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Spockie-Tech
Site Admin
Joined: 31 May 2004
Posts: 3160
Location: Melbourne, Australia
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I can probably make a copy of the SQL databases easily enough.
What will probably take some time is digging through the code to locate details of some of the customisations I did many years back. Its all reasonably well documented in the code files itself. Sadly, what I didnt do (and would these days) is keep a seperate log file of what modules were altered, why and were, so Ill have to look through the various modules to find what was done in detail.
IIRC, There were quite a lot on the sign-up/user creation form to stop spam-bots from creating hundreds of new-user registrations, and to patch out some tricks they did to bypass the activation form requirements.
There were quite a few different solutions to that problem at the time, and I think I combined a couple of them and modified them. long time ago now. This might not affect too much if these tweaks were lost in the move to a new phpBB, since presumably current phphBB has updated captcha's (which I hate).
I prefer ones that ask from a range of forum-subject related word questions (eg. Which of these items is usually *not a combat-robot component - Wheels, Batteries, Radio, GPS ? ). That sort of captcha tests that the person trying to sign up knows a little bit about what the forum is about and isnt just a brazillian kid trying to sign in to spam I-Phone sales
There were also some streaming apache-rewrite mods to remove sql-injection attempts to get around poor SQL sanitation on submissions. I dont remember if that was a phpBB or a php problem, but just stripping them out of the webserver stream was an easy hack that worked well.
I recall doing some mods to link in a photo-album module by Smartor (The reason the "Photos" section in the blue image map up the top is in different writing, it was kludged in later ). There are over a thousand photos in there that I wouldnt want to lose, since this forum is a nice historical archive of the last 10+ years in Australian Robowars,
I suspect that figuring out how to wedge an 11yo SQL database-powered phpBBv2 module into phpBBv3 isnt going to be fun (or possibly even desireable security wise), so somehow those photos will have to be extracted to whatever new integrated photo album would be used, and the links in the old messages that call those photos would have to be scanned and updated.
On that note, I dont want to store gigabytes of 10megapixel photos for people forever, so any new onsite-photo storage would have to be res limited to say 1024x768 or something like that, and make it easy to link images inline to offsite storage services for people who like huge photo archives. Ive seen some modules that store a locally cached (low res) copy of offsite-photos so that offsite-hosted images dont disappear in the future if the offsite storage goes down.
The comment "the structure of the links could be integrated into the forum instead of .html files so they are easier to modify/update. " sounds intriguing, are you proposing to recreate the robowars.org static html pages as forum threads and link to them ? Sounds like an interesting idea, but a fair bit of work.
And no doubt there will be new problems to address, since the last year or so's versions of active-sites are always where the majority of attack vectors are focussed. This site is pretty tight now, since its old, and customised, there hasnt been a successful penetration in 5+ years, I doubt that a current version of phpBB will achieve that without someone staying on top of the updates until the crackers focus moves elsewhere again.
As I have always said to proposed re-vampers over the years, Im not interested in someone who just knows how to use a phpBBv3 auto-install script, and run a couple of pre-written migration tools and hope for the best to do a "spiff up". Any 15yo could do that.
If you want to update the front page, make some non-flash buttons, maybe a new image map etc, thats fine. Ill work with you on that.
Not sure why the forum needs a new skin.. Whats wrong with this one ? The default Dark I think looks nice, the standard light one is available for those who dont like dark skins. What is a new skin going to do except make more color choice available ?
But for me to agree to deeper, more structural mods, or major software updates, you will have to convince me that
1. You know php, apache and SQL well enough to be able to read and mod the code where required (and *understand what you are doing, not just follow the typical "edit these lines" mod instructions).
2. you agree to take responsibility for your work and maintaining it for a reasonable period of time (say 2 years from date of work done)
3. You will document any changes/work done to my satisfaction. I dont expect that you will guarantee to still be around in 10 years, so I need sufficient information to be able to support anything you do in 10 years
I realise thats a big ask for what is basically unpaid volunteer work, but I consider it my responsibility to the Robowars guys to keep this place working for them, and Im not going to jeopardise my ability to do that for the sake of a spiff up (with uncertain benefits other than decor) by allowing someone I met a week ago to rebuild the core software without me understanding exactly whats being done, and possibly having to clean up someone elses half-done mess when they get bored with it, or "dont have time" in 6 months.
Harsh, but this site has run with almost zero-downtime for 10+ years and I want to keep it that way.
If you can live with those conditions, we can talk about phpBBv3 upgrades and structural changes. _________________ Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people
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