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Combination of reddit swallowing everyone and every php webapp being a dumpster fire of vulnerabilities making them a constant source of maintenance headaches.

Combination of reddit swallowing everyone and every php webapp being a dumpster fire of vulnerabilities making them a constant source of maintenance headaches. source: I ran & hosted zx6e.net, a niche but active motorcycle forum, for over a decade. Sunsetted the site for lack of user growth combined with becoming sick of operating php trash.

seydor 4y ago
PHP was hardly the problem. Spam and security became a lot harder for everyone and everything. There are no equivalents of phpBB in Javascript or Go that did better. Only big centralized services can afford to tackle those problems
c7b 4y ago
Interesting - others have commented that the notorious security issues seem to have been addressed in modern PHP versions, you seem to disagree?
- pengaru 4y ago
  > Interesting - others have commented that the notorious security issues seem to have been addressed in modern PHP versions, you seem to disagree? It's been many years since I shut down the forum so I can't speak to the current state of things. At the time there were two major problems: 1. the php runtime was constantly in need of updating because of yet another vulnerability either due to bugs in a forum-required feature like gd (graphics package iirc) or another stupid php default resulting in exploitable bugs (remember register_globals anyone?) 2. the forum software was poorly written by the kind of people who wrote php web software back then, not well maintained by upstream, and I didn't have any time or interest in becoming a php forum software maintainer myself. There's only so many obvious semi-successful attempts to hack my shared server via any combination of the above before I lose interest in hosting a small web forum for free. If I were to host a web forum today I'd want it to be mostly static content and not a constant invocation of some php or php-like interpreter involved in every operation.
agent008t 4y ago
Also, at some point Google started penalizing them a lot in search results, hurting discoverability. Without new blood, existing ones mostly withered away.

seydor 4y ago

PHP was hardly the problem. Spam and security became a lot harder for everyone and everything. There are no equivalents of phpBB in Javascript or Go that did better. Only big centralized services can afford to tackle those problems

c7b 4y ago

Interesting - others have commented that the notorious security issues seem to have been addressed in modern PHP versions, you seem to disagree?

pengaru 4y ago
> Interesting - others have commented that the notorious security issues seem to have been addressed in modern PHP versions, you seem to disagree? It's been many years since I shut down the forum so I can't speak to the current state of things. At the time there were two major problems: 1. the php runtime was constantly in need of updating because of yet another vulnerability either due to bugs in a forum-required feature like gd (graphics package iirc) or another stupid php default resulting in exploitable bugs (remember register_globals anyone?) 2. the forum software was poorly written by the kind of people who wrote php web software back then, not well maintained by upstream, and I didn't have any time or interest in becoming a php forum software maintainer myself. There's only so many obvious semi-successful attempts to hack my shared server via any combination of the above before I lose interest in hosting a small web forum for free. If I were to host a web forum today I'd want it to be mostly static content and not a constant invocation of some php or php-like interpreter involved in every operation.

agent008t 4y ago

Also, at some point Google started penalizing them a lot in search results, hurting discoverability. Without new blood, existing ones mostly withered away.