The Best World Forum

Here you can follow the admin's thoughts and projects.

Each entry here is mirrored by a German translation in: viewtopic.php?t=11.

Having created this User Blogs forum and then my own blog, I set the topic as a bookmark — and then I couldn't find where to access bookmarks other than in {Your Username} > User Control Panel > Manage > Manage bookmarks, which totally contradicts the very idea of what bookmarks are.

In the phpBB (the forum board software this Community is built on) support forums I then found that this issue has been reported more than 10 years ago at least, but the developers ignored it.

So I had to hack the solution myself together, and now this Community is in all likelihood one of the very few phpBB-based websites, if not the only one, that has a fully useful bookmarks function, simply by the link that I added right after the Quick links option.

Here's what I did:

In ./styles/prosilver/template/navbar_header.html I inserted the following block as the second <li>, before the U_FAQ (you can search for this keyword to find the position the fastest) <li> block:

Code: Select all

    <!-- IF S_REGISTERED_USER -->
    <li>
      <a href="./ucp.php?i=ucp_main&mode=bookmarks">
        <i class="icon fa-bookmark fa-fw" aria-hidden="true"></i><span>{L_NAV_BOOKMARKS}</span>
      </a>
    </li>
    <!-- ENDIF -->

In all ./language/{language-code}/common.php I added a new entry (anywhere within the list is okay):
Code: Select all
```
  'NAV_BOOKMARKS' => '{caption}',
```
with {caption} standing for "Bookmarks" in English and "Lesezeichen" in German (without the quotes).

It is as simple as that, and can be used by any phpBB admin to significantly improve the usability of their boards, and should in fact have been implemented as a default solution by the phpBB developers right from the start.

This Community website is based on the free phpBB software, which is okay to use, but riddled with bugs despite being quite a long time around already, and in heavy widespread use.

This blog entry is only of interest for other phpBB admins (and should be for the phpBB developers, but they are infamous for being arrogant and ignorant and not fixing issues since decades, so I don't even bother contacting them).

Here's yet another bug I found recently, and its fix:

The bug: When you got some notifications and open the notifications dropdown list, the last line says "See all". But when you click on that link, you do not go to the full list of notifications, but to your notifications settings. (This may only happen when the notifications list was moved in the ACP Admin Control Panel > System > Module Management > User Control Panel to a non-default UCP tab. Either way, it's a bug.)

The fix: In ./includes/functions.php the key U_VIEW_ALL_NOTIFICATIONS is incompletely defined. By default it reads:

Code: Select all

'U_VIEW_ALL_NOTIFICATIONS' => append_sid("{$phpbb_root_path}ucp.$phpEx", 'i=ucp_notifications'),

Extend this to:

Code: Select all

'U_VIEW_ALL_NOTIFICATIONS' => append_sid("{$phpbb_root_path}ucp.$phpEx", 'i=ucp_notifications&amp;mode=notification_list'),

As the admin of a phpBB-based forums community, you get flooded with spam sent through the Contact the Admin form, a serious issue that has never been fixed by the phpBB developers.

Today I got fed up too much with it and finally coded a protective hack that any phpBB admin can use for themselves as well. The idea is very simple: We whitelist all URL domains that we accept in support request emails, which will usually be the forum community's own URL domain plus maybe some other URL domains of ourselves that the users may want to mention. This will catch any non-whitelisted URLs with optional subdomain prefixes (e.g. www. or whatever.) and optional protocol prefixes (like http:// or https:// or ftp:// or whatever://), even if they're written like "spam . com" or "spam dot com".

Edit the file ./phpbb/message/admin_form.php so that after the block

Code: Select all

		if (!$this->body)
		{
			$this->errors[] = $this->user->lang['EMPTY_MESSAGE_EMAIL'];
		}

(simply search for "empty_message")

you enter the following block,
where you replace "my_url1.tld" with your actual URL domain
and can add any number of lines like that with further URL domains:

Code: Select all

    # SPAM PROTECTION by Molaskes, 2022
    $myurls=[]; # white list
    $myurls[]="my_url1.tld";
    $spam=0;
    $whitelist=implode("|",$myurls);
    $whitelist=str_replace(".","\.",$whitelist);
    $whitelist="~^(\w+://)?([\w-]+\.)?($whitelist)~i";
    preg_match_all("~\S+(\s*\.\s*|\s+dot\s+)\w{2,4}(\W|$)~",$this->body,$urls);
    foreach($urls[0]as$url){
      if(!preg_match("~^(\w+://)?([\w-]+\.)?($whitelist)~i",$url))$spam=$url;
    }
    if($spam!==0)$this->errors[]="DO NOT SPAM!<br>Remove the URL <em>$url</em>.";

I recently transformed the "Future Democracy Community" into the "Best World Forum", including a new URL, https://future-democracy.org/forum.

I moved several topics and subforums around (nothing has been deleted, of course!), and replaced the old think tank forums category with the new, perfectly structured new think tank forums category. I also improved many things about the design. The source for this website is the free phpBB software, which offers the functionality you need for a forums community, but is full of nasty errors in design and concept, which take a lot of expertise, and a lot of work, to overcome. I'm quite certain that this online community here is one of the very best phpBB websites ever, and I hope it will get used by many more people than it has been so far.

I'm still very busy with many other things, but over the course of the next months, the Best World Forum, including its core, the open public think tank for a better world, shall be fully built up.

I just finished the Knowledge Base for the Think Tank (see https://ttpub.ftdm.org). With that, both the Think Tank and also the Best World Forum have been fully prepared and are now ready for actually being used.

In the past months, I've been very busy both in businesses and (wider) family matters, and I've started the website for my World Language Project:
https://the-world-language.org — Check it out!
I will update/extend this more or less regularly, and will likely do so for many years to come.

While I originally planned to develop Eas2 (see https://molaskes.com/Eas for the old version "Eas1") in 2024, I postponed this for 2025. In the past weeks I've developed a new all-in-one self-management suite that will increase my productivity even further, and which also you will be able to use for yourself once I have implemented it via Eas2 in my upcoming social and self-management website, probably in 2026.

In 2024, I still hope to write all the upgrades for the Future Democracy book (see https://future-democracy.org); in particular I plan to completely rewrite the Introduction & Essentials chapter, probably increasing the book's size towards 1500 pages. Later, with Eas2, I plan to create photorealistic freely usable renderings for all the architecture images of the book, finally replacing the SketchUp and Sims2 illustrations.

The Best World Forum

The Admin's Blog 🇬🇧

The Admin's Blog 🇬🇧

Making phpBB's Bookmarks Useful | 210820

Bugfixed phpBB's Notifications | 211031

Support E-Mail Spam Protection | 220425

Building the Best World Forum | 230519

The New Think Tank Is Ready | 240219

The World Language Project | 240719