18 ms·

PhpBB 3.3.10

272 points by neustradamus 4y ago

mostlysimilar 4y ago
Forum software of phpBB's era got so many things right that we get wrong today. I'm glad it's still chugging along. It's valuable software, even if that value is contained to small islands outside of the continents that are the mega-platforms of social media.
- user3939382 4y ago
  We didn’t know at the time we were in a golden age of federation that would soon be evaporating. Discoverability may have been less than say a subreddit, but the mods were in practically 100% control of the rules.
- bluedino 4y ago
  One bad thing about old forum threads is a lot of the images are lost. Disk space and bandwidth were still expensive back then. The free image hosts mostly disappeared or started charging (so many forums have dead photobucket links).
  - Gigachad 4y ago
    They also got flooded with spam and were regularly hacked.
    - kijin 4y ago
      Which really didn't matter back then. People just deleted the spam, recovered from backup, patched whatever flaw they found, and changed passwords. It wasn't the end of the world.
      - Gigachad 4y ago
        Lots of the forums I used to use died this way. The site owners eventually got tired of having to janny the site daily to fight an endless wave of attacks. It's all moved to reddit and discord these days.
        mattl 4y ago
        Janny?
        scrlk 4y ago
        Janitors (shortened to "janny") are a part of 4chan's moderation team. Seems like the slang has bled out to incorporate all types of volunteer moderators.
        mattl 4y ago
        Ah, makes sense.
      - pixl97 4y ago
        Spam did matter when it didnt stop. No one wanted to engage in a full time job of deleting bullshit. This is one of the reasons forums disappeared and people went to larger sites that tended to have much larger moderation staff
  - BlueTemplar 4y ago
    Same thing is going to happen again once imgur shuts down. While the pictures that were actually hosted on the forum itself are usually fine.
    - z57 4y ago
      That will be a day of days. imgur shutting down will be like someone shaking your internet Etch-A-Sketch. The internet post imgur will have a completely different vibe.
      - Medox 4y ago
        Sounds like a job for archive.org
        esskay 4y ago
        That doesn't solve the issue of the millions of embeds and links though.
        account42 4y ago
        It's kind of sad that browsers still have no concept of the passage of time (except to intentionally break things for security). One of the many things that a browser focused on being a browser for hyperlinked documents could do better than our current app delivery platforms calling themselves browsers.
        BlueTemplar 4y ago
        Why not ? (Besides that of course it would be probably easier for the Archive to deal with multimedia inside the same website.)
        esskay 4y ago
        What do you mean why not? If a forum embeds an image from imgur and imgur ceases to exist the image stops working. It doesn't matter if archive.org has a copy, you wont be able to see it without manually going to archive.org to find every image by its former embed url (which likley isnt archived as thats a different url to the one you see on their site).
- timeon 4y ago
  Not sure how it was in last decade but there were two things I remember that I didn't like about phpBB forums: - lack of threads - signature noise
- POPOSYS 4y ago
  But people using forums also got so many things wrong. One thing that really went wrong: people using forums as issue trackers. Just look at the mega topics that exist for one $thing with never-ending addition of posts that are a nightmare to search and extract knowledge from. Instead of using an issue tracker, they post more and more messages to the one forum topic dedicated to $thing. Some hardware related forums still do that. Ultra long topics with hundreds of posts, somewhere between page 157-178 there are some nuggets you will never find. Also the extremely annoying UIs - as an example look at the minimal navigation / pagination buttons in many forums. Well, OK, that started to change slowly, but still we have horrible UIs everywhere. Annoyances like most space on a forum page still wasted for unimportant side information do exist - some designs are so bad that the most important information has the smallest font size. But while the good old slick and dirty PHP forums still delivered with all that warts, mostly because these people still knew how to program fast software, then came the ruby programmers and brought us a vision of forum software that should get a premium lifetime award for coding horrors. JS heavy frontend with grotesque front-end anti-patterns and a monstrous bloated backend that breaks when your forum actually has some attention. The time of "internet software as a satirical art form" has not stopped until today. So hopefully the old-school PHP devs can easily iron out the annoyances of the past and still deliver internet software that is fast and usable. Happy release party, PhpBB!
  - sourcecodeplz 4y ago
    > Ultra long topics with hundreds of posts, somewhere between page 157-178 there are some nuggets you will never find. Yep, you have to go through each page to find them all, it's called research.
  - antifa 4y ago
    > Just look at the mega topics that exist for one $thing with never-ending addition of posts that are a nightmare to search and extract knowledge from. That's basically the default experience of discord.
nigamanth 4y ago
This goes on to prove that PHP is still relevant today. No matter how many new frameworks come up, we all know PHP anyways.
- elashri 4y ago
  I think this applies mainly because of WordPress, not PhpBB and any other project.
  - hunter2_ 4y ago
    Drupal is up there, maybe not as a household name like WordPress, but in some big organizations.
    - chippiewill 4y ago
      Drupal's been on the heavy decline over the past 10 years. Drupal 8/9/10 might turn it around now that Drupal 7 is set to officially retire eventually but it's not had the staying power in the way Wordpress has. Drupal doesn't really seem to have an ecosystem left anymore.
      - thejosh 4y ago
        It had some decent developers and ecosystem around it a few years ago, but honestly a lot of bureaucracy and drama killed a lot of the enthusiasm in the project and contributed modules for many.
        chx 4y ago
        ...
        geerlingguy 4y ago
        Always good to see you here chx! I hope you are doing well these days.
ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
I'm surprised it's still around. They did a good job on the software, but discussion forums seemed to go belly-up, after Facebook took off (MySpace, too, I guess). Maybe they will make a comeback?
- derefr 4y ago
  phpBB deployments are still popular, among other places, on Tor hidden sites, because the Tor Browser disables client-side Javascript, and phpBB was written before Javascript was something you could architect a whole application around, so any JS functionality in phpBB is just optional graceful enhancement.
- gnulinux 4y ago
  Forums were doing just fine during the golden age of Facebook, at least in my generation. I thought what made forums go belly-up was reddit. Once reddit became a mainstream social media, there was no need for niche forums as anyone could just create a subreddit.
  - jamesfinlayson 4y ago
    Could be - at least the communities I used to participate in seem to use Discord now.
    - vanderZwan 4y ago
      I really dislike using Discord and I can't even figure out why (so it's probably me). I do know it's not the part where it is a chat app per se - I'm happily using Zulip, managing with Slack, and WhatsApp, Telegram and Slack all have their place. But something about the UI/UX of chatting in Discord just makes it a stream of conversations where I can barely follow what's going on. Having said that in many contexts a forum with threads that have a clear topic are just so much more of an appropriate solution than chat apps. I don't understand why people prefer the latter (although it does explain why I prefer Zulip since it manages to be a good hybrid in how it organizes discussions).
lolinder 4y ago
Every time I see hype about Mastodon and the fediverse I miss the phpBB days. There was something special about the interlocking network of forums that didn't need to "federate" in any formal capacity. We just joined communities we liked and formed overlapping networks like normal people do and always have done. No one at the time felt any need to try to accommodate the whole world in one venue. As someone who never understood the appeal of Twitter or Facebook, the new wave of FOSS social apps feels very alien to me.
- agumonkey 4y ago
  It seems that by formalizing / integrating things at the technical layer we lost something. I do miss those days, I still feel different when I interact with these old websites.
- mhd 4y ago
  One definining characteristic of internet media is where they rank on the "transience" spectrum. The most extreme end probably being some old school chat apps and IRC on one side, and encylopedic wiki's (not the only kind) on the other. And while both forums and Usenet were closely rooted in current conversation, they had a more long-standing meaning, too. Where you could follow whole discussions even years later and where the writing style recognized this, often having single posts that more closely resemble articles. Twitter and Mastodon seem a lot more ephemeral. As do sites like this or reddit, after all, they're concerned with "news". StackOverflow seems closer to the forums of olden time out of most of the contemporary outlets. So apart from the UI, you might miss that different conversational character resulting out of this. As a final note, I do miss Wikis like the original one, where you had a lot of long-standing information, but with a conversational bent.
  - gabereiser 4y ago
    It’s not about what’s written, it’s about engagement and advertising. The more ephemeral the better! Then that fomo kicks in and engagement is through the roof. That is, until some rich guy buys it and runs it into the ground.
  - 4y ago
kxrm 4y ago
I've been using PhpBB for years, started my board with them back in 2002 and the main reason I stuck with them was the versatility. I hope they can last another 20 years.
tiffanyh 4y ago
HN, the most popular forum for hackers. Long-live forum software :)
- ThatMedicIsASpy 4y ago
  until you try to comment/post on a few week old post. HN is not a forum
  - iinnPP 4y ago
    I never used PHPBB, but I did use the feature-strict PunBB(and then fork FluxBB). Both of those software allowed you to order threads by date, where posts were no longer able to be used to "BUMP." Several categories had this feature enables, including any news discussion areas and the designated shitpost area. HN and PunBB look quite similar. Even more so when using the orange skin.
  - Findecanor 4y ago
    One thing that HN has in common with forums though, is that threads stay around for years . And that's a good thing, as there can be a lot of useful information even in old threads.
BizarreByte 4y ago
I used to despise PhpBB, at the time I thought it was vastly inferior to SMF. SMF seemed far more professional, the closest you could get to vbulletin while being free. In retrospect I miss it just as much. I really do mourn the loss of communities I was part of, I even owned one for a short while. The friends, the discussions, the projects, all lost to time.
- dankwizard 4y ago
  I'm not familiar with SMF but screenshots give me InvisionFree vibes. All my favourite forums were all on InvisionFree. Is this the same thing?
  - loeber 4y ago
    SMF means Simple Machines Forum, which is a FOSS project. InvisionFree was a for-profit company. I don't know if InvisionFree ran on SMF.
- themodelplumber 4y ago
  I wasn't a fan of PhpBB either but got used to it as a user. PunBB, Flux, and MyBB were fantastic for small admin teams. There was very little overhead for modification and maintenance. I ran a PunBB board for over a decade. It was extremely lightweight, and if you left off the footer ID & version info in the template you wouldn't get hacked nearly as easily as with the popular systems. (One of the worst ever was when I used a Joomla-integrated forum though...that install seemed to be sniffed at by bots endlessly) (There was also a German commerical PHP board that I was paid to maintain for my city, can't remember the name but it worked really well. It's probably still around)
  - skipnup 4y ago
    WoltLab Burning Board was the one big German counterpart to PhpBB, quite popular in Germany at the time.
  - jasongill 4y ago
    I also ran a PunBB forum (an automotive forum) for about 6 years before selling the site to VerticalScope. It was the largest PunBB-powered site for quite some time, by number of posts and users, and considering that it's still running the same old version of PunBB to this day, I'm guessing that the VerticalScope team couldn't figure out how to migrate it to InvisionPowerBoard. Shocked they haven't been hacked and defaced, but PunBB never seemed to attract much attention compared to PhpBB and others.
mig39 4y ago
I still run 4 different web forums, and they still get a bunch of traffic. They all used to be phpBB back in the day, but all were migrated to Discourse a long time ago.
- o_____________o 4y ago
  How do you like Discourse? I was looking at that vs Flarum over the last few days.
masenf 4y ago
In the last month, I’ve been experimentally replacing my use of Trello, stickies, and todo lists with a phpBB instance. So far I’m the only user, but it’s a surprisingly nice system for keeping track of notes and regular status updates on my projects. And when I need to collaborate with someone, the permission system is quite nice as well. The fact that it’s free, mature, and relatively easy to install and maintain are what led me to give it a try. I have plans to eventually write a kanban view and scheduled post plug-ins to make it a bit better project tracker.
- nvr219 4y ago
  I love this post thank you
- JasonLABS 4y ago
  I have been doing this since 2015 and, I agree! It is amazing how useful it is. I've tried various note taking apps, project management systems, etc and I keep coming back to this system of keeping notes and staying organized. The best part for me is I always have access to my notes even if I don't have my main device with me.
- _def 4y ago
  Huh now I really wonder if it would work out if you would replace Slack with a bulletin board organization wise
  - Eupraxias 4y ago
    I implemented one for my company in 2006, and it worked much better than the Slack they use now, imho.
- nstart 4y ago
  Do you think you'd feel comfortable sharing some images with redacted information to show how you are using it? Would love to peek into how a forum tool is being used in a non conventional way. Thanks!
  - 4y ago
dpedu 4y ago
I remember the days when PhpBB needed an addon for nested categories/boards, and when addons were distributed as simple php source code patches!
Ayesh 4y ago
Ah good times. These forum software were so easy to available and ubiquitous to a point that everyone and their dog had their own forum. Customizable signatures, BBcode, user flairs, reputation systems, register to download, etc all were pretty fun. The privacy was superior too. Almost nobody used their real names, and the profile pictures were crafted animated gifs. Sure they got hacked once in a while, and admins were often left paying for the servers out if their pockets or dumb banner ads. Facebook groups took everything away, and the ads were replaced with creepy personalized ones.
- timeon 4y ago
  I hated signatures. Often posts were one-line short while signature had several lines with images. It was hard to scroll and read forum like that.
  - TheCapeGreek 4y ago
    Making forum signatures for the Spore (yes, the game) forum back in 2008 was my introduction to image editing. Never got quite as good as the "pros", but I enjoyed having my own style of sig.
rhn_mk1 4y ago
PhpBB forums are in the sweet spot of permanence. What's the easiest/cheapest way to test-host a forum? Discourse wants payments, which doesn't make a lot of sense for something that might not even get used. PHP, in my recollection, has always been a pain to deploy and to take care of. Does there exist something lightweight, storing data in sqlite, not requiring JS to even operate, and easy to update? I'm talking libre ofc.
- zerocrates 4y ago
  You don't need to pay for Discourse, unless I've missed some major development. Though they do seem to heavily accentuate their hosting plans on their site now. If you're happy to use Docker then the story of hosting it is pretty easy. I wouldn't generally consider PHP a pain to deploy either for that matter, but I'm sure that all depends on your particular situation.
- Tomte 4y ago
  > Does there exist something lightweight, storing data in sqlite, not requiring JS to even operate, and easy to update? I'm talking libre ofc. I think PHPBB ticks all those boxes, doesn't it?
- GaNuongLaChanh 4y ago
  You can try asmBB, very lightweight and sqlite
krzrak 4y ago
PhpBB? Now that’s a name I’ve not heard in a long time.
alfiedotwtf 4y ago
A lot of nostalgia here, but I'm sure I'm not the only one who shudders when hearing the words "PhpBB" because of all the security vulnerabilities
- Wronnay 4y ago
  Not only that, I had a PhpBB hosting service back in the day and every update they changed something which nearly broke my service... There are some really strange things in the PhpBB codebase - I remember that the software somehow found out that I injected custom code and therefore stopped working. (My biggest problem was the upgrade from 3.0.12 to a newer version (probably 3.1) back in 2014 / 2015)
unixhero 4y ago
I jumped ship from phpbb as their develoment stalled. Then I switched to Simple Machines Forum, then development if that project stalled. Then I moved to VanillaForums, then development kind of slowed there. Now I am considering Discourse or NodeBB, which both are in an entirely different league of technology and sleekness. But now none of my friends wants to hang put in forums anymore. Oh well.
- dijit 4y ago
  To be fair; I tried migrating a population from Invision Power Board (IPB) to Discourse over 10 years ago and it did not work. The discourse software was sleek enough, speedy enough etc; but it was too far a disconnect from how forums of yore worked. Discourse is much better suited for QnA over Discussions where each comment has equal merit; there was also an emphasis on 'personality' with older forum technology which promoted some kitsch graphics design and made people cultivate a persona (which became a reason to put more effort into replies to things). I'm not sure if I can correctly articulate what I mean, but, just be aware: Here may be dragons.
- hal0 4y ago
  All these names I haven't heard muttered in years. What about vBulletin? Conforums?
  - unixhero 4y ago
    vbulletin is not open source and not free, although a legacy and good choice for those kinds of scenarios. Conforums seems defunct
  - CM30 4y ago
    vBulletin got kinda killed by the Internet Brands buyout and vB4 and the vB5 upgrades. It still exists and you can still use it, but very few new sites do anymore.
- networked 4y ago
  Open source Vanilla seems to not be doing well: https://open.vanillaforums.com/discussion/39204/where-do-we-go-now https://open.vanillaforums.com/discussion/39204/where-do-we-.... It's a shame. I thought it had a nice UI: mobile-friendly, not very flashy, around 300K per page (less if assets are cached), rendered on the server. I wanted to migrate my FluxBB forum to Vanilla, since FluxBB is effectively discontinued in favor of Flarum. If I migrate my forum now, it will probably be to Flarum. https://www.unitedbsd.com/ https://www.unitedbsd.com/ runs it, and I seem to like the experience of browsing it more than Discourse forums (edit: but I still prefer paginated forums without infinite scrolling). It also helps that Flarum has lower system requirements than Discourse. The forum migration tool https://github.com/linc/nitro-porter https://github.com/linc/nitro-porter targets both Vanilla and Flarum, though I haven't actually attempted a migration with it, so I don't know how useful it really is. I rejected NodeBB because MongoDB is no longer developed under a free license. I'll list some other forum software I have considered in case you find it useful: Fossil Forums (https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/forum.wiki https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/forum.wiki), nimforum (https://github.com/nim-lang/nimforum https://github.com/nim-lang/nimforum), Talkyard (https://github.com/debiki/talkyard https://github.com/debiki/talkyard), Misago (https://github.com/rafalp/Misago https://github.com/rafalp/Misago), FlaskBB (https://github.com/flaskbb/flaskbb https://github.com/flaskbb/flaskbb). All of these have less momentum behind them than Flarum. Most are lightweight. I found it very appropriate that nimforum's name is inconsistently capitalized. :-) I am still kind of amazed that Fossil has integrated a forum and a chatroom. During my research I also found an interesting fork of SMF: https://github.com/elkarte/Elkarte https://github.com/elkarte/Elkarte.
ayajibo 4y ago
I used to use this longtime ago. It's still ugly.
esher 4y ago
This has been mentioned before here, but I would like to high https://flarum.org/ https://flarum.org/ as a more modern (looking) alternative, minus the nostalgia of course.
sourcecodeplz 4y ago
Ah the OG. Does anyone knowledgeable about forum software know witch is the most resource-less intensive? PhpBB, SMF, MyBB, Xenforo, BBPress (or others)? I know with SMF, one can disable lots of features and make it lightweight, but would like to know more.
- pqb 4y ago
  I would mention PunBB[0], which can run on a potato computer. It was often configured to use a SQLite database, so it seems very light in terms of CPU, disk and memory usage. And source code? It is very thin too. Also Flarum [1] looks good in terms of being lightweight. It is based on Laravel Framework, so it has own pros and cons, but thanks to wise implementation of mithril.js, it feels very fast from a user perspective. On a different spectrum, I would list Discourse [2], followed by Invision Power Board (IPB) [3]. Both require 2GB+ of RAM and a good CPU to run the server. [0]: https://punbb.informer.com/forums/ https://punbb.informer.com/forums/ [1]: https://flarum.org/ https://flarum.org/ [2]: https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/main/docs/INSTALL-cloud.md https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/main/docs/INSTAL... [3]: https://invisioncommunity.com/ https://invisioncommunity.com/
pojntfx 4y ago
If someone here is interested in using phpBB's interface with a much more modern backend written in Rust, check out lemmyBB: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmyBB https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmyBB
Ralfp 4y ago
A shameless self promotion, but for last 10 years or so I've been developing and maintaining my own forum software, Misago: https://misago-project.org/ https://misago-project.org/ It's build with Python and React, so obviously not so easy to setup like PHP solutions, but there's also a magic docker setup that you can just git clone to your server and get forum running in minutes. But with Misago I am trying to find a sweet spot between "new wave" of forum software and old solutions. So there's plenty of interactivity in the UI that JS provides and there's markdown support, but there's also classic pagination instead of infinite scrolling.
rcconf 4y ago
Every time I google something, I tend to add "reddit" at the end of it so I can see discussion between individuals and I hope I find an expert that can help me either understand or purchase something. I tend to also do this with "hacker news" for things related to technology. Recently, I was looking for Espresso Machines and found https://www.home-barista.com/forums/ https://www.home-barista.com/forums/ which is actually powered by PhpBB. The amount of knowledge and information on that forum is changing the way I research products and search for things on the internet. I've learned so much deep knowledge on espresso machines and I've gone down rabbit holes of how water affects espresso machines. It gave me a deep feeling of how awful Google and reddit are at having good quality information from experts. The users on the barista forums are just experts and have been around the forum for a very long time. It's almost like Reddit and Google are fast food and Home Barista (and other forums that use PhpBB and similar technologies) are quality, home cooked meal past down from generations of knowledge. Now I exclusively try to find forums for a specific topic and try to find the experts on those forums to get my information, usually through a forum. Long live PhpBB and forums and these experts on there, it's a breath of fresh air exploring the internet away from the major social media products (including Google honestly.) Note: The fact that home-barista is using PhpBB is purely ironic, I did not know it was, this post just reminded me of a forum that had a wealth of information and that forums are great even in 2023, heh!
rchaud 4y ago
PhpBB forums are the closest virtual parallel to "third places" (places that are not the home or work/school). I'm on a soccer messageboard, and it's the only place on the internet where I recognize handles. Like Cheers, it's a place to chat, where everybody knows your name. You aren't crowded out by a thousand new people joining every day. Social media-centric tech bloggers turned this into a disadvantage ("low growth"), where for actual users, it's a godsend. Brigading and derailaing cthreads, common on Reddit and Twitter, is largely impossible because you have to set up a user account first, and that friction drives away all but the most dedicated trolls. I've had a Reddit account for 10 years and don't know a single person on it. It's no different from Facebook or Twitter, they're all just a amorphous chattering mass.

272 points by neustradamus 4y ago

Forum software of phpBB's era got so many things right that we get wrong today. I'm glad it's still chugging along. It's valuable software, even if that value is contained to small islands outside of the continents that are the mega-platforms of social media.

user3939382 4y ago
We didn’t know at the time we were in a golden age of federation that would soon be evaporating. Discoverability may have been less than say a subreddit, but the mods were in practically 100% control of the rules.
bluedino 4y ago
One bad thing about old forum threads is a lot of the images are lost. Disk space and bandwidth were still expensive back then. The free image hosts mostly disappeared or started charging (so many forums have dead photobucket links).
- Gigachad 4y ago
  They also got flooded with spam and were regularly hacked.
  - kijin 4y ago
    Which really didn't matter back then. People just deleted the spam, recovered from backup, patched whatever flaw they found, and changed passwords. It wasn't the end of the world.
    - Gigachad 4y ago
      Lots of the forums I used to use died this way. The site owners eventually got tired of having to janny the site daily to fight an endless wave of attacks. It's all moved to reddit and discord these days.
      - mattl 4y ago
        Janny?
        scrlk 4y ago
        Janitors (shortened to "janny") are a part of 4chan's moderation team. Seems like the slang has bled out to incorporate all types of volunteer moderators.
        mattl 4y ago
        Ah, makes sense.
    - pixl97 4y ago
      Spam did matter when it didnt stop. No one wanted to engage in a full time job of deleting bullshit. This is one of the reasons forums disappeared and people went to larger sites that tended to have much larger moderation staff
- BlueTemplar 4y ago
  Same thing is going to happen again once imgur shuts down. While the pictures that were actually hosted on the forum itself are usually fine.
  - z57 4y ago
    That will be a day of days. imgur shutting down will be like someone shaking your internet Etch-A-Sketch. The internet post imgur will have a completely different vibe.
    - Medox 4y ago
      Sounds like a job for archive.org
      - esskay 4y ago
        That doesn't solve the issue of the millions of embeds and links though.
        account42 4y ago
        It's kind of sad that browsers still have no concept of the passage of time (except to intentionally break things for security). One of the many things that a browser focused on being a browser for hyperlinked documents could do better than our current app delivery platforms calling themselves browsers.
        BlueTemplar 4y ago
        Why not ? (Besides that of course it would be probably easier for the Archive to deal with multimedia inside the same website.)
        esskay 4y ago
        What do you mean why not? If a forum embeds an image from imgur and imgur ceases to exist the image stops working. It doesn't matter if archive.org has a copy, you wont be able to see it without manually going to archive.org to find every image by its former embed url (which likley isnt archived as thats a different url to the one you see on their site).
timeon 4y ago
Not sure how it was in last decade but there were two things I remember that I didn't like about phpBB forums: - lack of threads - signature noise
POPOSYS 4y ago
But people using forums also got so many things wrong. One thing that really went wrong: people using forums as issue trackers. Just look at the mega topics that exist for one $thing with never-ending addition of posts that are a nightmare to search and extract knowledge from. Instead of using an issue tracker, they post more and more messages to the one forum topic dedicated to $thing. Some hardware related forums still do that. Ultra long topics with hundreds of posts, somewhere between page 157-178 there are some nuggets you will never find. Also the extremely annoying UIs - as an example look at the minimal navigation / pagination buttons in many forums. Well, OK, that started to change slowly, but still we have horrible UIs everywhere. Annoyances like most space on a forum page still wasted for unimportant side information do exist - some designs are so bad that the most important information has the smallest font size. But while the good old slick and dirty PHP forums still delivered with all that warts, mostly because these people still knew how to program fast software, then came the ruby programmers and brought us a vision of forum software that should get a premium lifetime award for coding horrors. JS heavy frontend with grotesque front-end anti-patterns and a monstrous bloated backend that breaks when your forum actually has some attention. The time of "internet software as a satirical art form" has not stopped until today. So hopefully the old-school PHP devs can easily iron out the annoyances of the past and still deliver internet software that is fast and usable. Happy release party, PhpBB!
- sourcecodeplz 4y ago
  > Ultra long topics with hundreds of posts, somewhere between page 157-178 there are some nuggets you will never find. Yep, you have to go through each page to find them all, it's called research.
- antifa 4y ago
  > Just look at the mega topics that exist for one $thing with never-ending addition of posts that are a nightmare to search and extract knowledge from. That's basically the default experience of discord.

nigamanth 4y ago

This goes on to prove that PHP is still relevant today. No matter how many new frameworks come up, we all know PHP anyways.

elashri 4y ago
I think this applies mainly because of WordPress, not PhpBB and any other project.
- hunter2_ 4y ago
  Drupal is up there, maybe not as a household name like WordPress, but in some big organizations.
  - chippiewill 4y ago
    Drupal's been on the heavy decline over the past 10 years. Drupal 8/9/10 might turn it around now that Drupal 7 is set to officially retire eventually but it's not had the staying power in the way Wordpress has. Drupal doesn't really seem to have an ecosystem left anymore.
    - thejosh 4y ago
      It had some decent developers and ecosystem around it a few years ago, but honestly a lot of bureaucracy and drama killed a lot of the enthusiasm in the project and contributed modules for many.
      - chx 4y ago
        ...
        geerlingguy 4y ago
        Always good to see you here chx! I hope you are doing well these days.

ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago

I'm surprised it's still around. They did a good job on the software, but discussion forums seemed to go belly-up, after Facebook took off (MySpace, too, I guess). Maybe they will make a comeback?

derefr 4y ago
phpBB deployments are still popular, among other places, on Tor hidden sites, because the Tor Browser disables client-side Javascript, and phpBB was written before Javascript was something you could architect a whole application around, so any JS functionality in phpBB is just optional graceful enhancement.
gnulinux 4y ago
Forums were doing just fine during the golden age of Facebook, at least in my generation. I thought what made forums go belly-up was reddit. Once reddit became a mainstream social media, there was no need for niche forums as anyone could just create a subreddit.
- jamesfinlayson 4y ago
  Could be - at least the communities I used to participate in seem to use Discord now.
  - vanderZwan 4y ago
    I really dislike using Discord and I can't even figure out why (so it's probably me). I do know it's not the part where it is a chat app per se - I'm happily using Zulip, managing with Slack, and WhatsApp, Telegram and Slack all have their place. But something about the UI/UX of chatting in Discord just makes it a stream of conversations where I can barely follow what's going on. Having said that in many contexts a forum with threads that have a clear topic are just so much more of an appropriate solution than chat apps. I don't understand why people prefer the latter (although it does explain why I prefer Zulip since it manages to be a good hybrid in how it organizes discussions).

lolinder 4y ago

Every time I see hype about Mastodon and the fediverse I miss the phpBB days. There was something special about the interlocking network of forums that didn't need to "federate" in any formal capacity. We just joined communities we liked and formed overlapping networks like normal people do and always have done. No one at the time felt any need to try to accommodate the whole world in one venue. As someone who never understood the appeal of Twitter or Facebook, the new wave of FOSS social apps feels very alien to me.

agumonkey 4y ago
It seems that by formalizing / integrating things at the technical layer we lost something. I do miss those days, I still feel different when I interact with these old websites.
mhd 4y ago
One definining characteristic of internet media is where they rank on the "transience" spectrum. The most extreme end probably being some old school chat apps and IRC on one side, and encylopedic wiki's (not the only kind) on the other. And while both forums and Usenet were closely rooted in current conversation, they had a more long-standing meaning, too. Where you could follow whole discussions even years later and where the writing style recognized this, often having single posts that more closely resemble articles. Twitter and Mastodon seem a lot more ephemeral. As do sites like this or reddit, after all, they're concerned with "news". StackOverflow seems closer to the forums of olden time out of most of the contemporary outlets. So apart from the UI, you might miss that different conversational character resulting out of this. As a final note, I do miss Wikis like the original one, where you had a lot of long-standing information, but with a conversational bent.
- gabereiser 4y ago
  It’s not about what’s written, it’s about engagement and advertising. The more ephemeral the better! Then that fomo kicks in and engagement is through the roof. That is, until some rich guy buys it and runs it into the ground.
- 4y ago

kxrm 4y ago

I've been using PhpBB for years, started my board with them back in 2002 and the main reason I stuck with them was the versatility. I hope they can last another 20 years.

tiffanyh 4y ago

HN, the most popular forum for hackers. Long-live forum software :)

ThatMedicIsASpy 4y ago
until you try to comment/post on a few week old post. HN is not a forum
- iinnPP 4y ago
  I never used PHPBB, but I did use the feature-strict PunBB(and then fork FluxBB). Both of those software allowed you to order threads by date, where posts were no longer able to be used to "BUMP." Several categories had this feature enables, including any news discussion areas and the designated shitpost area. HN and PunBB look quite similar. Even more so when using the orange skin.
- Findecanor 4y ago
  One thing that HN has in common with forums though, is that threads stay around for years . And that's a good thing, as there can be a lot of useful information even in old threads.

BizarreByte 4y ago

I used to despise PhpBB, at the time I thought it was vastly inferior to SMF. SMF seemed far more professional, the closest you could get to vbulletin while being free. In retrospect I miss it just as much. I really do mourn the loss of communities I was part of, I even owned one for a short while. The friends, the discussions, the projects, all lost to time.

dankwizard 4y ago
I'm not familiar with SMF but screenshots give me InvisionFree vibes. All my favourite forums were all on InvisionFree. Is this the same thing?
- loeber 4y ago
  SMF means Simple Machines Forum, which is a FOSS project. InvisionFree was a for-profit company. I don't know if InvisionFree ran on SMF.
themodelplumber 4y ago
I wasn't a fan of PhpBB either but got used to it as a user. PunBB, Flux, and MyBB were fantastic for small admin teams. There was very little overhead for modification and maintenance. I ran a PunBB board for over a decade. It was extremely lightweight, and if you left off the footer ID & version info in the template you wouldn't get hacked nearly as easily as with the popular systems. (One of the worst ever was when I used a Joomla-integrated forum though...that install seemed to be sniffed at by bots endlessly) (There was also a German commerical PHP board that I was paid to maintain for my city, can't remember the name but it worked really well. It's probably still around)
- skipnup 4y ago
  WoltLab Burning Board was the one big German counterpart to PhpBB, quite popular in Germany at the time.
- jasongill 4y ago
  I also ran a PunBB forum (an automotive forum) for about 6 years before selling the site to VerticalScope. It was the largest PunBB-powered site for quite some time, by number of posts and users, and considering that it's still running the same old version of PunBB to this day, I'm guessing that the VerticalScope team couldn't figure out how to migrate it to InvisionPowerBoard. Shocked they haven't been hacked and defaced, but PunBB never seemed to attract much attention compared to PhpBB and others.

mig39 4y ago

I still run 4 different web forums, and they still get a bunch of traffic. They all used to be phpBB back in the day, but all were migrated to Discourse a long time ago.

o_____________o 4y ago
How do you like Discourse? I was looking at that vs Flarum over the last few days.

masenf 4y ago

In the last month, I’ve been experimentally replacing my use of Trello, stickies, and todo lists with a phpBB instance. So far I’m the only user, but it’s a surprisingly nice system for keeping track of notes and regular status updates on my projects. And when I need to collaborate with someone, the permission system is quite nice as well. The fact that it’s free, mature, and relatively easy to install and maintain are what led me to give it a try. I have plans to eventually write a kanban view and scheduled post plug-ins to make it a bit better project tracker.

nvr219 4y ago
I love this post thank you
JasonLABS 4y ago
I have been doing this since 2015 and, I agree! It is amazing how useful it is. I've tried various note taking apps, project management systems, etc and I keep coming back to this system of keeping notes and staying organized. The best part for me is I always have access to my notes even if I don't have my main device with me.
_def 4y ago
Huh now I really wonder if it would work out if you would replace Slack with a bulletin board organization wise
- Eupraxias 4y ago
  I implemented one for my company in 2006, and it worked much better than the Slack they use now, imho.
nstart 4y ago
Do you think you'd feel comfortable sharing some images with redacted information to show how you are using it? Would love to peek into how a forum tool is being used in a non conventional way. Thanks!
- 4y ago

dpedu 4y ago

I remember the days when PhpBB needed an addon for nested categories/boards, and when addons were distributed as simple php source code patches!

Ayesh 4y ago

Ah good times. These forum software were so easy to available and ubiquitous to a point that everyone and their dog had their own forum. Customizable signatures, BBcode, user flairs, reputation systems, register to download, etc all were pretty fun. The privacy was superior too. Almost nobody used their real names, and the profile pictures were crafted animated gifs. Sure they got hacked once in a while, and admins were often left paying for the servers out if their pockets or dumb banner ads. Facebook groups took everything away, and the ads were replaced with creepy personalized ones.

timeon 4y ago
I hated signatures. Often posts were one-line short while signature had several lines with images. It was hard to scroll and read forum like that.
- TheCapeGreek 4y ago
  Making forum signatures for the Spore (yes, the game) forum back in 2008 was my introduction to image editing. Never got quite as good as the "pros", but I enjoyed having my own style of sig.

rhn_mk1 4y ago

PhpBB forums are in the sweet spot of permanence. What's the easiest/cheapest way to test-host a forum? Discourse wants payments, which doesn't make a lot of sense for something that might not even get used. PHP, in my recollection, has always been a pain to deploy and to take care of. Does there exist something lightweight, storing data in sqlite, not requiring JS to even operate, and easy to update? I'm talking libre ofc.

zerocrates 4y ago
You don't need to pay for Discourse, unless I've missed some major development. Though they do seem to heavily accentuate their hosting plans on their site now. If you're happy to use Docker then the story of hosting it is pretty easy. I wouldn't generally consider PHP a pain to deploy either for that matter, but I'm sure that all depends on your particular situation.
Tomte 4y ago
> Does there exist something lightweight, storing data in sqlite, not requiring JS to even operate, and easy to update? I'm talking libre ofc. I think PHPBB ticks all those boxes, doesn't it?
GaNuongLaChanh 4y ago
You can try asmBB, very lightweight and sqlite

krzrak 4y ago

PhpBB? Now that’s a name I’ve not heard in a long time.

alfiedotwtf 4y ago

A lot of nostalgia here, but I'm sure I'm not the only one who shudders when hearing the words "PhpBB" because of all the security vulnerabilities

Wronnay 4y ago
Not only that, I had a PhpBB hosting service back in the day and every update they changed something which nearly broke my service... There are some really strange things in the PhpBB codebase - I remember that the software somehow found out that I injected custom code and therefore stopped working. (My biggest problem was the upgrade from 3.0.12 to a newer version (probably 3.1) back in 2014 / 2015)

unixhero 4y ago

I jumped ship from phpbb as their develoment stalled. Then I switched to Simple Machines Forum, then development if that project stalled. Then I moved to VanillaForums, then development kind of slowed there. Now I am considering Discourse or NodeBB, which both are in an entirely different league of technology and sleekness. But now none of my friends wants to hang put in forums anymore. Oh well.

dijit 4y ago
To be fair; I tried migrating a population from Invision Power Board (IPB) to Discourse over 10 years ago and it did not work. The discourse software was sleek enough, speedy enough etc; but it was too far a disconnect from how forums of yore worked. Discourse is much better suited for QnA over Discussions where each comment has equal merit; there was also an emphasis on 'personality' with older forum technology which promoted some kitsch graphics design and made people cultivate a persona (which became a reason to put more effort into replies to things). I'm not sure if I can correctly articulate what I mean, but, just be aware: Here may be dragons.
hal0 4y ago
All these names I haven't heard muttered in years. What about vBulletin? Conforums?
- unixhero 4y ago
  vbulletin is not open source and not free, although a legacy and good choice for those kinds of scenarios. Conforums seems defunct
- CM30 4y ago
  vBulletin got kinda killed by the Internet Brands buyout and vB4 and the vB5 upgrades. It still exists and you can still use it, but very few new sites do anymore.
networked 4y ago
Open source Vanilla seems to not be doing well: https://open.vanillaforums.com/discussion/39204/where-do-we-go-now https://open.vanillaforums.com/discussion/39204/where-do-we-.... It's a shame. I thought it had a nice UI: mobile-friendly, not very flashy, around 300K per page (less if assets are cached), rendered on the server. I wanted to migrate my FluxBB forum to Vanilla, since FluxBB is effectively discontinued in favor of Flarum. If I migrate my forum now, it will probably be to Flarum. https://www.unitedbsd.com/ https://www.unitedbsd.com/ runs it, and I seem to like the experience of browsing it more than Discourse forums (edit: but I still prefer paginated forums without infinite scrolling). It also helps that Flarum has lower system requirements than Discourse. The forum migration tool https://github.com/linc/nitro-porter https://github.com/linc/nitro-porter targets both Vanilla and Flarum, though I haven't actually attempted a migration with it, so I don't know how useful it really is. I rejected NodeBB because MongoDB is no longer developed under a free license. I'll list some other forum software I have considered in case you find it useful: Fossil Forums (https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/forum.wiki https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/forum.wiki), nimforum (https://github.com/nim-lang/nimforum https://github.com/nim-lang/nimforum), Talkyard (https://github.com/debiki/talkyard https://github.com/debiki/talkyard), Misago (https://github.com/rafalp/Misago https://github.com/rafalp/Misago), FlaskBB (https://github.com/flaskbb/flaskbb https://github.com/flaskbb/flaskbb). All of these have less momentum behind them than Flarum. Most are lightweight. I found it very appropriate that nimforum's name is inconsistently capitalized. :-) I am still kind of amazed that Fossil has integrated a forum and a chatroom. During my research I also found an interesting fork of SMF: https://github.com/elkarte/Elkarte https://github.com/elkarte/Elkarte.

ayajibo 4y ago

I used to use this longtime ago. It's still ugly.

esher 4y ago

This has been mentioned before here, but I would like to high https://flarum.org/ https://flarum.org/ as a more modern (looking) alternative, minus the nostalgia of course.

sourcecodeplz 4y ago

Ah the OG. Does anyone knowledgeable about forum software know witch is the most resource-less intensive? PhpBB, SMF, MyBB, Xenforo, BBPress (or others)? I know with SMF, one can disable lots of features and make it lightweight, but would like to know more.

pqb 4y ago
I would mention PunBB[0], which can run on a potato computer. It was often configured to use a SQLite database, so it seems very light in terms of CPU, disk and memory usage. And source code? It is very thin too. Also Flarum [1] looks good in terms of being lightweight. It is based on Laravel Framework, so it has own pros and cons, but thanks to wise implementation of mithril.js, it feels very fast from a user perspective. On a different spectrum, I would list Discourse [2], followed by Invision Power Board (IPB) [3]. Both require 2GB+ of RAM and a good CPU to run the server. [0]: https://punbb.informer.com/forums/ https://punbb.informer.com/forums/ [1]: https://flarum.org/ https://flarum.org/ [2]: https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/main/docs/INSTALL-cloud.md https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/main/docs/INSTAL... [3]: https://invisioncommunity.com/ https://invisioncommunity.com/

pojntfx 4y ago

If someone here is interested in using phpBB's interface with a much more modern backend written in Rust, check out lemmyBB: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmyBB https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmyBB

Ralfp 4y ago

A shameless self promotion, but for last 10 years or so I've been developing and maintaining my own forum software, Misago: https://misago-project.org/ https://misago-project.org/ It's build with Python and React, so obviously not so easy to setup like PHP solutions, but there's also a magic docker setup that you can just git clone to your server and get forum running in minutes. But with Misago I am trying to find a sweet spot between "new wave" of forum software and old solutions. So there's plenty of interactivity in the UI that JS provides and there's markdown support, but there's also classic pagination instead of infinite scrolling.

rcconf 4y ago

Every time I google something, I tend to add "reddit" at the end of it so I can see discussion between individuals and I hope I find an expert that can help me either understand or purchase something. I tend to also do this with "hacker news" for things related to technology. Recently, I was looking for Espresso Machines and found https://www.home-barista.com/forums/ https://www.home-barista.com/forums/ which is actually powered by PhpBB. The amount of knowledge and information on that forum is changing the way I research products and search for things on the internet. I've learned so much deep knowledge on espresso machines and I've gone down rabbit holes of how water affects espresso machines. It gave me a deep feeling of how awful Google and reddit are at having good quality information from experts. The users on the barista forums are just experts and have been around the forum for a very long time. It's almost like Reddit and Google are fast food and Home Barista (and other forums that use PhpBB and similar technologies) are quality, home cooked meal past down from generations of knowledge. Now I exclusively try to find forums for a specific topic and try to find the experts on those forums to get my information, usually through a forum. Long live PhpBB and forums and these experts on there, it's a breath of fresh air exploring the internet away from the major social media products (including Google honestly.) Note: The fact that home-barista is using PhpBB is purely ironic, I did not know it was, this post just reminded me of a forum that had a wealth of information and that forums are great even in 2023, heh!

rchaud 4y ago

PhpBB forums are the closest virtual parallel to "third places" (places that are not the home or work/school). I'm on a soccer messageboard, and it's the only place on the internet where I recognize handles. Like Cheers, it's a place to chat, where everybody knows your name. You aren't crowded out by a thousand new people joining every day. Social media-centric tech bloggers turned this into a disadvantage ("low growth"), where for actual users, it's a godsend. Brigading and derailaing cthreads, common on Reddit and Twitter, is largely impossible because you have to set up a user account first, and that friction drives away all but the most dedicated trolls. I've had a Reddit account for 10 years and don't know a single person on it. It's no different from Facebook or Twitter, they're all just a amorphous chattering mass.