Yesterday, I asked on the phpBB forum if there was any chance XHTML/HTML content negotiation could be added to phpBB. I provided a link to my project as an example. So yeah, some edit-happy mods deleted the link to my project (on the grounds that it was spam … yeah, right) and then locked the thread when I replied again (saying that phpBB 3.0 is feature-frozen … so why wouldn’t the conversation be allowed to move to the subject of the next version?). I realize that phpBB is a big operation, but you would think that they wouldn’t object to someone simply asking for a feature to be added, especially when I’m offering example code. It’s certainly nothing to lock a thread over.

I’m an admin at Fuzziqer Software’s forums, and we never lock a thread unless there’s a flamewar, or something that could get us in trouble legally. So far, I can recall exactly 1 thread that we have locked since the forum was created ages ago. And that was due to a user flaming other users about 4-5 times before we decided that we needed to take action greater than just editing his posts. And he stopped after the thread was locked, and therefore isn’t banned.

Is any forum so big that mods need to lock threads for superficial reasons? I really don’t think so. Seriously, just appoint more mods if you’re having trouble keeping the users in line. The moderators of phpBB: more evidence that too many people just don’t have common decency.

I took the PSAT today, and I actually think I did okay on it. The practice test I took last week gave me a good score (around 10 points above the National Merit Semifinalist cutoff), including a perfect math score, so I’m hoping that I achieved the Semifinalist status.

I almost ran out of time on the first math section this time, because I got stuck on one problem (which I had skillfully saved for last); the problem gave me the areas of three faces of a right rectangular prism which all shared a vertex as three variables (r, s, and t) and asked me to provide the volume of the prism in terms of those variables. I couldn’t remember the formula for that, which I had only looked at briefly when reviewing, so I set about trying to determine the length of each dimension through substitution. Only after wasting about 8 minutes did I realize that only one of the answers resulted in the correct units (some of them resulted in things like inches^6), so that was obviously the correct one. With 1 minute left in the test section, I finished, fairly confident that I had gotten all of the questions right. Whew!

I get my results back in December. Of course, now I have to worry about the ACT, which is in 2 weeks. I just never get a break, do I?

Finally had a chance to upgrade WordPress to 2.0.4, which had the happy benefit of removing that damn Turkish defacement. The site should be back to normal now.