For nearly 6 years now I've been part of the support team over at phpbb.com, trying to help where I could to make the using, customizing and understanding phpBB as easy to use as possible to all those people out there who wanted to have a board but had a problem with it.
It all started in 2002 when I found out about phpBB2 and really liked what I saw. Think about it: Even back then, phpBB2 was already around and it's still supported to this date. Naturally with its end of life coming closer and closer, but nonetheless. Not to mention the huge community that helped making phpBB what it is today, one if not the most popular open source forum solution out there.
Anyway, as life goes on, interests change. Over the years I found just too much stuff that I wanted to work -- like Django, programming Python in general etc. -- or simply enjoy during my rare free time and when I started working on my master thesis last year, I knew, I finally had to make a cut somewhere. So two days ago I finally drew that line and resigned from my position on the support team.
This was definitely not an easy decision since the daily visits to phpbb.com were a constant stop on my daily route through the interweb and I really enjoyed the work with the other members of the team, although it became more and more tiresome having to answer the same questions again and again because people simply didn't care enough to search before asking. These definitely caused some burnout on my end which the release of phpBB3 definitely help to relieve a lot during the last couple of months and I went back into full mode, although not as long as I'd hoped. That said, there were some things I couldn't push through about which I'm still angry about ;-)
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Required intelligence tests for all people visiting phpbb.com
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Required spellchecker
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Instaban for 1337-sp34k
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A splash page for the create-topic with some serious psychological stuff on there about how many kittens die if you don't RTFM.
Anyway, to the folks over at phpbb.com: Thank you for those nice years and good luck in the future. You very much deserve it. And we will definitely see each other :-)
11 days ago the first 