Lately when I’ve paid my favourite discussion boards a visit they all seam to be flooded with SPAM. As a result I’ve now more or less stopped visiting them and most certainly lost interest due to the fact that they appear messy and that proper information is hard to find/get.

Earlier when you got notified about a response there would actually be someone trying to help, or give a related comment. Now all you get is highly irrelevant information about some obscure stock or a pill for specific purposes.

Turning the discussion boards (forums) to “members only” with insane security measures doesn’t quiet work as intended in my mind as information no longer are shared with the public. Therefore it puzzles me that the developers haven’t come up with something similar to the comment filtering in WordPress (Akismet). I for one can sit back and relax while my comment feature is wide open knowing that SPAM will be treated as SPAM and never displayed.

Web 2.0 and the websites that came out of it has also provided new ways of forwarding/sharing information and displaying it much nicer, leaving the rest left way behind. As a consequence I believe that without some drastic measures the good old discussion board are digging its grave faster and faster.

I had a look at the Alexa ratings for the 2 most popular software developers, but there’s no obvious trend except that they both seam to have fallen slightly during the first quarter this year (phpBB, vbulletin).

I would very much like to get your opinion on this as I’m currently seriously thinking of removing my old phpBB support forum off the site for good.

Applications and websites that have provided bandwidth speed tests have been around for ages, but Speedtest.net takes the concept a step further. With a ultra cool “Web2.0ish” interface you’ll get your upload and download speed displayed on your screen based on a connection with a remote server of your own choice.

An excellent source for free backgrounds, sorted by user rating. The images are available in all common resolutions, from 2560×1600 down to 1024×768, and are very diversely themed.

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Ever wondered how you could put quotes around your blockquotes without using images? Stuart Robertson reveals a nifty technique at his site designmeme.com using only CSS to complete the task.

It will NOT work in IE 6 or less but it will work in modern CSS2 compatible browsers like Firefox and Opera. An alternative version that works cross-browser but requires the <span> tags are referenced for those of you still holding on to Microsoft’s creation from 2001.

On the very same site you’ll find a cool “Hoverbox menu“, also well worth a look.

This article explains how to configure and run multiple MySQL installations under Microsoft Windows.

I’ve now MySQL 5.0.37 and MySQL 5.2.3-falcon-alpha set up on my PC. I could easily add more versions but for my testing purposes this does the job. The installation procedure is explained in detail in my post about how to install MySQL5 on Windows.

NOTE! During set-up the installer asks you if you would like to Install As Windows Service, and in case you are planning multiple installations you should provide a unique name for each service corresponding to the version number. My default service (MySQL 5.0.37) is named “MySQL5” and my test installation (MySQL 5.2.3) is named “MySQL52” - you get the picture. For any installation that you don’t want Windows to initiate during start-up, uncheck the “Launch the MySQL Server automatically”.