Upgrading to phpBB3

Post by **Gambit37** » Fri Dec 14, 2007 12:20 am

I was about to go to bed, but since this came up, I just headed over to phpBB site and v3 finally went gold this week after 5 years of development. Jeez... that makes me nervous indeed. I know it's an open source project and these things take time, but after seeing the mess they made with the permissions panel last year, I'm not confident in their ability to deliver a stable product anymore.

BUT.... it would be easy to upgrade (more or less) and it's free. More stable solutions cost money.

Who's up for an upgrade over the hols?

Post by **Gambit37** » Fri Dec 14, 2007 12:23 am

Also, on another note, I now run a server that could handle the forums -- I would be happy to take ownership of hosting. It wouldn't cost anything extra and as I'm now going to be computer based for at least the next 2-3 years through my new business, it's probably more convenient for me than ever to take over. Cows?

beowuuf · Post by **beowuuf** » Fri Dec 14, 2007 12:40 am

Upgrade over the hols as in 'apologise for the inconvenience' then will be at home and manchester, so will have limited access

If you mean 'so who can help' then lol, I have limited access!

Post by **Gambit37** » Fri Dec 14, 2007 1:58 pm

Nope, I can do it all. I downloaded the forum database last night (220MB) and left it importing to my local SQL overnight -- 12 hours later, it still isn't done! Anyway, when it is, I'm gonna try out a local upgrade to phpBB3 to see how it goes and see if they've improved things since the last time I looked at it.

Post by **Gambit37** » Fri Dec 14, 2007 9:00 pm

Blimey, it took 19.5 hours to import the database! I dread to think what's gonna happen when I try and convert it to the new version...

Post by **Gambit37** » Fri Dec 14, 2007 10:48 pm

Damn, the conversion process requests manual input every 1000 or so database queries. Feck. With over 180,000 queries in the database, I'm gonna be here all night...

Perhaps I should cancel this and do it on a 3 year old, much smaller backup.... hmmm...

Post by **Gambit37** » Sat Dec 15, 2007 12:25 am

Bugger this, been here two hours and still haven't got past step 16 of 27.... think I need to try it with a smaller DB.

If this is how long it's gonna take, I am NOT looking forward to upgrading!

beowuuf · Post by **beowuuf** » Sat Dec 15, 2007 1:26 am

thanks for trying!

Post by **Gambit37** » Sat Dec 15, 2007 2:34 am

I persevered and it's just finished the conversion. Somewhere between 4-5 hours! About to try logging in for the first time!......

beowuuf · Post by **beowuuf** » Sat Dec 15, 2007 2:41 am

If we do swap, I can go around and repost quotes of any new thread replies since you took the back-up

Post by **Gambit37** » Sat Dec 15, 2007 2:46 am

Well, we need buy in from Cows and if I do this, I'd really like to take ownership of the domain and have it trasnferred to me. It's gonna be a pain in the ass trying to upgrad eon a server in Czech or wherever the hell it is, and if there are problems, support might take ages to sort out.

So we'll have to wait for a bit until Cows sees this and gets in on the disccssion, which means more things will be posted and the database will be well out of synch, so I'll have to go through it all again anyway. It's not so bad, especially if I do the conversion directly online as I won't have to spend a day downloading and importing the newest data to my machine.

On another note, I've just logged in. Checking the board stats:

Total posts 66691 • Total topics 6081 • Total members 954 • Our newest member: slickrcbd

It seems to have missed some stuff and added others. Oh well, I ain't going through it to work out what changed!

Post by **Gambit37** » Sat Dec 15, 2007 2:54 pm

Not impressed with the default skin and we'd be looking at this for quite some time until either a) I get the time to create a new one or b) people start creating new skins.

http://resonantedge.com/misc/phpbb3skin.png

EDIT: They included SubSilver too which is a bit easier on the eye.

beowuuf · Post by **beowuuf** » Sat Dec 15, 2007 3:50 pm

We could live with it a while, I am sure if needs be....

More interested in the security side - can we ban whole domains *like *ru or *cn)?

Can we ban partial e-mail addressed in using name not domain (like bradpitt@* or *google@*)?

These are useful catchalls, and not having them still lets alot of bots register with impunity even though i started doing banning like this until I realsied it wasnt' working!

Also, what's the cachpa like? (however you spell it)

Post by **Gambit37** » Tue Dec 18, 2007 7:16 pm

Haven't looked at that stuff yet. More interested to know what Cows thinks about transferring the domain over to me but it seems pretty quiet around here....

beowuuf · Post by **beowuuf** » Tue Dec 18, 2007 7:23 pm

I did e-mail him about something else and mentioned you doign the phpbb3 thing

Post by **linflas** » Thu Dec 20, 2007 3:32 pm

does phpbb3 have a "view today's posts" link ? misses a lot here..

Post by **Gambit37** » Thu Dec 20, 2007 3:36 pm

Yeah, should have. We have that here too though -- "View Posts since last visit" works for me. It's where I go when I login, in fact I bookmark the link as it's the easiest way to see what's new.

http://www.dungeon-master.com/forum/sea ... d=newposts

Post by **linflas** » Thu Dec 20, 2007 8:06 pm

yes but i meant the today's posts based on date, not on session : sometimes you don't read all of them, come back a few minutes later and all the missing ones have "read" state.
in this case, the "since last visit" list is empty

Post by **Gambit37** » Fri Dec 21, 2007 11:31 am

Ah, I see. Not sure, I'll check it out.

Post by **linflas** » Sat Dec 22, 2007 9:08 am

thanks !
anyway don't spend too much time on it

Post by **Gambit37** » Wed Jan 02, 2008 1:30 am

OK, for the sake of Cowsmonaut and anyone else who has an interest in these things, here's a summary of what I'd like to do around here to improve things.

Short term (next few days):

Move the forums from /dungeon-master.com/forum/ to /dungeon-master.com/something-else-not-in-search-listings/.

The rationale for this is that it should reduce registrations by spam-bots which are becoming a huge nightmare to manage around here. I've deleted and blocked 40 or so just in the last few days. Beo must have done hundreds over the last year. It's a complete waste of time and we'd all much rather be using our valuable time for fun stuff instead of combatting mindless spam-jerks.

The downside is that all search results that have indexed the /forums/ link won't work and anyone using a bookmark will no longer reach the forums. I would put an interim page here stating what the corect URL is (but without a link as this is what spam-bots will follow). We'd also need to change the home-page to remove actual forum links. Note: This may only be useful for a matter of weeks -- it's unknown how quickly spam-bots will harvest the new URL

Medium Term (next few weeks)

1) Upgrade to phpBB3 which has improved security
2) Use phpBB3 to setup better moderator groups, security profiles and train the forum moderators on how to use their powers effectively.

Long term (next few months)

1) Transfer ownership of the dungeon-master.com domain to me. Reasoning: I can much more easily manage things from an English hosting package rather than dealing with unreadable Czech websites or being twice removed from our point of contact (ZPC)
2) Then transfer the actual website and forum to the new hosting package.
Note: A yearly cost will be involved in the hosting. Currently Cow's pays this. Moving to a new host, depending on cost, either I would be willing to pay for this myself or maybe we can consider contributions from the community to keep it running.

The bottom line is that we need to make some serious improvements to stop the admins going insane and reduce spammers as much as possible.

Please add your thoughts.

Post by **Sophia** » Wed Jan 02, 2008 1:55 am

Gambit37 wrote:Move the forums from /dungeon-master.com/forum/ to /dungeon-master.com/something-else-not-in-search-listings/.

This probably won't be helpful. It'll just confuse people, and the spambots will find it soon enough anyway.

Post by **Gambit37** » Wed Jan 02, 2008 2:16 am

Yeah, I actually agree, but just see it as a potential short-term win to reduce admin headaches while we sort out the medium to long term.

Post by **ChristopheF** » Wed Jan 02, 2008 2:32 am

I also think it would certainly not take a long time for bots to find out the new url.
But why not try it and see how effective this really is...

Do you know if the final phpbb version 3 has an updated captcha that might resist spammers for some time?

Post by **Gambit37** » Wed Jan 02, 2008 4:15 am

The captcha is much better and there are also other things that can be done to make registration much harder:

http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopi ... 6&t=586538

However, I just found that this guy cracked the default phpBB3 captcha in an evening!

http://www.apathysketchpad.com/blog/200 ... -captchas/

I need to check my local install to see if this was improved in the final version.

Post by **Gambit37** » Wed Jan 02, 2008 4:19 am

Another thought is to switch to a less popular forum software, such as SMF, that has very little spam due to it not being ubiquitous. One of the reasons phpBB forums get so much spam is that there are so many of them, the spammers target them first.

EDIT: And another alternative would be to simply upgrade to the last version of v2, forget v3 for a while and install this MOD:

http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopi ... 6&t=552845

Post by **Gambit37** » Wed Jan 02, 2008 4:45 am

Some other perspectives:

http://bbspam.com/2007/12/12/w3c-has-ha ... h-captcha/

And we could add a textual captcha to either the current version of our forum or if/when we upgrade to v3:

http://bbantispam.com/atc/

ian_scho · Post by **ian_scho** » Wed Jan 02, 2008 10:43 am

A cool CAPTCHA that I've seen, is by this guy at Coding Horror (scroll to the form at the bottom). The IT wizard uses the same image/phrase 'orange' every time, rather than trying to dynamically create images with funky fonts each time. I bet some spam still gets through though, and it'd take your time to implement

Very poor example:

Post by **ChristopheF** » Wed Jan 02, 2008 5:42 pm

Thanks Gambit for the research and the links.

I would first stick with phpbb v2 and try one or both modules (that would mean less work on your side I think):

MOD1: 'Advanced Textual Confirmation' is very simple to integrate with the forum according to these instructions: http://bbantispam.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=284
So it would be easy to try it for a few days and see its real effectiveness here on our DM forum.

MOD2: RAC MOD http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopi ... 6&t=552845

I would definitely not switch to another, less popular forum software, as the migration would certainly be a nightmare to manage, and we would certainly lose a few things during the operation. And using less popular software means more risk to see the software without future maintenance, less plug-ins available, etc.

Post by **Gambit37** » Wed Jan 02, 2008 8:24 pm

For the record, I can't stand image based captchas... these other types would suit me (and our guests) much better.