A few days ago I was trying to install the reCAPTCHA plugin for phpBB2 to stop the increasing number of spam registrations on one phpbb forum. I’ve followed the instructions, but the usercp_register.patch was failing:

patching file usercp_register.php
Hunk #2 FAILED at 278.
1 out of 4 hunks FAILED -- saving rejects to file usercp_register.php.rej

The phpbb installation was the latest version available of the 2.0.x stable branch at this time (2.0.22) with no custom changes or modifications done on the core phpbb files. I have even tried to install the reCAPTCHA phpBB MOD that required to install easymod 0.3.0 but that failed also. I could not find any useful information anywhere on the phpBB forums or recaptcha ones. Read the rest of this entry »

There are several good howto’s explaining how you can reset a lost phpBB admin password, but all of them use phpMyAdmin for mysql access. Since I had to do this a few days ago, I thought other might benefit from such a howto that uses only command line utilities if phpmyadmin is not available.

Identifying the MySQL user/password

Locate the config.php file under your main phpBB installation directory. If you are using the debian phpBB package then the particularity of this package is that the config.php from the installation folder /var/www/phpbb2/site/config.php just calls the real config file from /etc/phpbb2/config.php

Read the rest of this entry »