Forums software upgraded to phpBB 3.0.2

After deleting lots of spam posts in the forums yesterday, I decided to spend a little time to prevent this from happening again in the future.

As a first step, I upgraded the board software from the now rather outdated phpBB 2 to phpBB 3.0.2, which was released only a few weeks ago. phpBB 3 has more anti-spam features than its predecessor and the registration captcha also seems to be much more sophisticated.

I was rather surprised how smooth the upgrade went – after creating a database and entering some initial settings, the conversion wizard was able to import all information from the old database and also handled additional data like avatar images nicely. As far as I can tell, external links to forum topics and posts also still work.

Still, phpBB 2 themes don’t work with phpBB 3, so I had to find a new theme that uses BSD-like red colors and shouldn’t be too different from the old theme. The Milky Way Red theme from Icy Phoenix seemed like a very good choice. In fact, I only changed the logo in the top-left corner :)

For now, I hope this stops those annoying spammers, otherwise I’ll have to look for some additional modifications to get the problem under control.

Oh, and of course, if you have found a problem with the new board software or configuration, please write me a mail or contact me via PM.


One Response to “Forums software upgraded to phpBB 3.0.2”

  1. Amiralul Says:
    August 27th, 2008 at 11:35 am

    I had only troubles with phpBB (total forum crack, spam messages, etc) and since I learned my lesson, I use only SimpleMachines for my forums. It’s smaller (not that this counts nowadyas), never had a problem with the default settigns with it, since I’m not that skilled to security-tweak the phpBB and SimpleMachines. And I think there is some conversion tool from phpBB to SM.