Forum MODs (requests and installed) Updated: 14th Oct 2006

[IBBoard]

OK, the following mods are going to be or have been added to the site, please suggest more from phpBB.com if you want anything specific.

The following have been suggested or otherwise need looking into:

• Null vote in polls
• Attachment mod

The following was almost certain, but doesn't seem necessary any more:

• Categories hierarchy to let us have nested subforums.

The following are installed:

• [Thumnail] BBcode - a custom MOD by me that adds an alternative image that doesn't display as one per line (useful when you have small images you want multiple ones on per line, and when they aren't going to be more that 590px wide!)
• Multi BBCode allows simple addition of the Thumb BBCode button to the posting form.
• Save Bandwidth - I'm optimising the HTML and moving the CSS and Javascript into external files, so why not optimise other bits
• Last post info on index (although I've modified it to return the topic title instead of the post title, since lots of posts don't have titles!)
• Watched Topics list
• Ranking Themes (also known as a multi-race MOD) currently installed: default green, Imperial Guard, Ork and Skaven
• eXtreme Syles for even faster page loading!
• Fix Search Results for Browser Error
• Quick Reply - modified so that it only shows up in appropriate circumstances (i.e. doesn't show when you can't use it!)
• Sensible New Reply button for Admins/Mods - phpBB shows a Locked button for admins and mods when a topic is locked, even though they can still post in the topic/forum...or at least it did before I hacked a fix in!
• Rebuild Search - installed when the forum database was moved.
• Two custom anti-spam signup methods, plus the in-built 'make spammers obvious' feature of our modified user control panel.
• Post count resync - hopefully a one-off that shouldn't be used again

[IBBoard]

The Watched Topics list now has its own link in the header for all logged in members, following a bit of skin-hackery and botch-modding

[edit] I've also done some sensible modding of the "Quick Reply" section. Non-logged-in people won't see the box, since they aren't allowed to post anywhere anyway.

Also, the box will no longer show up with "Topic locked, you cannot post" when the topic is locked, instead it will be hidden from everyone except those with permission to bypass a lock (me and TGSC at the moment) I've made the same change to the "locked"/"New Reply" button as well - it will still show locked on locked topics for everyone except those who can bypass the lock.

Ahhhh, the joys of PHP hack-ability

[IBBoard]

A modified Change Style Mod has now been added. For users, the style will be a permanant change in their profile when the link is clicked. For guests, the change is stored in a cookie. Guests also get a 'reset' link to revert to default

[edit] The mod has now been quite heavily modified - it uses something similar to the Change Style Lite mod from page 7 of the thread, but does a better job of updating registered user's styles while not adding random useless query string parameters for them.

Guests will no long have cookies set

[IBBoard]

I've now got a stash of interesting Mods that I'll hopefully include at some point, including an advanced User Control Panel, online status for Yahoo and AIM, some tweaks to posting and a couple of back-end bits.

Also added (because of the database change I'll mention elsewhere) is a Rebuild Forum Search mod - but that's just back-end stuff (and is running now)

[IBBoard]

There have been a veritable collection of new Mods added, with one or two more large mods possibly making an appearance soon.

• AOL IM status (modified so it can do different images in different locations)
• Yahoo IM status (visible on the HWT Standard skin)
• Date Drop Down (to make date format selection easier for non-techies)
• Exclamation Point in Title and Exclamation Point in Message mods (remove multiple exclamation marks or question marks)
• Don't Count Posts (allows for a 'test' forum where posts don't count towards your post count - modified to fix a bit of missed functionality when deleting topics)
• Change Admin and Mod Colours (modified so that it does it using styles instead of fixed colours)
• Export PMs (export your PMs in to an XML file)
• Forum Information (shows query numbers and load time at the bottom of the page)
• Google BBCode (announced earlier)
• Highlight Topics Posted In (requires new images on all skins, but will alter the image for those posts that you've posted in)
• No Flood On Edit (lets you edit a message very soon after posting instead of hitting the 'no new posts within 30 seconds' message)
• PM Popup Blocker fix (uses a Javascript alter instead of a web page to inform you about new PMs, so that popup blockers won't block it)
• Quick Poll Insert (poll options are one per line now, instead of having to go through and add a new box individually for each one)
• Registration IP (so I can know track exactly where everyone registers from )
• View PM While Replying (so you can see the PM you're replying to, much like you can see the last posts in a topic you're replying to)

If you find any problems, just yell Hopefully people will find them useful.

[IBBoard]

Just added another couple - quite heavily modified from their originals, again!

• Extended Reply Notification (I also added a copy of the message)
• Extended Private Message Notification (I didn't include the message content, as it's a PM and so shouldn't be emailed out)

[IBBoard]

I've been investigating the Profile Control Panel on my development machine. It's a huge re-write and changes all sorts of things (including trying to overwrite some of the new mods like the Time Format drop down, and changes to the way that user buttons and usernames are linked etc). For all of the extra features it brings, it may be worth it, but for now it still needs a lot of work (cleaning up the fugly HTML for one thing!)

I'll keep poking at it and see what I can work out and change. For now you won't see anything of it, but suffice to say that it's a lot closer to a vBulletin control panel

[IBBoard]

We now also (as a temporary measure) have the InstaBan Mod installed. I've not gone for the whole length of banning people, only ignoring the registration attempt, but all members with less than ten posts are now unable to add website addresses or signatures.

Now, time to go and clean up that member table and remove the sigs and websites of anyone with less than 10 posts...

[IBBoard]

I think the Profile CP mod is getting abandonned. It's a great idea and a huge and complex mod from Ptirhiik, and all credit to him for that, but it's also got the ugliest HTML I've seen and it's proving too much of a chore to convert it to how I want it compared to what we'd gain from it (especially when it'd also lose us some existing mods)

You never know, maybe I'll do something to the existing control panel to improve it myself

[IBBoard]

I've now improved the "extended reply notification" so that it correctly handles URLs and colour tags (or at least I think it correctly handles colour tags - I'll have to check again for multi-line!)

Anyway, hyperlinked text (such as Vote for us written as [ url=http://www.warvault.net/tracker/index.php?do=votes&id=25]Vote for us[/url]) will now show up in notification emails as "Vote for us (http://www.warvault.net/tracker/index.p ... otes&id=25)", while links to a URL matching the text will just show up as the URL in the email.

It's nothing major, but it's just a niggling little thing that I noticed and only just decided to fix

[IBBoard]

I've now added another custom anti-spam mod. Having examined the spam registrations more closely, there's one give-away feature that all of the recent spams have had in common, and it's something that absolutely no other reasonable browser/user should do (even the IE6 browser that they're pretending to be!)

I've tested it out with the Firefox Web Developer plugin to test some things and it works fine. It'll also notify me of failed registration attempts. Now to see how much turns up and whether our forums remain spam free comparatively, at least!

[edit] We've just caught our first spammer with the new system (or at least the first one that's correctly giving me the details they submitted!) A quick search on the username and it matches numerous registrations across the net where a porn site was in the website address Lets hope this good start continues.

[IBBoard]

As of the 5th September I'd added a bit more anti-spam coding to the website (this time it denies them access to the entire website, rather than just denying registration). Since then we've not had a single successful spammer registration! And three legitimate registrations still managed to get through One legitimate registration failed, but I've just tracked down what the cause was (it was related to re-submitting the registration form after making an error) and all is now good

Lets hope that the spammers keep repeating their same tactics (110 spammers were denied an account with the 29th August, and an unknown number were blocked by the later addition)

[IBBoard]

Spammers have so far been almost entirely unsuccessful (including the ones pretending to be GoogleBot).

Additionally, I've now added a post-count re-syncing mod. We've had at least three forum systems (IkonBoard, Invision Board and phpBB) and we've lost some posts along the way and had times when test forums incremented post count, but didn't decrement it when the test was deleted. Now all post counts should reflect the number of posts actually still in existance I seem to have lost about 800 of my post count!

[IBBoard]

The forums will soon be upgrading to phpBB3, now that the first Release Candidate is out. As such, there isn't much need for this thread and a new phpBB3 version will be available once we migrate.