Apathy Sketchpad

There. I’ve said it.

Reason being, my phpBB forum keeps getting hacked, by morons no less, because it features the world most insecure admin panel. I don’t know if you’ve ever clicked the “administration panel” link at the bottom of a phpBB forum. It’s a tiny link at the bottom of pages which is only displayed to administrators and anyone else who wants to see it badly enough. When you click it, a large button appears saying “please don’t click here if you are a hacker”, and clicking it automatically takes you to the admin page. The admin page has three options: ban users, change the kind of captcha you use, and change the index page to say “Joo hav been hacked by Captain Awesome’s CyberDweeb Klan” and play shitty music. I understand phpBB employ people specially to compose this music.

Whatever the reasons behind this insane design philosophy, the result is that phpBB is a total chunk of crap. So what I’m doing is writing my own forum script. My forum script is better than phpBB. Sure, I’ve not added any way for users to register, so I’m the only person who can post, but that’s one better than phpBB, since I’ve had to take away phpBB’s access to my database, so even I can’t post there without doing it via PhpMyAdmin. Secondly, it is impossible to hack the admin panel on my forum script, because it hasn’t got one. Nor does it have a moderator’s panel that can delete all the threads at once. That’s just asking for trouble in my opinion. And you don’t need these things. At least, I don’t.

phpBB is, I think aimed at people who want a cheap forum for their website and want to have a team of moderators and admins watching over it and doing handy things. Mine isn’t. Mine is aimed squarely at me. It does things my way. If you want to change the look, you change the PHP files. If you want to edit the forum list, you use PhpMyAdmin. If you want to ban a user, PhpMyAdmin. If you want to delete a load of threads at once, PhpMyAdmin.

It’s a much better system. It’s more flexible than phpBB’s mod controls (which are useless at best) and it’s infinitely more secure. Once it’s up and running, my new forum will be at forum.apathysketchpad.com. Well, it’s up there now but it’s nothing but meaningless testing banter at the moment, so there’s little point in looking at it (though I’ve no doubt someone will).

I don’t really understand phpBB. I’ve looked at the source and it’s crazy. The database is split across a hundred things; they take away your RegExp and give you a rubbish asterisk system, which the code then turns back into RegExp. The posts are stored across two tables. The whole thing is just madness in a jar.

So I’m doing it myself. Honestly, it seems like the only way sometimes.