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Securing and Maintaining phpBB CHAPTER 1 0 Among the most important tasks you will perform with phpBB are the jobs you will handle behind the scenes: maintaining the less-than-glamorous but absolutely necessary routine maintenance schedule and vigilantly keeping the board s defenses against hackers and malicious users up-to-date. This chapter is dedicated to guiding you through these important tasks for keeping your community operating smoothly and safely, so your members can participate with confidence. Generally, a secure phpBB is up-to-date with the latest patches, has tightly assigned permissions, and has a limited number of people with administrative power. phpBB provides many facilities to help ensure the security of your installation. It ultimately is up to you, as the phpBB administrator, to implement a security policy that you believe is best for your forums. My job in this chapter is to empower you with the tools to do just that and give you a few pointers along the way. I ll also introduce you to phpBB s tools for maintaining your board and tuning its performance. Implementing Security Strategies Having smart security strategies in place at the beginning can go a long way toward reducing headaches later. Here, I will suggest a few practices that can help you keep your board s power structure in order, keep tabs on who does what, and keep dictionary-attacking script kiddies at bay. Feel free to adjust these strategies for your own tastes as you see fit. Best Practices for Delegating Power As your board grows, you will undoubtedly wish to bring members of your community onto your forum staff in varying roles. As you delegate power to members to moderate and, perhaps, administer your forum, keep in mind the following guidelines: Appoint only members you trust to be responsible: It seems like a no-brainer, but if you have any doubts that someone will behave responsibly in a position of power on your forum, he isn t the person to appoint to a staff position. Moderators will have total control over the content in their forums. Additionally, they will be able to view mem bers IP addresses, so it is particularly important to appoint someone you know you can trust with sensitive information.
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294 CHAPTER 9 TOURING PHPBB S FEATURES tour of the private messaging system, which often is a major part of your forum experience. Finally, you were introduced to the upgrades to these features in the upcoming phpBB 3.0 release. The number one thing forum administrators should be concerned with is the security of their message board. In the next chapter, I ll detail strategies and tips on securing your phpBB installation. I ll also introduce you to important maintenance tasks that will ensure that your phpBB community runs as smoothly and efficiently as possible over the long haul, so you can reduce your risk of serious problems. You will also be introduced to the vast expansion of power phpBB 3.0 will provide you to optimize and secure your board for the rough reality of the Internet.
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CHAPTER 9 TOURING PHPBB S FEATURES 293 In addition to the rest of the new features, the composition form s sidebar also features a quick search option for unread messages and reading your drafts. The Options link takes you to the form for creating new rules, adding new folders, and defining the behavior you wish phpBB to exhibit when your Inbox becomes full. Previous versions of phpBB destroyed older messages to make room for the new ones. phpBB 3.0 gives you several options to handle full Inboxes: Redirect new messages to another folder with more space. Hold new messages until some space is cleared. Stick with the old way and start deleting old messages to make room for the new ones. The phpBB default setting in the Administration panel is to hold new messages, and I do not recommend changing that option, as data loss is a very nasty thing. Private messaging now supports multiple recipients, including sending blind carbon copies of private messages to people. The most important aspect of all these enhancements is that each new option is incredibly administrator-configurable. The administrator can disallow mass private messaging, limit the editing time on private messages, and much more. Searching with phpBB 3.0 phpBB 3.0 s search features have been modestly upgraded to be more robust under load and to handle sub-forum searching. phpBB 3.0 also caches searches you have carried out and displays them on the search form for you, so you can revisit a previous search with one click yet another example of the timesaving tweaks and polish being implemented in the next revision of phpBB. Another nice addition to phpBB 3.0 s search facilities is a new section in the Administration panel that permits you to allocate a minimum and maximum size of the index, specify words you do not wish to be indexed, and re-create the search index. phpBB 2.0 did not permit you to do much work on this index, as it handled most of the operations itself. Now, if you wish to alter the search index for some reason (if it is getting too large for your liking, for example), you have the tools to work on it. Caution Modifying the search index could adversely affect search performance. Additionally, rebuilding the index is a time and resource-consuming task that should not be undertaken during peak hours of activity, nor performed often. Summary In this chapter, I ve discussed many of phpBB s available features to end users and administrators, with the goal of helping you implement and troubleshoot them effectively in your community. The chapter covered the basics of posting topics, replies, and polls. It then discussed user profiles and avatars, and how to troubleshoot those. Next, you had an in-depth
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292 CHAPTER 9 TOURING PHPBB S FEATURES Figure 9-27. Selecting an action Figure 9-28. Adding a rule for private messages Posting Interface The upgrades to the posting interface in phpBB 3.0 really shine when writing private messages, as the same features are carried over. As mentioned before, phpBB 3.0 sports new drafts functionality, and that applies to the private message system as well. Note the link on the sidebar in Figure 9-29, PM Drafts, as well as the Save button at the bottom of the form. Just as with forum posts, you can save private messages to return to later. Figure 9-29. The upgraded private message composition window
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CHAPTER 9 TOURING PHPBB S FEATURES 291 Figure 9-23. Adding a new folder to Private Messaging Figure 9-24. Selecting an attribute to check Figure 9-25. Narrowing down the search pattern
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290 CHAPTER 9 TOURING PHPBB S FEATURES Figure 9-22. The new Private Messages Inbox Multiple Folders and Rules Put simply, phpBB 3.0 will allow you to manage your private messages in the much the same way that you manage your e-mail. The single Savebox is a thing of the past, replaced with the option to create multiple folders to save and organize your private messages, as shown in Figure 9-23. The new rules feature really makes the private message system shine. With rules, you are able to redirect incoming private messages to a folder of your choice or the trash, mark the message for further action, or mark it as read. Additional message-filtering functionality cannot be ruled out for the final release. Right now, busy phpBB administrators inundated in a deluge of private messages are rejoicing at the thought of automatic organization! Creating a rule is typically a four-step process, analogous to Microsoft Outlook s Rules and Alerts Wizard, though on a smaller scale: 1. Select an attribute to check, as shown in Figure 9-24. 2. Narrow down the search pattern, as shown in Figure 9-25. 3. Enter the pattern to match, as shown in Figure 9-26. 4. Select an action, as shown in Figure 9-27. And that s it. You ll see the new rule you defined, as shown in Figure 9-28.
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CHAPTER 9 TOURING PHPBB S FEATURES 289 A New Home for Preferences Your user preferences are now in their own special Preferences section in the User Control Panel. Preferences are broken down into three separate categories: Personal Settings, which contains personal preferences and privacy settings, as well as date formatting (including the much-needed DST support) and language choice. Viewing Posts, which lets you enable and disable various elements of posts made on the board, such as Flash animations, signatures, and even word censoring. You can select a default topic and post ordering as well. Posting Messages, which includes the default options for creating posts (such as leaving BBCode on by default, automatically attaching your signature, and enabling notifications automatically). These options have not changed since phpBB 2.0 thus far, but as I ve said before, that may not be the case by the time phpBB 3.0 is released. Friends and Foes The Friends and Foes feature is a buddy list and ignore list, respectively. Your friends list shows up in your User Control Panel. When your friends are online, they are listed in the Online column, with a quick link to private messaging so you can see how they re doing. Adding a user to your Foes list effectively blocks their communication and even the posts they make in the forum. It is a full-fledged ignore list, so you don t have to listen to a troll s bickering. Attachments The User Control Panel also keeps a running list of the attachments you post in threads. This functionality is useful when you wish to look for a file that you have attached. The User Control Panel keeps all this information referenced in one place, so you know how many attachments you ve posted. Private Messaging in phpBB 3.0 By far, the most renovation was saved for the private messaging system, as shown in Figure 9-22. With the features it now packs, phpBB 3.0 s private messaging system rivals some e-mail clients in terms of power.
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288 CHAPTER 9 TOURING PHPBB S FEATURES Introducing the User Control Panel The new User Control Panel represents the nerve center for user functions in phpBB 3.0, and it is amazingly informative. The new Overview page, shown in Figure 9-21, gives you the lowdown on forum announcements from administration, lets you see what topics you are watching (a great improvement from phpBB 2.0, in which you hadn t a clue as to what topics you were watching), lets you revisit drafts of posts you are working on, and much more. Additionally, all the profile-editing tools from phpBB 2.0 are available here. Figure 9-21. The new phpBB 3.0 User Control Panel The User Control Panel includes a new Friends and Foes feature, something like a buddy and block list for those familiar with instant messaging programs. Private messaging is also an integral part of the new User Control Panel. Best of all, this panel is fully extensible, making writing modifications for it a cinch. (I ll discuss modifications in Chapter 11.) User Profile Enhancements phpBB 3.0 breaks the formerly consolidated user profile into four separate pages to cut down on clutter and form overload: Profile, which contains your publicly viewable information such as web site address, instant messaging contact information, and your birthday (a new addition) Registration Details, which has settings that deal with your username, password, and registered e-mail address Signature, where you can customize your signature for each one of your posts (now featuring the formatting toolbar and color picker found in the posting interface) Your Avatar, which provides nearly identical avatar-picking functionality to that in phpBB 2.0
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CHAPTER 9 TOURING PHPBB S FEATURES 287 Drafts: This is one of the neater features of phpBB 3.0, which permits you to save working copies of your forum posts before making them public, much like making revisions to an article. You can view your drafts via the User Control Panel (described in the next section). This can be incredibly useful if you re writing a post but need to step away from the computer, because you can ensure that your message won t be lost. Simply click Save at the bottom of the post form, and your post will be saved to your Drafts folder, where you can retrieve it and continue working on it later. Font color picker: When you re creating or editing a post, you can now choose colors from a color picker. This is more flexible than using a drop-down list of predefined colors (or remembering hexadecimal codes!). Flash BBCode: BBCode now offers an option to embed Macromedia Flash animations into posts, which could be good or bad depending on your position on Flash. (If you dislike Flash, the Flash BBCode is easily disabled via permissions.) Poll creation: The phpBB Group has streamlined the process for creating polls. No longer do you need to keep clicking Add option to add responses to your poll. Now you can just press Enter inside the text box, and phpBB will know to add the option. The polling engine also permits users to change their responses if you want to allow that. Additionally, you can create polls that permit more than one response. Global announcements: phpBB 3.0 introduces global announcements to the base product, which permit administrators and other authorized personnel to make announcements to every forum. Previously, administrators were permitted to post announcements in only one forum at a time. Many people opted to hack this functionality into phpBB 2.0 using a modification written shortly after phpBB 2.0 s release, demonstrating the popularity of the feature. File attachments: Another old modification (which ships with phpBB 2.0 releases as a contributed package) is now a part of the base product as well. File attachments make their debut as an integrated feature in phpBB 3.0. This permits authorized users to attach certain administrator-defined file types to posts they make. This functionality can be very useful when you re posting an image in a thread and the image is either hosted somewhere else or does not have any hosting. As with a great majority of the features in phpBB 3.0, this feature can be heavily regulated via the Administration panel. Note File attachments can be a risky proposition; in fact, early versions of the modification introduced security holes into the board. The phpBB Group has taken great care to ensure that their implementation of file attachments in phpBB 3.0 is a safe and secure method, and administrators should have no problems rolling the feature out to authorized users. Reporting of offensive posts: If you come across a post you find offensive, you can use the new report functionality to contact the moderators of the forum in which the offensive post resides. They will get a notification via e-mail (or via private message if you prefer; this can be set in the Preferences area of the User Control Panel), stating the location of the topic and what is wrong with it. This allows moderators to act faster in cleaning up any problems that might arise.
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286 CHAPTER 9 TOURING PHPBB S FEATURES Touring phpBB 3.0 Feature Upgrades phpBB 3.0 brings with it a great number of upgraded features, which will bring considerable advances in ease of use and power to the phpBB platform for both end users and administrators. End users now have a one-stop shop for managing their user account in the brand-new User Control Panel. The user interface has been refined, smoothing over a lot of phpBB 2.0 s quirks. Caution The usual disclaimer applies: This section was written when phpBB 3.0 was prerelease software, so items covered in this section could easily change drastically as the phpBB Group heads toward final release of the new version. Introducing the Board Index The Board Index, formerly known as the Forum Index in phpBB 2.0, has undergone several enhancements. The Who s Online summary at the bottom of the Board Index page has the ability to display search engine bots traversing your site. phpBB now permits users to optionally enter their birthday into their user profile. phpBB keeps track of these birthdays and announces them just underneath the Who s Online section on the Board Index. As I mentioned in Chapter 8, phpBB 3.0 now has support for sub-forums. You will know when a forum has a sub-forum underneath it by a special icon (currently, at the time of this writing, a standard phpBB forum icon with a folder overlay). If you or your users experience problems with phpBB s tracking cookies, there is now a link on the Board Index to clear all board cookies. This can help dramatically when troubleshooting cookie problems (a feature noticeably missing from phpBB 2.0). The links to the special searches (unanswered posts, your posts, and new posts) are now global links, along with a new breadcrumb navigational system that does a better job than phpBB 2.0 did in terms of helping you find your way back from deep points to the Board Index. Posting and Reading in phpBB 3.0 phpBB 3.0 offers many new enhancements to making posts and reading topics. Here s an overview: Topic icons: You can now select a topic icon to sit next to the topic title in the forum view, which acts as sort of an emoticon for your posts. You, as the administrator, have full control over how many topic icons are available, if you decide to allow the feature. The topic icon functionality works a great deal like the emoticon functionality, right down to being able to create a topic icon pack.
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