I won't use phpbb or vbulletin or any of them because they feel cludgy. I don't want signatures. Two lines of text shouldn't occupy 500 pixels on my screen. And conversations among tons of people don't make sense when displayed at one hierarchy. Reddit and HN have spoiled me, any sort of unmoderated single-hierarchy forum is a chore anymore.
I'm out of the loop I suppose... what software would you use for, say, a support forum or something? I still use phpBB, and it works, but I agree it feels cludgy.
Ah, yes, that. I didn't remember it, since it was solved in a few hours and it was not a horrible security hole, just a problem with permissions in feeds: www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?t=2014195
None of them work for me on Windows 7 / Chrome. My computer is being sent to 96.17.148.105 or .120 when I ping www.bing.com (pinging bing.com goes to 65.55.175.254, which times out), in case that's useful to anyone - since this is only happening to some people, it could be an issue which isn't present on all of Bing's servers.
Every single one of his search examples "that breaks Bing" works for me just fine.
Either Bing fixed this the same hour his blog post was made, or he just ran into a temporary snag.
And his Google search of the error code on Bing is just that, a snapshot of a temporary error that has no correlation to any particular keyword in the url.
Bing seems to do refer[r]er and/or cookie checking. If I enter the search on www.bing.com or have a cookie from bing, a search for phpbb produces results, if I clear all all bing cookies and enter http://www.bing.com/search?q=phpbb in the location bar, I get the error.
I'd be interested in which browser you're using, and if you could check with a different one. I mention in the article that some browsers seem to be redirected before the bot filter kicks in (IE9, for example, but not IE8).
You can see the results of the bug on about 50 browsers here:
It seems to be related to whether or not you have a bing cookie in your browser or not. I can turn on private browsing have them fail, then use a session with a bing cookie and have them succeed.
The "what topics do they discuss on the view?" search initially failed for me. So I went directly to Bing and typed it in manually and it worked from there on out, even going back and clicking the link in the article.
Same for me (different numbers, though). I'm not surprised, though—I'm on an EC2 VPN, which some internet services are somewhat biased against (notably Stack Overflow).
Not exactly true. phpBB2 has a bad security record. phpBB3 has been clean since day 1, IIRC.