I am trying to run PHP and found this after pulling my hair out for hours! This post is almost two years old! Will php work or not? It seems that in this day and age to not have proper php support is…outdated…

PS: I would also like to try setting up a membership site for our church members — and I understand that a membership site needs php so that people can set up their own profile pages, right?

I also find it backwards thinking to table a project that has Homestead lagging behind.

Sounds like there is more to it than that. It is absolutely a necessity in the modern age.

Get with the program!!!

If you can’t provide these services by year end, I’m afraid I will need to port my site over to another service (reluctantly).

It would be great if you could get Intuit to inject some $$ and turn Homestead into a hosting site that can truly support commercial efforts.

So I was very excited to find this post and discover that it was a possibility only to be shot down and find that, no it’s not.

I am really surprised by the comment saying there wasn’t enough interest in the long run during the beta test. How can that be possible? Just looking at the comments here you can see there is a lot of interest and a huge need for the Homestead users to have this feature.

There are two main ways to combat the problem:

1. Technical Solution – CAPTCHA

You’ve probably seen CAPTCHA in action before. It’s the blurred string of letters or numbers you’re often asked to enter before you register for something or post online. CAPTCHA is intended to prove that you’re human, by asking you to complete something a machine would find it difficult (but not, sadly, impossible) to do.

We use a common PHP package called phpBB. It has built-in CAPTCHA support, but unfortunately some spammers have found a way around it. There are various options for improving it. If you Google for ‘phpBB captcha’, you’ll see advice on improving CAPTCHA in your forum. Usually this involves installing some new PHP files and changing your phpBB configuration. We haven’t had the chance to test any of these packages, so I can’t recommend any particular one. All of them require some knowledge of PHP, and none of them have been tested on our servers.

2. Manual Solution

The only completely reliable alternative at this point is moderating your board manually. You can do this by disabling anonymous posting, disabling user signups without admin (your) approval, and then actively monitoring your forum and deleting any offensive posts. This takes more time, but it’s the solution used by most popular forums. I’m not sure how to manage these settings on phpBB, but there should be plenty of support on the web if you search for it.

Combating spam is a never-ending battle, I’m afraid. You should see how much spam WE get.

However, over the past two weeks our PHP forum was hit hard by spam-bots who posted tons of porn on our dicussion forum – it was shocking for anyone to view who happened to visit the site.

I had to delete all the catagories we’ve created over the last year. When I called homestead support they were clueless about how to help me and referred me to their legal team – great tech support!

The current version of the PHP was out of date and I’ve never received any comments from homestead about how the beta test was going or what our thoughts were of it – very strange!!! Doesn’t homestead update the version of PHP ???

While I love using homestead – their communication with customers is lacking at times -

Also enable a few dbs for each site to use. MySQL