May was a reasonably active month full of work, but most of it was for one client, a continuation of the work for this client for several months now. They are not in a particular hurry on their project and neither am I, but they do want it done right, so they’ll take the time to make sure it is done right. We are iterating on the styling in phpBB 3.3 for their current phpBB 3.0 forum with the goal of making it look as close to what they have now as possible. By mid month I felt like the styling was close to being done so stopped work, waiting for a review by the company’s designer. That took nearly two weeks so things were slower toward the last half of the month. I finally got the review last Friday and started doing some more work on it this weekend. Basically we’ll keep iterating through the styling until they are happy, then work on the next phase of the project, which will hopefully involve creating extensions to replicate what they are doing now through their custom modifications. The goal is to see if everything can be done through an extension. That’s similar to my approach with the styling: putting all changes into a custom style that inherits from prosilver, so most changes over time to prosilver will get applied automatically.
I’ve also been working slowly on a spam remover extension using Akismet. There is already an extension that will check new posts for spam and prohibit those, but nothing to clean up old spam. This is a continual issue for some of my clients but there is no way to find these and pull them out reliably. I’m hoping my extension will do this using the Akismet service. As I iterate through it though I keep changing features and trying different technical approaches. Since testing every post on a large board will be very time consuming and probably cause ugly PHP timeouts, I’m trying to figure out a way to do this more asynchronously. I’ll probably use an interface similar to creating a new search index with a screen that refreshes periodically to show progress. This is hard to do in phpBB.
Other work in May:
- I performed a painful upgrade from phpBB 3.0.8 to 3.3.0. The board used the standard prosilver style, so I just had to add a logo. Sounds easy, right? But there were all sorts of issues with timeouts and things not working optimally. When the basic upgrade was done, I installed my digests extension and tested it. Installed also installed the Board 3 portal extension, which needed a patch to make it work on phpBB 3.3. I also set up reCAPTCHA V2 invisible spambot countermeasure and disabled contact form.
- I converted an old phpBB 2.0.19 board to phpBB 3.3.0. There were not many posts on this board. The client chose the CleanSilver to replace the old subsilver style. I replaced the phpBB logo with old logo, and made small changes to CSS to show site title and description and to properly size the logo. I disabled the contact form, recreated the search index, and replaced the GD CAPTCHA with reCAPTCHA V2 invisible. I had to create my own account to login. cPanel access wouldn’t work for a while, and I got two different login screens.
- Upgraded a board from phpBB 3.2.5 to 3.3.0. Eleven extensions were upgraded. Updated the Platinum style to a 3.3 compliant version. A number of extensions had to have their services.yml files edited to work on 3.3.
- I dad a one hour requirements discussion on Skype with a client. If it goes forward, I will help move a board from a Delphi forum to phpBB through a lot of complex scripts. They can export to YAML to that has to be moved into a database and munged to be usable to phpBB. The basic idea is to import it to phpBB 2, which is relatively simple and if successful upgrade to phpBB 3.3 from there.
- I upgraded a board from phpBB 3.2.8 to 3.3.0. I applied a private message bug patch. I reapplied their logo, which does not include old Site Lock code in the footer. I upgraded their Cleantalk extension to version 5.7.2.
- Rehosted phpBB 3.1.6 forum from Bluehost. Lots of issues with Bluehost. Why? Because the Bluehost hosting environment is so tightly optimized that things you would expect, like to make a reliable archive in the file manager or to be able to archive the database easily in phpMyAdmin would time out instead. When I was able to piece together their database from various fragments, I moved it to a virtual machine on my computer to run database cleaner, then moved it to the Mac to upgrade it, then imported the database on Bluehost, with issues of timeout on phpMyAdmin loading the database too! It was all a big pain because Bluehost is a poor host in general, despite their slick advertising. This is probably because it is owned by Endurance International Group, which buys up hosts and squeezes every nickel out of them and their customers. I had to work through their legendary poor technical support to get FTP to work which involve chatting virtually with some guy in India. PHP 5.6 used, changed the config.php file to mysqli. Created an add on domain to do the work. Search index recreated as it was too big to move due to Bluehost’s phpMyAdmin timeout issues, so I had to recreate it manually.
- Upgraded board from phpBB 3.2.2 to 3.3.0. Updated the Allan-Style SUBSILVER to the latest version and applied a patch to the style that was recommended to use it on phpBB 3.3. I also updated the board rules extension. All looks good.
- Upgraded a board from phpBB 3.2.9 to 3.3.0. Updated my digests extension to 3.3.1. Upgraded PHP to 7.2 from 5.6. No issues. Client had concerns about emails not being received. There were some items in cPanel’s email deliverability report. Client may not have his phpBB notifications set correctly. Client did not have founder privileges to I granted them.
- Troubleshooting. The client could not move or edit posts. The issue was that there is no user moderator role defined for him, which became a NEVER blocking permission. Made his role full moderator for all his forums and it seems to fix the problem.
