moderator and admin roles: ACP > Permissions > Permission roles > Forum roles > Create role. In general, the existing roles make it unlikely that you will need to create other forum roles.

Overriding role permissions

While not a good idea generally, I should point out you can override forum role permissions for groups and users. Use either:

ACP > Users and groups > Users > User forum permissions

ACP > Users and groups > Groups > Group forum permissions

Here’s an example of how it can be done for a user’s forum permissions.

In this case, Jane Doe is a teacher and in the teacher’s group, so she has Standard Access role’s permissions to the teachers’ forums. This means she cannot post sticky topics, i.e. posts that stick to near the top of the list of topics in a forum.

We would like to allow her to post stickies but not change her permissions otherwise.

We first enter her name by entering it in the Find a member field and pressing Submit. See screenshot above.

Then we pick the forums where we want the permissions applied. In this case, it makes sense to select the Teachers forums category and the forums inside it. Once selected, press Submit. See screenshot above.

On the next screen, the role shows no role assigned because no user role has been applied. The user still has a group role applied. Click on the Advanced permissions link.

You can then select any permissions you want to grant. In this case, I granted the Can post stickies permission by changing it to Yes. Since multiple forums should be show on the screen, do this for each forum in the category. See screenshot below, which shows only the permissions for the category.

User forum permissions, advanced permissions

Clicking the Apply permissions button will make the permission stick for this forum, or do all then press the Apply all permissions button at the bottom. Now Jane Doe has the necessary added permission, but it was done outside of the forum role.

Understanding roles, part four – administrator roles

On: November 17, 2019November 18, 2019 By: Mark

It’s tempting to think of administrators as one size fits all, but you can have various kinds of administrators. The kinds of administrators are based on the roles they are given.

If you don’t want to be granular about administrator privileges, simply add the user to the administrator’s group: ACP > Users and groups > Groups > Manage groups > Administrators > Members. In the Add Users block, enter the usernames on separate lines that you want to make administrators. Use the Find a member link if needed, and press Submit when done. See the screenshot below.

These new administrators will inherit the Standard Admin.

There are four administrator roles:

Standard Admin. Has access to most administrative features but is not allowed to use server or system related tools.
Full Admin. Has access to all administrative functions of this board. Not recommended.
Forum Admin. Can access the forum management and forum permission settings.
User and Groups Admin. Can manage groups and users: Able to change permissions, settings, manage bans, and manage ranks.

The main role to worry about is the Full Admin role, because if you grant it, then you are giving the administrator virtually complete control of the board. The administrator is not technically a founder but might as well be since they can do pretty much anything a founder can do too except make themselves a founder or create additional administrators.

If you want to make someone a founder, you first must already have founder privileges.

ACP > Users and Groups > Manage users

Enter the user’s name and press Submit. In the Founder field select Yes and press Submit.

You can also create a new Administrator role if you want similar to the process used for moderators: ACP > Permissions > Permission roles > Admin roles > Create role

Large and busy boards might find a need to assign people to the Forum Admin and User and Group Admin roles.

These new administrators get into the Administration Control Panel the same way as you do: by selecting the link in the navigation bar or from the link that appears in the footer.

Understanding roles, part three – moderator roles

On: November 17, 2019November 18, 2019 By: Mark

In addition to having global versus forum-specific moderators, phpBB allows you to place moderators into various roles. The permissions of the role determine how much power a moderator has. These moderators roles come out of the box:

Standard moderator. This type of moderator can use most moderating tools, but cannot ban users or change the post author.
Simple moderator. This type of moderator can only use basic topic actions. They cannot send warnings or use the moderation queue.
Full moderator. This type of moderator can use all moderating features, including banning.
Queue moderator. This type of moderator can use the Moderation Queue to validate and edit posts, but nothing else.

There is nothing to stop you from changing the default permissions for these moderator roles. The process is similar to changing user roles.

You could create a new moderator role. Let’s say you have a popular and busy forum with a lot of topics that are out of place. You want to keep the primary moderator for handling the bigger duties, but delegate moving topics, splitting topics, merging topics and locking topics to another type of moderator via a moderator role.

ACP > Permissions > Permission Roles > Moderator roles

First I create the role called Special Moderator. Since a Full Moderator has all permissions, I’ll start with its permissions and take away permissions I don’t want the role to have.

I enter “Special Moderator” in the Create role field, and select Full Moderator from the Use settings from dropdown, then press Submit.

On the next screen, I first went to the Post actions tab and clicked on the No column to disallow all those privileges. I did the same on the Misc tab. On the Topic actions tab, I left these as is. See the screenshot above. Pressing Submit created the role.

With the group now defined, I can select members to have this role. Since I want these moderators to do this for any forum, it’s easiest to make them global moderators, but with the Special Moderator user role.

ACP > Permissions > Global permissions > Global moderators

See screenshot above. The first step is to add the users to get this role in the Add users block, then pressing the Add permissions button. The Find a member link makes it easy to find the usernames, if you don’t know them.

The next step is to assign the moderator role to these users. In the Role dropdown, I select the Special Moderator role I created, then pressed the Apply all permissions button. See screenshot below.

Done!

Understanding roles, part two – user roles

On: November 17, 2019November 18, 2019 By: Mark

User roles bundle sets of permissions that apply to what users can do on your board. There are six built-in user roles:

Standard Features. Can access most but not all user features. Cannot change user name or ignore the flood limit, for instance.
Limited Features. Can access some of the user features. Attachments, emails, or instant messages are not allowed.
All Features. Can use all available forum features for users, including changing the user name or ignoring the flood limit. Not recommended.
No Private Messages. Has a limited feature set, and is not allowed to use Private Messages.
No Avatar. Has a limited feature set and is not allowed to use the Avatar feature.
Newly Registered User Features. A role for members of the special newly registered users group; contains NEVER permissions to lock features for new users.

If you want to create a new role, there is nothing from stopping you. ACP > Permissions > Permission roles > User roles. Enter the new role name in the Create role field, then select the role you want to inherit the permissions from in the Use settings from dropdown. Then press Submit. Change the permissions as desired for each tab.

Once a new role is created, you generally want to assign groups or users to the role. Use one of the following paths:

ACP > Users and groups > Users > Manage users

ACP > Users and groups > Groups > Manage groups

Understanding roles, part one

On: November 17, 2019November 17, 2019 By: Mark

What is a role?

Roles are one of phpBB’s most useful but most obscure features. It can be a little hard to understand what roles are intended to do.

Roles essentially are a collection of permissions with a name. This collection of permissions can be assigned broadly to users of various types (users, administrators or moderators). For example, the Standard Features user role describes the privileges users with this role have.

You can view and change these permissions: ACP > Permissions > Permission roles > User roles > Standard Features > Edit

The screenshot shows some of these user permissions for the Standard Features role. The permissions comes in four sets, represented by a tab. The Post permissions are shown. It is green because all permissions are set to Yes. Change just one of these to No or Never, and the green turns into blue. The Profile, Misc and Private messages tab are blue, letting you know that at least one of the permissions on these tabs is not Yes. If the color is red, all the permissions on the tab are either No or Never.

Since these are user permissions, any user granted the Standard Features role will get these permissions, such as the ability to attach files. These are the default permissions. Forum permissions may override these settings.

What’s neat about roles is that you can change them at any time. Don’t want to allow this role to attach files? Change it to No or Never and the permission goes away immediately. A No permission might be overridden by a subsequent Yes permission, but a Never permission cannot be overridden.

Types of Roles

Four categories of roles exist:

User roles. These are broad permissions that apply to any user of your board.
Administrator roles
Moderator roles
Forum roles. These allow permissions to be finely tuned for individual forums. They are applied after any user role permissions and may override any user role permissions.

You don’t generally need to backup all of your tables before updating phpBB

On: September 7, 2019May 19, 2020 By: Mark

Updated October 13, 2019 to mention that the phpbb_migrations table is always changed with an update.

When updating phpBB, you should backup your database. That’s the guidance given by the phpBB Group. Updates occur when you are moving from one micro version of phpBB to another, say 3.2.6 to 3.2.7. When moving from minor versions, like 3.1 to 3.2, you are doing an upgrade and different procedures apply.

It’s never a bad idea to backup your database. It can be done manually in phpBB: ACP > Maintenance > Backup. This method though is not foolproof. Particularly on larger forums or on shared hosting, backups can time out. Sometimes you think you have a complete backup and you don’t. The only way to know for sure is to download it, and examine it in an editor. If the bottom of the file shows the phpbb_zebra table is being populated and ends with a semicolon, it should be complete. Web hosts often offer features that make automatic database and file backups for you.

But it turns out that when making updates, generally not much of your forum’s database actually changes. Only two tables are guaranteed to change: phpbb_config and phpbb_migrations. (I use phpbb_ as your table prefix. Yours may be different. You can see your actual table prefix in your forum’s config.php file.) This is because phpBB always tracks the current version of phpBB installed, and it is stored as a row in the phpbb_config table. And with each update, one or more rows are added to the phpbb_migrations table to indicate what migrations were made.

Most updates don’t affect many tables. In fact, it’s typical that only the phpbb_config and phpbb_migration tables are affected.

So there is no point in making a full backup of your database prior to updating if you don’t need to. It’s a real hassle on larger forums.

It turns out that if you look through phpBB’s code you can figure out which tables are updated. The /phpbb/db/migration folder contains a number of subfolders. The programs in these subfolders do the work of changing your database during updates.

For example, there is a v320 folder. This contains the migration programs used to bring phpBB up to version 3.2.0.

There is also a v32x folder. This contains the migration programs used for each version update of phpBB 3.2. You can infer from the file names which these are. For example, v321.php and v321rc1.php are used to update from phpBB 3.2.0 to 3.2.1. “rc” in the file name means “release candidate”. There is typically at least one release candidate before an official release. So it’s a matter of reading these programs to see what tables are actually affected.

That’s what I did, and you can see the results on my Do I need to update page. Or you can examine them yourself. I’ll keep the update page updated as new micro releases occur. You might want to bookmark it and refer to it before doing your own update.

Of course, I do updating as a service. You can see my pricing here and send me a service inquiry if you’d like to get started.

If you do it yourself, follow the official procedures on phpBB’s update page. But you may decide to backup only the tables that are actually changed to save yourself extra hassle. If an error occurs, restore these tables and recover your files.