sorry for such a long delay, but the forum is finally back online - i managed to clear it of all the spam. it was a bit of an ordeal…

phpbb (the forum software) doesn’t have the greatest data model, and mysql doesn’t appear to have referential integrity, at least with the storage engine it was using. in other words, if you delete a user record, it won’t cascade delete all the related posts they created. i wound up exporting the data from mysql to an access database (which i am much more familiar with), defining primary keys for several tables, adding all the relationships that were needed and turning on referential integrity, and performing all sorts of queries to identify the spam posts and users. they tended to post a lot from the same ip address, so i wound up being able to identify the majority by deleting from the ip addresses with 20+ posts. although i did scan through the messages first to make sure no legitimate posts were deleted. then more queries to identify all the other spam posts. i think i got it all.

getting the data from mysql to access turned out to be interesting - microsoft appears to dislike odbc, and doesn’t make it easy for you to use it. in windows xp there is a registry key called “don’t load” for the control panel, which includes the odbc applet. it’s at “HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\don’t load”. so if you’re trying to set up an odbc data source, you might wonder where the applet is. in any case, you can run the applet from the Start menu, by selecting Run and entering “odbccp32.cpl”.

the last step was exporting from access to mysql, and fortunately there’s a really nice (free) program to do that, at http://www.mdbtomysql.de

there was a sort of hidden feature of phpbb that caused the problem in the first place - i had wanted to be notified of all the new posts to the forum, but oddly enough, there didn’t seem to be an option to do that, even as an administrator. i came across an addon/mod that would alert you to all new posts. so i went through the instructions to modify the php code to get that working. then came a huge number of security updates to phpbb, and i wasn’t sure how those would interact with the mods that i had made. so i wound up losing that mod with the forum notifications. school was keeping me pretty busy, so i just said, ok, i’ll just check in every now and then to see what’s new. then the spam started coming in, despite having what i thought was good security turned on. er, ok, i’ll fix that sometime in the future when i have more time, i thought.

well, finally, it’s fixed. and after all that, after upgrading to phpbb3, i finally found the place where you can subscribe to a forum - it’s a link at the bottom of the page, in the blue footer. somehow i’d never actually seen that button, after reading about it in various places.

anyway, i’ll try to keep up with the forum now - there are a few posts i still need to reply to, which i’ll try to get to shortly.

i still need to get a system set up for maintaining bugs and feature requests, which is most of what the forum winds up doing. in fact, it’s higher priority than working on the code, at the moment.

brian

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