Utter Randomness

I’m quite surprised actually. I’ve been receiving an enormous amount of phpbb spam, like everyone else over the past oh, few months or so.  Mostly, it was registrations with no posts and occasionally a profile link.

I came on my forum today to find a spam post – possibly posted by a human, but I’m sure the registrations are bots. Anyway, the post was filled with ~50 links to profiles on other phpbb forums. On my forum, I require registration before people can see others profiles, so the bot seems to know if that feature is on or off. Then in those profiles, are links to some very weird sites…

The basic timeline was:

Mass registration -> Occasional profile link adding -> Posting a massive list of profiles with links = $$$ for the bot owner.

Came close to completing my own phpbb3 captcha for the registration page, but it’s annoyingly complex..

I didn’t? How sad. When I first decided to delve into the world that is forum software, I had my mind set on just two options: phpBB or SMF. Well, in my opinion phpbb looked sleeker at the time so that was the sole reason I downloaded and installed it on one of my sites. What a mess.

Originally, I started off liking it. It is quite polished on the outside. It’s got everything a forum should have + easy management.

Onto the mess: The source code. Could it get any uglier? It’s like digging through 8 tons of garbage to find a lost diamond ring. When I wanted to change it’s captcha, I had one heck of a time wading through that mess. I also created my own template, and that took weeks.

On the other hand, I was starting out a new site and I wanted to try out SMF just so I could say that I had given it a chance. I was awestruck.

Firstly, SSI.php was essential to the site. I thought I would have to code my own bridge between forum + my own code (and I would have, if I had used phpBB).

Next was the smooth upgrade process. I give it some ftp details, it updates itself. Done. With phpbb, I had to manually update numerous times, or upload its auto updater (still slower than SMF) and that often failed at updating the darn thing.

Update 5/21: SMF released a security patch upgrading the forum from 1.1.8 to 1.1.9. I was able to upgrade the forum in less than 30 seconds, including whatever download it did.

Now for creating a theme, it was glorious. The CSS was commented. Loads. I actually knew what stuff did, and there was no pointless random CSS like phpbb has. I was able to create a theme using the default one as the starting point in a matter of hours, vs. a matter of weeks with phpbb.

SMF’s source code is also a lot more organized. While it can still be just as bad as phpbb in some areas, it generally strays away from numerous absurdly large files. SMF’s coding style just makes sense to me. I can follow the code and understand what’s going on, where even with my PHP knowledge I struggle to figure out what the heck phpbb is doing. SMF also has a lot more comments (granted, newbies should stay away), and tells you at the beginning of the file a summary of what it does.

Only thing I find irritating is SMF’s user/mod management system. It just seems so quirky to me.. but it still does the job.

So for too long this site (matt-shaffer.com) has just been my blog. I don’t post a whole lot on here, and it’s probably not interesting to the majority of people, so I’m going to expand the horizons.

Basically, I had planned on keeping a site “matt-soft.com” dedicated to my creations. Turns out, I don’t want it anymore. I’ll be merging that site and all future creations into this one, because it also makes it perfectly clear who made the stuff (me!). Think of it as an obvious e-resume.

So, what else? The homepage is the central hub of organization. Eventually, I’ll add a footer (just for fun) and a navigation bar for easier navigation.

I also plan on creating my own wordpress theme for this blog (a nice bleak light gray, to go along with the main site), and a theme for the future oscommerce shop I’ll be setting up. What will be in the shop? Digital goods. Commercially licensed pictures & wallpaper, and games most likely. Quit your worrying. I need to get some quality free stuff out there first before I start charging, because really who would buy anything of mine without some sort of idea of how good it can be? .

Currently, I’ve uploaded what I’ve done so far – shiny buttons. They don’t lead anywhere yet, but they will.