In the next few weeks I’m planning on moving off of Wordpress onto my self-coded blog. Along with it will be a new theme. Here is a sneak preview

This will be version 4 of DennisTT.Net

Wow! It’s been such a long time since I’ve posted something on my blog.  Yes I’m alive  I will try to post a bit more often, but sometimes you people have to remind me

Followers of the MyBB Community Forums will have noted that my presence on the forums has been limited in the past two weeks. Readers of my blog will also note that I haven’t posted here in a very very very long time, and since I am on vacation I have a bit of time to leave a note here :).

Where am I? Hint: I am plotting evil strategies for MyBB to take over the world with Peter. (Just kidding, but I am relatively near where Peter’s studying)

When? Now!

Who? Me!

Why? Err…to have fun?

What am I doing? Visiting family, doing normal vacation stuff.

Unfortunately I don’t have a steady internet connection over here. This vacation coupled with my study in the past few months means I haven’t been able to work on MyBB much. But fortunately Chris, Tikitiki, Justin and the other staff have been working hard on maintaining the MyBB 1.2.x series and also developing 1.4.0 (I can’t wait to see all the features they have added in the past 20 days; too bad I can’t show you everything we’ve got so far, but some of the major new features have been blogged already ). After the 20th I’ll be back at home and I’ll be working on MyBB once again, but I need to get up to speed to what the team’s been doing for the past few months since so much has changed in MyBB since the 1.2.x series. I’m happy to see that many suggestions from the community (and also some of mine yay!) have been implemented already. This reinforces one of our goals which is to make the software something that the community wants to use, not just for our own benefit.

Anyway that’s all from here.  My next blog post will probably from home sweet home

All administrators of MyBB probably know of the MyBB License one way or another. However, it has come to my attention that there are some people who just can’t get their head around one statement in the license. It happens to be this one:

The MyBB Group has several copyright notices and “powered by” lines embedded within the product. You must not remove, alter or hinder the visibility of any of these statements (including but not limited to the copyright notice at the top of files and the copyright/powered by lines found in publicly visible “templates”).

Is the text too difficult to understand? Personally I think we have made this as clear and as inambiguous as possible. Would you not agree? To me, it is quite easy to understand from this quotation that I am not allowed to remove any copyright notice and “powered by” statements which have been already written into the files distributed in the MyBB package. I don’t see any other way of interpreting it.

Is the license too difficult to find? The license is distributed in the Documentation folder of the full MyBB package. It is also displayed when the forum is installed. By installing a forum, the administrator has to at least see one, if not both instances where the license is displayed during the installation of a forum.

Are you that ashamed of running MyBB? I have seen MyBB forums changing the “powered by” line to other software such as vBulletin. I mean, if you like vBulletin, or IPB, or the other software that much, why not use that instead? Why mask MyBB as another software? Is there something wrong with using MyBB? If so, I’d suggest you voice your feedback on the MyBB Community Forums. We respect all feedback, and we take in your suggestions when we’re developing the next version of MyBB. We want to make MyBB something that you and your users want to use. This isn’t just for our own benefit.

I spent an hour tonight surfing the web looking for violators, and with a simple web search, I was able to find around 40 within the time I spent. And that was only for one search. I’m sure there are hundreds of forums out there who have removed the MyBB copyright and/or “powered by” lines.

To the MyBB forum owners who have removed the copyright and/or “powered by” lines, it isn’t a matter of if your forum will be found, it’s when. We enforce our License to the fullest extent possible, including legal action if required. How would it feel if you spent hours working on something to have it taken by another person who claims it is theirs? Not too happy I’d assume. We aren’t either.

Support us, and we will support you. It’s only two lines with links to the official MyBB homepage at the bottom of your forum. Is that too much to ask really?

If you really despise the copyright lines that much, please consider purchasing the privilege of removing the copyright on one board with a small payment to Chris Boulton. Please contact him for more details about this.

PS: Thanks to everybody (the majority of MyBB administrators) who is adhering to the License and thus supporting us

After reading “5 Tips on securing your Wordpress blog from spam comments and pings,” at leftblank, I decided to try out Bad Behavior (although I think the correct way of spelling it is Bad Behaviour ), a plugin for Wordpress which blocks detected spam bots from reaching the blog. So far the combination of Bad Behavior and Akismet is working amazingly well. Bad Behavior first turns away any spam bots, and Akismet catches any other spam that happens to trickle through.

Bad Behavior has blocked 627 access attempts in the last 7 days.

I haven’t even installed Bad Behavior for a week yet, and already it has made a noticible impact on the number of spam that I am receiving on the blog.

However, there is again a chance that a legitimate user is blocked by this plugin, but I surely hope that it won’t happen.