I’ve spent the last several days coming up with my own phpBB modification so that Private Messages can be encrypted and sent to other board members – then decrypted by the recipient, so long as they provide the same encryption key that was originally used.

This exercise was fun, tiring, and frustrating all at the same time. While I certainly know more now about the board software (and the use of encryption via PHP) than I did before, I’m still not completely enlightened. Some of what I did was, effectively, trial and error – involving sticking code in certain places until things ended up working.

Frankly, I’m surprised that nobody’s come up with such a mod before. Despite the trouble it gave me (as a first time coder of this sort of thing) the basic idea is really quite simple.

I’m now busy documenting the changes I made so that I can submit it as an “official” mod to the appropriate places. (If only I could make some money off of this…)