Geek Dinner Afterparty

Asides

After every good party, there’s an afterparty, and Robert’s geek dinner Thursday night is no different. When it turned out the venue was just a stone’s throw from my place in SF it just made sense to allow the festivities to continue after the restaurant kicks us out. So after the dinner we’ll walk down to my place (about two blocks) where the fun can continue with food, refreshments, and of course wifi. Everyone is invited, as long as you’re XFN Friendly. (Though I’m willing to make an exception for Marc.) If you haven’t already let me know you’re coming via email or IM please leave a comment so I can stock up accordingly. 🙂

Announcing bbPress

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The software that was running the WordPress support forums was getting long in the tooth and was not handling the load of increased exposure terribly well. A PHP upgrade rendered it nearly unusable. Anyway, long story short, I wrote some forum software. It’s called bbPress and is similar to WordPress in a lot of ways, including being Free-as-in-Software. The things that WP does well—unicode, timezones, XHTML, speed–it does well too. You can read all about it on the new bbPress site and grok its philosophy, comment on the blog, join the mailing list, checkout the code, submit bugs, patches, et cetera. I have been putting this off for almost a year now, so it’s very fufilling to get this project rolling. It went so fast that I’m kicking myself that I didn’t do it sooner.

The goal of bbPress is to bring some weblog and WordPress sensibilities to forum software. It’s never going to have a tenth of the features of phpBB or vBulletin, but that’s a feature itself. My experience with those packages is they’re like a herd of elephants who evolved on a strange island in bizzare ways, and they tend to foster a type of community that is antithetical to I’m trying to accomplish. We’ve learned a lot in the past few years about how the interactive web works, why do most forums look and act the same they did in 2000? Why is it still so hard to integrate user systems or mesh designs? Why can’t I ping a thread like I can a weblog post? Why can’t I filter by XFN values?

bbPress is not and will not be right for everyone. There are open source traditional forum packages, like PunBB, that get a lot of things right and push the envelope in interesting ways, so that’s covered. bbPress is not going to have avatars, or put post counts next to your name, or give every user 80 options about how they want their dates formatted, and for some people (maybe most people) that just won’t work. However even if WordPress.org is the only site that ever runs this software, it’ll be totally worth it just to get the forum technology growing again and create a richer support experience for the WP community.

Comment Spam is a thing of the past

Asides

Comment Spam is a thing of the past. That method I’ve found to be 100% effective in stopping bot-based spam, but you still need some sort of content moderation for manually-entered spam. A version of Stopgap Extreme called WP Hashcash is in the new plugin repository and undergoing shared development. The repository has over 55 plugins already and it hasn’t even been officially announced. 🙂 (And this doesn’t count.)