So despite hating everything Facebook stands for and making a principled withdrawal from the social nightmare earlier this year, I'm now experimenting with a new Drupal for Facebook module that could mean Planet Boinng going live as a Facebook application

It's early days yet, and not at all working, but in theory Facebook users (ie, the entire world, but more probably just you lot) should be able to add Planet Boinng as an app and start posting to your blog etc all from within Facebook and your profile pages.

So anyway, on Friday morning I decided to upgrade the site to the latest (stable) release of Drupal, going from 4.7.7 to 5.2 and taking all of the various modules we use with me. 5.x has actually been around for quite a while, but the thought of updating everything had me veering towards the dark side of sticking with what I knew worked already... the problem with that, is what happened to the old Postnuke-based site.

Because it's always nice to share, you'll now find a selection of little icons below each and every post on Boinng, which will allow you to bookmark or share the story on other sites - for instance, if you like a story click on the "Digg" icon to digg the post up on digg.com, or use the Google "G" to add the story to your own Google/Gmail account bookmarks, or there's even a Facebook icon to share the post on your Facebook wall, not that anyone here uses that s

Sadly, we seem to be getting targetted by increasingly clever spam-bots at the moment, intent on filling up our hallowed pages with lots of lovely links to viagra, goats, plasticine, or whatever else they're obsessed with. Too many are slipping through the net for my liking, so I've had to take drastic action - from now on, new users will have to go into an approval queue and wait for me to decide they're human, before they can log in and post.

We got spammed last night, with a ton of posts and comments containing links to all sorts of rubbish. Sadly, there are spambots patrolling the internet looking for sites like these where they can automatically register an account and then post a load of guff like this; it's a major pain and anything that makes life more difficult for the tossers that do this is a good thing in my book.

So... to that end, I've added something called a captcha to the site, to trip these robots up. From now on, whenever you post a comment or create a blog post, forum topic or whatever, you'll be asked to answer simple maths question or complete some other puzzle. In theory, for you - a human - the captcha won't take a second of your time, but for the robots these will stop them in their tracks, since they won't know the answers.

Mental note for myself - when updating Drupal to a new version (we're on 4.7.4 now, you'll be pleased to know) always observe the following safety precautions:

1. Don't let anything overwrite the theme (not normally a problem, unless they start distributing a theme called "boinng" with every update).

2. Don't let anything overwrite sites/default/ (compare for differences)

3. Never, ever let anything overwrite .htaccess - reconfiguring Gallery, after that, is a real bitch.

If anyone notices anything broken, please let me know...

Today I've installed and configured the magical Pathauto module for drupal (the thing the site runs on now) which doesn't need to mean anything to anyone except, you might notice, most of the pages on Boinng now have sensible addresses. Like this page you're reading now, rather than being called

http://www.boinng.com/node/2963

or whatever, is now called the similar but subtly better

http://www.boinng.com/forum/sensible-names-for-insensible-things

now okay, that's a little longer, but it also makes sense, and actually describes what this page is about. Drupal has always been able to create sensible sounding pathnames for its pages (or indeed nonsense ones if you prefer) but Pathauto automates this process, meaning that it creates these names on the fly as and when new posts are added. And it doesn't stop at the forum, but also applies to blogs, polls, and virtually anything else, including users - you'll now find all your account pages are at http://www.boinng.com/user/yourname, and your blogs are at http://www.boinng.com/blog/yourname - look around the place and you'll find lots of other neat little changes like that.

There's been some configuration change to the Hostgator server Boinng is running on which has broken one or two things at present - I've put in a support request to get things put right, but if anything odd happens (or fails to happen) bear with me...

This old Planet's been running as a Drupal site for a little over a month now, but there's probably still a few features you haven't found yet...

1. Did you know that Drupal allows you to change your username to anything you like? So if you're slightly embarrased by that five year old nickname, all you need to do is edit your account. Just remember that your login will change!

2. Did you know that there's a few other things you can change on your account page? When you're editing your account, click the "All about me" tab at the top to tell us more about you, and "My favourites" to tell us some of your favourite things. The answers to all these questions will appear on your account page.

One of the big new features in this site (as opposed to the old one) is something called "Taxonomy". That's what Drupal call it anyway; to you, me, and Boinng, it's called the Collective. So what is it?