Hari's Corner

I recently went window-shopping for a new bulletin board solution for LiteraryForums.org as I indicated in this article. Although I have chosen MyBB as the forum solution for now, I have been looking with great interest to vBulletin. For those who are not familiar, vBulletin is a professional forum software written in PHP with MySQL as the backend database. It is powerful, jam-packed with features and is an absolute delight for any forum administrator. It's admin panel is one of the best in the business. I had also tested out IPB admin demo and quite frankly vBulletin comes out as the better of the two by quite a distance. In fact, with vBulletin, almost every aspect of the forum can be configured and gives complete power to any forum admin. I guess many people will find it hard to resist such a rich offering. The only catch is that it comes at a price tag of USD 160 which is pretty hefty if you are running a non-profit website. Is it worth the price? I think it is. But whether you will use all the features that are available is another question you need to seriously consider. It will take you a couple of days just to navigate through the admin panel and get a feel of it. Is definitely not for the technically challenged although you do get support through their forums and also telephone (for US and Canada customers). To use it effectively though, I guess you need to have a clear sense of how it works. It definitely requires a bit of learning unlike phpBB which can be mastered within an hour.

One of the first things that I liked was its templating and theming system. Unlike phpBB it stores the templates in the database and it is easily editable without having to use FTP to upload files. It also has an easy to use theme editor with integrated colour controls to quickly select commonly used colours for CSS elements. This allows you to quickly get a site to look the way you want it to.

I glanced through the permissions system and I must say that one will quickly find that permissions are a lot more configurable than the rather elementary system used by phpBB. It will take time however, for you to get the settings right simply because of the array of choices available. I was also confused by the "user ranks" and "user titles" system. To many forum admins, there isn't much difference between the two. Again, I only had a brief look at the usergroups system and it will take a bit of time for anybody to get used to.

All in all, I was thoroughly impressed by this complete package. I didn't go through each one of the options because I simply didn't have the time but I will probably go back to give it another go simply because it impresses one at a mere glance. It holds a lot of promise for forum admins by providing such a rich array of features and there might be a time when LiteraryForums.org can probably migrate to vB. But for now, I cannot see the justification for paying the price of USD 160 (for the owned license. It doesn't make sense to purchase a leased license which costs USD 85 for a year. After the year is up you have to stop using the software or pay for another license which is quite a ridiculous thing to do considering the price).

Final thoughts? Even if you can afford it, it might be worthwhile considering the pros and cons carefully before you take the plunge. For a large forum vBulletin will definitely score because of its admin features. But if you are still new to the business of managing a forum, you might prefer a simpler system to start with. The advantage is that you don't lose much out of starting off with free solutions like phpBB or Simple Machines. You can always migrate later if you find the need.

The media often talk about corruption. They use grandiose phrases like "corruption is the disease of society" or "corruption is the cancer that eats away at the vitals of a country" and so on. I don't know who coined the phrase equating corruption to cancer, but they aren't too far off the mark. Unfortunately, do we really know that much about corruption? How does it begin and where does it end? Well, I'll try and analyse this phenomenon from an Indian point of view, since corruption is a big problem in this country, but I'm sure the principles apply globally. Also I'll restrict the definition of corruption to mean corruption in governance and bureaucracy for the purposes of this article.

So where does corruption start? To begin with, I'll try and classify corruption based on the motivations. In other words, what motivates individuals to become corrupt? I think that there are two broad aspects to this.

• Extension of privilege
• Denial of service

Without taking extraordinary circumstances into consideration I think corruption is motivated by these two factors. Let me explain what I mean by them.

Extension of privilege

I think the source of corruption begins with the individual who wants an extension of privilege. In other words, he wants something from authority to which he is not rightly entitled to. A man who wants a favour from an officer of law or a government servant who is in a position to give it - a favour which breaches the normal rules and regulations or something to escape the consequences of crime. This kind of corruption is motivated by the bribe-giver and not by the bribe-taker. So far so good. It's restricted to an individual's motivation to attain some end which is not normally possible. So what's the problem with this if it doesn't affect others? The transaction is restricted to a few individuals and nobody suffers as a result (unless the underlying purposes are innately criminal). To answer this question, I'll go on to the next one, which is denial of service.

Denial of service

The danger of a few individuals seeking to extend their privileges in society by bribing a few people in a position of authority and power is that it creates the seeds of the second form of corruption which is rather more insidious and unfortunately more powerful and difficult to control. Because it is driven by the bribe-taker and not the bribe-giver.

When an officer of law or a government servant who wields enormous powers decides that he would not do his duty in the normal course of business but do it only in exchange for money or favours, he creates the seed of corruption in the system. Thus people are forced to pay money for getting things done in the normal course of business. Things that they are entitled to from government, but don't get unless they pay the agent (in this case the bureaucrat or officer) a bribe (also called "speed money" in India). This is a vicious form of corruption because:

1. It spreads far more quickly in society and becomes institutionalized when a majority of government servants decide to follow the policy of bribe-taking for performing their normal duties.
2. The common man gets entrapped into it. Corruption is enforced from the top and is not a "choice". He cannot fight the system because the system is far bigger and more powerful than he can ever be.
3. It creates far more problems than the first form of corruption because it creates injustice and punishes the honest.

In short, it is far preferable to have several dishonest people in society who want to bribe rather than a few dishonest officers of government who want to take the bribe. I don't think we recognize that the bribe-taker is often in an advantageous position because he wields the control and he has some authority which can harm people if used in the wrong way. It's similar to the principle of justice that it's far better that a hundred criminals go unpunished rather than a single innocent man be convicted.

There is a hitch here. And that is: aren't these dishonest individuals sowing the seed of the second kind of corruption when they bribe those in positions of power? Aren't those officers or government servants who receive bribes begin to think of it as their privilege to receive money in exchange for their regular duties in the long run? A man who takes a bribe to perform a special favour today to somebody he knows will soon take bribes to do his regular job from everybody else. Then he spreads it to his colleagues and pretty soon, entire departments become corrupt to the core. Like it or not, it's a fact today that governments have insitutionalized this corruption right from the top-level management to the door-keeper.

The real issue here is that this form of corruption is a menace to civil society and the democratic way of life because it is driven by fear, not just by greed. The fear that a honest man feels when he opposes this institutionalized corruption - the fear that he will be denied his rights or maybe even harmed if he does not give in to it. The fear of an honest officer who is forced to succumb to corruption simply because the system does not permit him to remain honest - the fear that he might be weeded out if he does not comply with the "norm". Undoubtedly, this vicious cycle of bribe-giving and taking will continue until this fear is removed. The answers are not simple because the system has been made to work that way thanks to years and years of passive acceptance. Unfortunately the cure will not be painless. The media probably doesn't understand this when they start blaming the common man. Yes, they might have been passive witnesses to the process of spreading corruption, but the real culprits are probably less than 10% of society. The price, however, is paid by all of us.

The cure can only come when attitudes change. And that will depend on the next generation of politicians and bureaucrats. The present generation is too deeply rooted in corruption to come out of it completely. The role of this generation therefore is to provide education which promotes values, ethics and morality rather than merely train individuals to perform jobs and earn more money. Education is a topic that deserves entire books on its own and I won't go into it here. But it's obvious that education plays a huge role in shaping individuals and societies and that education systems have to be fundamentally sound and sensitive to the needs of the greater common good.

So I conclude by saying that corruption is a cancerous disease. And the cure, just like chemotherapy can hurt a lot before it heals.

Over the past few months the volume of comment spam on this blog had reached irritating levels. Most of these were bot spam and they were tricking the default moderation queue feature by not posting any links in the comment body but using the user website field. There was also plenty of trackback/pingback spam. Almost everytime I logged in, I found a dozen comments in the moderation queue and a not a few that had slipped through deviously.

Till now I had been deleting these manually, but it was getting rather repetitive and annoying to find the same kind of spammers hitting the blog again with more useless junk. Now I have decided not to take this any longer. While captcha (word verification) is a good idea to prevent spambots, it is a nuisance to the genuine commenters by forcing them to enter a random string. So I decided to use other methods. There are quite a few good anti-spam Wordpress plugins found at codex and not all of them use the captcha technique. I decided to give this one a try. I'll be keeping an eye out on how it works in the next few days.

I don't know how many of you might have noticed this, but LiteraryForums.org is no longer powered by phpBB. I won't go into the reasons for this, but the long and short of it is this: phpBB is no longer the only free forum solution left. It's age has shown up. Within the last twelve months or so, it has received several bug fixes, security patches and updates. Version 2.0.18 was the biggest update among them all and it was a pain to upgrade on a heavily modified board. And now, I just noticed that 2.0.19 has come out. I don't know when this meaningless upgrade cycle will end, but one thing is for sure: phpBB 3.0 was long overdue a year ago at the very least. And we still haven't heard a whisper about this. Take a look at this fairly recent thread at area51@phpBB and you will know the attitude of the developers. Open Source it may be, but they aren't winning too many friends out there.

The real issue is that there are several free competitors to phpBB now with many more features and a friendlier support community. Simple Machines is one such board. For a free forum, it's chock-full of features and though I'm not the biggest fan of its templating system, it's still a great option for people who simply cannot afford to pay for a forum software. Another is MyBB which current powers LiteraryForums. It's not open source, but it's still free for use and their support community seems to be much friendlier at present. Their community is still small and it's not a perfect forum solution, but it's as good as one can get with a free board. MiniBB is another free board. It's concept is totally different and its "minimalistic approach" to a bulletin board is quite refreshing but unfortunately it doesn't seem to have too active a community and the lack of working converters from other boards makes it a not too attractive prospect for existing forums. I'm sure there are quite a few free boards I've not mentioned here, but I think I've made my point.

Where does this leave phpBB? I don't know. It's still the world's most popular board, mainly due to its large modding community and the wide variety of templates available. Unlike a few free boards, it's also got a large network of support communities worldwide in different languages. Most importantly, there must be a million boards which are currently powered by phpBB. Does this make phpBB the best option? Not really in my opinion.

Some time back, I could have criticized phpBB 2.0.x for its poor security. The reason is obvious. The codebase is fairly old and needs a complete rewrite. As a PHP programmer, you take one look at their code and you can say that it's out of date even for PHP 4. The large number of changes in their session code in 2.0.18 alone showed you how much it's gone behind in terms of development. Then again, I could criticize it for its lack of features. It's amazing how quickly you find a need to MOD phpBB to get feature "A" or feature "B" which you absolutely want but which is missing. I'm not talking of the frills. Take for instance the ability to prevent old posts from being edited by users. No, it's not part of phpBB. Again the lack of a moderation "queue" is a severe drawback. I still cannot find a MOD for that one. Lack of subforums (yes, I know there are a couple of MODs for this one) is another. Sure, the admin control panel is one of the easiest to use in the business, but it always left one feeling a lack of control over features.

I know that I shouldn't be critical of a free, open source program and I usually am not. I also know that many of you might say "If you want a professional forum, you should pay for it (say vBulletin or IPB)". It is a good argument but unfortunately not all of us can pay $160 for a forum solution and not all of us can generate revenue from our sites to pay for our costs.

So I definitely hope that the phpBB programmers manage to roll out a full, working and stable version of 3.0 quickly. It's the least that they can do for the huge community of phpBB enthusiasts and supporters out there. Competition can only be good for everybody concerned and it's time that Jelsoft and Invision had some to contend with. phpBB 3.0, if it is up to expectations, will fill a huge gap in that regard.

From 1.5.2 to 2.0 RC3. It's a fairly easy upgrade, but do notify me if you find any problems with the site especially since I am using a custom designed template.

I have often wondered why people develop frustration while learning to use Linux. For a long time I dismissed most complaints against Linux as being trollish (although there are definitely genuine trolls around who get a raise out of rubbishing all things Linux).

Until I tried FreeBSD recently.

Then I knew. It was the catch-22 situation which many people run into while installing Linux. It's like this:

1. I want to configure the system in FreeBSD. But I don't know how to do it because it's totally new to me.
2. But I need to configure internet access before I can download a few applications which I absolutely need before I can proceed with anything else.
3. To access the internet I need to know how to configure my network device/DSL modem/cable modem/router etc. For that I need help.
4. I try to read the docs for some time looking for the relevant info, but I give up after a while after going through several docs which assume that you know to configure something else to get this to work.
5. I get seriously frustrated until I work out how to connect to the internet. From there, it's pretty plain sailing, having the necessary support from google and internet forums.

For somebody who may not have access to a spare machine with a pre-existing internet connection (or a dual boot with another OS already configured), this cycle results in frustration. I need app "A" to do something, but I cannot install it because it's not available on the CD. But to install it, I need the internet connection to download the necessary software packages. Unfortunately I don't know how to connect to the internet. Sounds familiar?

While some people like me are willing to accept this as part of the learning curve. Others just give up and then vent their frustration in online forums and communities talking about how Linux is not ready for mainstream use.

Granted, FreeBSD is not Linux. And because I have already accepted that Linux is not Windows, it was easier to accept FreeBSD as a totally new OS rather than expect it to work like Linux. In fact, I enjoy the fact that FreeBSD is not Linux and therefore enjoy the experience of learning something totally new. For an expert at Windows however, the transition to Linux is harder because Linux is like moving to Chinese from English. Moving to FreeBSD from Linux is merely like learning a different dialect in Chinese. But if learning a new dialect is hard enough, I can well understand why learning a new language altogether can be initially frustrating.

Fortunately Linux has got easier and easier to use and learn over the years. Ever tried out SUSE Linux? Well, anybody new to Linux should get SUSE first and see how they like it. It's a commercial distro, but it's also available for download as OpenSUSE which removes a few proprietary software from SUSE professional, but is otherwise not limited in any way. It's also a very user-friendly distro while being quite powerful and configurable. The point is that there are plenty of Linux distros that will get you started on the right note. Later on you can always explore the infinite possibilities when you are really comfortable with the system. In other words, get to know the limited vocabulary before you try to write a novel.

My advice to Linux newbies who feel tempted to throw it all up? It's simple. If you can turn your frustration into something positive - a learning experience - you gain a lot out of the time you have spent in trying it out in the first place. If you give up, then you've just lost a few hours of your life and it's time to return to familiar territory. Ultimately which category you fall into depends on the aptitude and the willingness to learn within the constraints of all other factors like time.