Penultimate Reality

In a strange turn of events, I found the motivation to get this done. The MOD is now fully-updated for phpBB 3.0.0 (assuming I didn’t make a glaring error, that is). Since there were no major problems with the alpha releases, I have gone ahead and moved on to beta status. This period will likely last a few weeks as I attempt to shake out any lingering bugs.

You can, as always, find this latest release at the Custom Title MOD web site. Please test this version and let me know if you have any problems, concerns, or suggestions. And if you find it useful, please consider donating. Thanks.

After playing around with that script I linked earlier, (mostly repairing the damage that it had endured from being blindly posted to a blog), I’ve managed to integrate it into my AWStats system. As a result, the rampant spam bot activity in my stats has more or less disappeared. I can’t be entirely sure that the script hasn’t filtered out a few genuine users, but even so, it makes me feel like those stats are useful again.

Whether or not the stats in themselves are useful is another question altogether. If nothing else, they help the webmaster measure growth and see what pages are popular and which aren’t. It’s how I know that there’s some interest in the phpBB3 version of the Custom Title MOD, despite my not receiving a single comment about it. In any case, it’ll be exciting to be able to actually follow the stats with some semblance of realism now.

One way of measuring traffic at a web site is log analysis software such as AWStats. These sorts of packages read the server logs and generate a variety of tables or graphs allowing a webmaster or server administrator to analyze their traffic and measure growth (or decline). One thing that really hampers such efforts is the wide proliferation of spam bots.

A sizable percentage of my traffic here at Penultimate Reality comes from spam bots. So far as I can tell, I’m essentially being hit by a couple of different kinds of bots. The first is so-called “referer spam”. These bots access a web page, and tell the web server they were referred there from some (usually terrible) spam advertising site. The motives are unclear, as the only person who will ever see these links is me. I suppose they either hope I’ll click on them or that some webmasters publish their stats and thus expose these links to the public. Either way, it seems somewhat dubious. That said, this kind of spam doesn’t affect me a whole lot, though it does show up.

The second (and most prevalent) is “comment spam”. These spam bots troll the internet, looking for blogs, forums, and anything else that allows comments looking to post their spam. (This description attributes far more intelligence to them than they actually have. I imagine they’re actually more specialized to one particular piece of software, but who knows. I haven’t used one.) They either attempt to post spam comments (and as you can see in the right sidebar, I block many thousands of them) or they attempt to use the trackback feature of blogging software. These bots have made my AWStats statistics next-to-useless, because such a large portion of my traffic comes form these bots. The most prolific of them have accessed various URLs hundreds of times this month.

As far as solutions, I’m not entirely sure what to do. One solution is to simply run Google Analytics. These bots rarely execute the JavaScript associated with an external tracker like this, and as such tend not to show up. That said, I prefer a local solution (for whatever reason), and it’d be nice to filter them out of AWStats somehow. I found an interesting script that purports to help solve this problem, but I haven’t actually figured out how the script works, and my perl-fu is decidedly weak at the moment. Even then, I’d have to integrate it somehow into the automated logging and statistics generation.

Are there any solutions I haven’t found or thought of, or is a service like Google Analytics just the best way to go at this point?

I’m a few days late on this, but I’d like to be the 738,535th person to congratulate the phpBB Group on the long-awaited release of their fantastic forum software, phpBB 3.0.0. It’s been an incredibly long nearly six-year road, with a number of bumps along the way. I’ve been following the development of phpBB since late 2001, and the one thing I can tell you is that pretty much everything that could go wrong did go wrong. (A little hyperbole never hurts.)

Even so, the changing team persevered, and here, as an early Christmas (or whatever December-ish holiday you choose to celebrate) present, we find ourselves with the gold version of an excellent piece of software. I’m still not an incredible fan of flat-style messaging, and phpBB certainly has areas where it could improve. Nonetheless, it’s exciting to see all the hard work finally come to fruition.

As both a (pretty much former) MOD developer and a user, my greatest hope is that with this release, the team is able to put the problems of the past behind them, and work towards far more frequent releases. Even I would find myself hard-pressed to continue to support their efforts if the next release is phpBB4 sometime in 2013. (Those of us in the know will recall that what became phpBB 3.0.0 was originally slated to be phpBB 2.2.0, an incremental improvement to phpBB2 itself. My, how things change, with phpBB3 in effect becoming nearly as much of a rewrite as phpBB2 was.)

If you’re looking for good, free forum software, I suggest you download it today. If phpBB’s not your cup of tea, there are plenty of other solutions, and you’ll find an ample list over at Wikipedia.

In a semi-related note, it’s becoming less and less likely that I’m going to find the motivation to work on my Custom Title MOD. As I’ve said before, it’s simply not a feature I’m currently using on any of my sites. It’s possible that could change in the future, but until then, I’d fully support any other developer who wants to update my alpha version for 3.0.0 and maintain and support it. Or write it from scratch, if you want. If the feature’s in demand enough, I’m sure it’ll pop up somehow. (I still have hope that certain features in phpBB 3.2 will make such a MOD completely unnecessary. We shall see.)