PHP Notebook

For the Second Life discussion site, I’ve used:

• Account Pictures
  This extension will allow your users to upload their icon and picture and store it on your server. You’ll have to create an upload directory and make it writeable. Also, the files which will get uploaded should have writing permissions. You can change the icon and picture sizes on the settings .
• Attachments
• Comment Removal
  Allows administrators and comment/discussion authors to delete posts and discussions directly from the database (ie. no first hide then clean up procedure). Please be aware that this is a permission, so if you’re an admin and you’re not seeing any ‘remove’ button on posts, it’s because you haven’t
• Comments Permalinks
  Adds a permalink in every comment, so you can share a single comment’s url.
• FCKeditor
  FCKeditor is a popular WYSIWYG toolbar for your comment forms and posts. Includes Source editing, smileys and Youtube/Google/Soapbox/Vimeo/Revver/Dailymotion/VideoJug/MetaCafe video embedding
• Google Analytics
  Adds the Google Analytics code to your vanilla forum pages. You must set up an account with Google Analytics and enter your account number in default.php before this add-on will work. Also see further discussion at http://lussumo.com/community/discussion/3507/
• Guest Welcome Message
  Adds a welcome message to the panel if the person viewing the forum isn’t signed in.
• Inline Images
  This extension will display uploaded image attachments in your comments. Users can use an image tag (e.g. [Image_154]). You can only use the image tag for comments where you uploaded the image to. !!!REQUIRES ATTACHMENTS 2!!!
• Next Unread Discussion Link
  This extension adds two links between the last comment of a discussion and the comments form. Previous Page Next Unread “Previous Page” simply goes back in the browser history. “Next Unread” will link to the most recently active discussion which contains unread comments.
• Notify
  The extension “Notify” enables to subscribe to the complete forum, categories or single discussions to be notified about new comments/discussions. Every user won’t get more than one mail, until he visits the forum again.
• Predefined Attributes
  The extension allows administrators to predefine attributes. Administrators may add custom fields like “Phone-Nr.” or “Shirt-Size” (Respect your users privacy). Users fill this information on Appliance and on the Account “Personal Information” page.
• RSS2 Feed
  Adds a link to an RSS2 feed on any applicable pages of Vanilla. It’s a WYSIWYG type of feed where it will deliver exactly what you see when you are browsing the forum. So, if you run a search and then click the RSS2 feed, you will get a feed of the search results.
• Sidepanel 1.0
  Enables you to insert everything you want to appear in the sidepanel easily (based on Statcounter by JP Mitchell) this is basically the code to extend the sidepanel.

I was searching for bulletinboard/forum software for a a Second life forum that was:

• easy to set up
• easy to maintain, in the sense that I didn’t want to develop basic functionality myself
• had a sufficiently large community

BBpress

• themes system not yet in place..
• integration with Wordpress would be interesting for the longer term, but not just now

Vanilla

• webstandards based
• smallish community
• contributions:
• Themes: templates that involve php code
• styles: pure layout, ie css and image
• Add-ons: adds new functionality

phpBB

• huge community
• lots of extensions, but mod system
• no webstandards-based
• no good seo, no friendly urls

Drupal

• huge community
• more a development platform than an application

Are there any other options? Full list on Wikipedia.

Outcome:

I went for Vanilla:

• it just did what was needed
• I found this nice Vanilla green style by Maurice Krijtenberg
• note: use the default theme, most styles are based upon it - so in the end you have greater choice
• Have a look at the Vanilla extensions I used

Online marketing report boosts a phpBB registration bot - a tool that will register a user on a phpBB forum, in order to drop a link in the user profile.

Since phpBB doesn’t put a nofollow tag on a profile link (check for yourself on the mother of all phpBB forums), phpBB forum memberlists are an easy target for linkspamming.

I used to manually remove fake registrations on a phpBB forum I run until I got sick of it and installed this anti-registration-spam mod. It simply removes the url field upon registration, and discards the registration if an automated process tries to post a url field anyway.