IBBoard

The following scripts are either scripts that can be run on this site and used, or scripts for download that can be used on your own server.

phpBB3 Multi-rank theme mod (AKA Multi-race Mod)

Most forum systems only let you have a single rank theme with some special icons for people such as administrators. Ever since the first forum I installed I've always added a multiple rank set mod to allow for different rank themes to be chosen by users.

With the release of phpBB3 I decided not to wait for other people to do the work for me, so I created my own mutli-rank theme mod that is currently installed on the Hive World Terra forums. The development thread is over at phpBB.com and contains a link to the latest version of the mod.

Uptime/server load script

If a site is having frequent timeouts or possible crashes then it's always good to find out the server load and uptime of the server. Some hosts, such as A Small Orange offer a basic script on their server, but other hosts aren't so generous.

This server load/uptime script takes the output of the Linux 'uptime' command and parses it into a more useful format for most users, as well as adding some useful additional data (such as server name and current time stamp).

The original server load script can be copied from the post, or an updated version is available for download. As of 31st December 2006 the version running on this server is the same as the updated version available for download.

Unix timestamp conversion

Although there are several different sites out there that provide Unix timestamp conversion, or the current Unix timestamp, some of them are not very clear on which timezone they're using when creating dates. Following some confusion trying to track a user in the site logs based on the time converted from a timestamp in the database (taken from PHP's time() function) I created a more extensive Unix timestamp converter that allowed you to specify timezones.

The script will let you enter a date and optional time and convert it to a timestamp, the server's local time and GMT, or it will let you enter a timestamp and a timezone and display the timestamp in the server's local time, GMT and your specified timezone.

These simple conversions are useful for converting a known time and date in your time zone to GMT and the server's time, or to convert a time stamp into server time, GMT and local time for searching through logs and identifying the time at which events logged using PHP's time() function occurred.