phpBBModders.net

O.... kay. So I was wrong. My apologies.

You know, speaking of support like that, it would be sooo cool if I could program a bot that could search through posts for certain criteria, then make an auto response based on questions in a FAQ...that would be AWESOME!!!

So, something like this...
"Hi i'm new i dont now muchh php butt i wannted 2 install ur mod nd i didnt now how 2 doo it. koud u hlp me????//"

And the bot would say "Based on my calculations, I have determined you are having trouble with installation. To install...{includes FAQ related to how to install}...

If you have any troubles with installation...
{common questions for installation}

If I have not properly calculated your request, please respond for further instructions, by my human master"

That would make my life SOOOOO much easier

Just make an FAQ section in the first post.

...
Thinks Igor has got to be kidding

I have written common problems and their solutions in the first post MANY times...I still have tons of people asking the same stupid questions...I just wish some people would be a little more respectful of the amount of time it takes to both make a MOD, and second, to support it...

Write a bot that notices if a question is asked that is answered in the FAQ post. Then it PMs the user, deletes the post.

Back on topic please.

I am curious... do you really need that level of detail? Isn't it going to add a lot of extra work for something that very people board owners will use? As a board owner, I can tell you there's no way a user or moderator is going to be involved in any way with setting up banners on my site. There's no need for any moderator or user interaction with my advertising or board sponsorships.

Someone kick me, I forgot. The logging system will basically be piggybacked onto the normal phpBB3 one, I reconsidered having it a standalone, 'twould be clumsy and inefficient.

Your replies are fine. Normally I write a novel too.

So I am guilty of not properly reading the initial description with attention to detail, then, as I thought that this was going to be a board banner management system. Oh, wait, it is.

I took that to mean that it would be for a board advertising system, at which point having user-submitted banners seems to be a bit unusual, for reasons I already mentioned. I am wondering how much interest there is in what you're actually writing, given that it seems to be fairly specialized.

I can't say I haven't done the same thing... almost every MOD I've written and released was written because I wanted it myself. So if you think about it that way, the MOD was written for an "audience of one" anyway. I just had to reset my expectations as to what you were working towards.

It seems that there would be a lot of code you could reuse. For example, to upload the banners I would assume you can leverage code from the attachments feature. You've already mentioned reusing the logging. I have not spent any time reviewing the 3.x permissions system yet, will you be able to reuse that too?

I can't imagine why not.

When sTraTo asked me if I'd like to help out, the initial plans were to do this as a somewhat stand-alone script that could be then 'plugged' into the forum, but that never made much sense, unless you were intending to make it pluggable with other popular scripts.

My intention is to make it as small and concise as possible. And utilizing phpBB's Permissions is by far better than any other method we could come up with. It's actually a really nice system and is easy to use. Likewise with anything else, it's preferred not to re-invent the wheel.

The best thing about Olympus, to me, is just the great framework it lays down for people to use. There will surely be a comment or two thanking functions or code.

// The following is an ode to download.php

Yeep, we're probably reusing a lot of stuff within Olympus for this MOD, except for the cache. I, in this instance, find my own caching system better suited for the job, since it allows it to run nearly SQL-free on most pages (except for when you modify settings or have click-tracking/view-tracking enabled, of course).

(House, a comment or two? ONLY that much? <.<;; I don't see that happening... 8+ is my guess. XD )

phpBB has an extremely easy way of caching SQL queries, you know. There's a parameter to sql_query that will cache it.