phpBB is an open-source forum soft­ware that is very pop­u­lar and widely used. This makes it an ideal tar­get for spam­mers. The phpBB de­velopers there­fore im­ple­men­ted an im­proved Captcha in ver­sion 3.0. But spam­mers have already ad­ap­ted to this and have im­ple­men­ted im­proved bots that are able to break the new Captcha and to auto­mat­ic­ally cre­ate junk posts. In the fol­low­ing I will de­scribe five anti-spam meas­ures that ef­fect­ively re­duce spam in every phpBB 3.x in­stance. The main goal of these meas­ures is to block as many spam posts as pos­sible without af­fect­ing nor­mal forum users.

Ver­sion 2.0 of bson4­jack­son has just been re­leased. bson4­jack­son adds sup­port for BSON, a bin­ary rep­res­ent­a­tion of JSON, to the Jack­son JSON pro­cessor. The latest re­lease of bson4­jack­son now sup­ports Jack­son 2.0.

Ver­sion 1.2.0 of bson4­jack­son has just been re­leased. bson4­jack­son adds sup­port for BSON, a bin­ary rep­res­ent­a­tion of JSON, to the Jack­son JSON pro­cessor. Thanks to con­tri­bu­tions from the com­munity, the latest re­lease of bson4­jack­son now in­cludes bet­ter sup­port for Mon­goDB.

In one of my pre­vi­ous posts I talked about how to build Scala pro­jects with PDE Build. However, PDE Build is rather old and has long been su­per­seded by Buck­min­ster. The great ad­vant­age of Buck­min­ster is that it is ac­tu­ally a light­weight Ec­lipse SDK with all that you need to build an RCP ap­plic­a­tion: a work­space of pro­jects, a tar­get plat­form, and so on. To build Scala pro­jects in Ec­lipse you will most likely in­stall the Scala IDE. Un­for­tu­nately, this plug-in can­not be in­stalled in Buck­min­ster right away. But there is a work­around…

Re­cently, JSON has be­come an ex­cel­lent al­tern­at­ive to XML. But most JSON pars­ers writ­ten in Java are still rather slow. On my search for faster lib­rar­ies I found two things: BSON and Jack­son.

Some time ago I wrote about how to let Ec­lipse PDE Build auto­mat­ic­ally com­pile Scala pro­jects. There­fore a spe­cial Ant script (customBuildCallbacks.xml) had to be cre­ated in the pro­ject’s root dir­ect­ory. This script looked for the Scala lib­rary and com­piler and then built the pro­ject’s source files.