21 ms·

PhpBB

161 points by rpastuszak 3y ago

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
azangru 3y ago
Oh yes, it brings happy memories.
thiscatis 3y ago
Modding phpBB and starting new forums using phpBB (and later Invision Community) got me into php dev and basically the job and career I now have. Such a great product for building communities. It would be so good having this feeling again browsing forums on this software. The Subsilver theme was iconic and legendary.
- subblue 3y ago
  That's made my afternoon! I had good fun making the original subsilver and prosilver themes all those years ago :)
  - green-salt 3y ago
    I loved those themes!
  - thiscatis 3y ago
    Wow, thank you.
- prox 3y ago
  Templating was such a drag though as a designer. Don’t know how it is now. I don’t think I saw many exciting designs that veered away from the distinctive phpbb look. You could always tell.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    I remember a few pretty big sites that templated the living daylights out of it for commenting/etc, but now many seem to use Xenforo instead.
- Macha 3y ago
  The mods being distributed as manual diff application instructions and then auto mod installers became a thing. Also called all caps MODs to distinguish them from forum moderators.
  - dbbk 3y ago
    This is the hardest nostalgia. I'd forgotten about the manual diff! I was doing this at 13 and was basically what got me started in PHP development in general.
    - progbits 3y ago
      Oh yes! Same for Wordpress. And then you try to combine two mods but the patches don't merge cleanly. I remember when Drupal introduced actual plugin hooks how revolutionary that felt :D
    - ljm 3y ago
      And doing the equivalent of partial compilation by just dragging and dropping your php install over FTP and telling it to ignore the unchanged files. Then writing .htaccess files everywhere to tell Apache what to do if you had a 'front controller' pattern. 20 years later and people are doing CGI through WASM or lambda so they can use their language of choice. Full circle as always.
- burntsushi 3y ago
  Same. But for vBulletin. I then went on to build my own forum software (because who didn't?): http://web.archive.org/web/20040523030817/http://www.webtrickscentral.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/20040523030817/http://www.webtric...
  - Ralfp 3y ago
    I remember wtcBB! Such a neat little script, reminded me a lot of vBulletin 2 :D
  - mostlysimilar 3y ago
    Same here! Originally phpBB, then IPB 1.3, then vBulletin. Good times. :) I was entirely obsessed with this space when I was a teenager/young adult. I would search out and try every forum software I could get my hands on, and of course (because who didn't) made my own.
  - thesuitonym 3y ago
    God that is peak mid-00s design. Wonderful job, you hit me right in the nostalgia.
  - deanc 3y ago
    Same. Used to moderate the official vbulletin.org with some good people. This got me started in my career and I would not be where I am today without all that time spent learning the internals of vBulletin. Of course, it's a shitshow nowadays after the company took it over and the majority of good people (including developers) created XenForo. I have not been involved for over a decade :)
    - burntsushi 3y ago
      That's amazing. I spent a fair bit of time on vbulletin.org (I think) back in the day. Wasn't a huge poster, but lurked a lot and remember reading Kier's posts.
  - whalesalad 3y ago
    that era of three column layouts, solid borders, pixel graphics, tiny text, etc. is so nostalgic
- lsiunsuex 3y ago
  Same - started using phpBB in 2000? 2001? Started my career in web development.
  - partiallypro 3y ago
    Same here, phpBB and vBulletin are basically what kick started my career, though I had built a ton of small static html sites before when I was in HS. I built a small but still pretty big community. I think the board ended with ~30k users, not all active, but still. I only just shut it down a few years ago. Reddit essentially killed it, and once I actually got a job it was harder to maintain my presence there and keep up with the personalities. Never made a dime from it, but it ended up being a solid investment. I still have all of the files, etc, the database is a monster. So, I could theoretically put it back up. Took it from phpBB to vBulletin 3.6 to 4 to 5, so it was an older and long lasting. I remember setting it up my freshman year in college ('06) taking advantage of a protest of moderators on a different board (they were reading user's PMs). Some of my favorite internet memories came from internet forums. The thing I always hated about vB though is that even a minor update could cause part of a custom theme to break, and the CP felt dated, even in the early 2000s. Finding a theme template or option was so overly complicated.
- ljm 3y ago
  I can also thank phpBB for kicking off my career. In the mid-2000s I spent a lot of time on a few specialist gaming forums, but also a webdev forum where I was sharing what I learned about XHTML and the new CSS with other newbies. JavaScript back then was a total obscurity - I didn't actually learn it until maybe 6 years later because, before then, everything was rendered by the server and you'd just copy DHTML snippets for silly things. Someone approached me to help modify their phpBB forum and while I did that as a hobby for a short while, they were also the first people to pay me for it. Basically validated my work and put me on the career path I have now.
- yesimahuman 3y ago
  Came here to say this! I hacked phpBB to build a “Facebook before Facebook” for my friends in high school. Added features like a poetry authoring tool, turn based games, and a blog feature. While I don’t use php any more I absolutely would not be where I am today without phpBB!
consultutah 3y ago
That's awesome! My first memory of PhpBB was using it for a developer job board in Utah and adding a VoiceXML script to it so folks could call a number and have the jobs read out to them - circa 2001-2002?
lockhouse 3y ago
Honestly, at this point I think the post Reddit internet very well could be a return to lots of independent PhpBB powered forums and Discord groups. Unlike when Digg destroyed itself there just really isn’t a single heir apparent.
- hombre_fatal 3y ago
  If a bunch of independent traditional forums was such a compelling experience, you have to ask yourself why Reddit was so successful despite them. The hay day of even large forums like Neogaf and SomethingAwful has also passed. The reality is that registering to N forums to discuss M topics isn't very compelling. And even a large forum with a diverse off-topic section can't compete with the long tails of Reddit subreddits where people can come together to make a forum on any topic at any time with zero friction participation. So traditional forums will keep losing to something like Reddit in the future just like they did in the past, though they still have their own niche.
  - bunkerbewohner 3y ago
    One thing that’s different today is authentication options. Modern APIs (eg WebAuthn), Oauth, passkeys, WebID… Also password managers were not as ubiquitous as they are today. I think there’s the potential to make using many different sites a lot more frictionless nowadays. Maybe the only missing part would be an aggregator to keep track of the different communities.
    - chongli 3y ago
      Those technologies may be frictionless for users to sign on, but they're not frictionless for administrators to deploy. Creating a new subreddit is as simple as clicking a button and filling in half a dozen fields or so, plus toggling some checkboxes, and you're done! Plus it's really easy for users to find your new subreddit via the site search. Just think of what it takes to get a new forum going: purchasing a domain name, setting up hosting, installing the forum software, setting up the aforementioned authentication APIs, dealing with SEO so people can actually find your site on Google (that one seems almost impossible now). It's absolutely dizzying. At least something like Lemmy solves all of this for you, bringing you back to a Reddit-like level of effort.
65 3y ago
I miss PhpBB. So much more well organized than Reddit or Discord or Instagram or Twitter. It feels like we've lost user experience sensibilities from the mid 2000s and now rely on algorithms and feeds to give us things we may or may not want. Hashtags and flair never made any real sense compared to threads and topics.
- coldpie 3y ago
  Forums are still around. Less popular, sure, and definitely a much smaller fraction of the entire online footprint. But if it's the experience you want, you can still get it. I've been on the Something Awful forums for almost 2 decades at this point, and there are definitely others.
neverminder 3y ago
Discourse is a good modern alternative.
- BasedAnon 3y ago
  Discourse is the single worst forum software I've ever had the displeasure of using. Everything is difficult to navigate and hard to discern. It's as if someone actively sought out to create the worst user experience.
- Kelteseth 3y ago
  This. NodeBB made me switch to Discourse, because it was a nightmare to update and backup.
- raun1 3y ago
  You know, I actually actively dislike Discourse's UX. I've always found there to be a cognitive load to usage that I never found with PhpBB, other older forum software, or Reddit. I think my issue with it has to do with too clean of a UI, not enough visual hierarchy, delineation between post replies, etc.
- scblock 3y ago
  I only realized yesterday that all the company web support forums I use are using Discourse, and I really hate the UI. Information density is low and infinite scrolling is a usability disaster.
- hpb42 3y ago
  I'd say that Discourse is an alternative, some people consider it good, but I personally don't like it. What I like in PhpBB forums I joined is the organization of topics, usually hierarchical; balance of information density, not too high, not to low; good pagination that is fast to load; ctrl-f does what you expect: search in current page; theming that usually makes each forum look unique; profile and signature customization; no gamification of usage; and probably many other stuff I forgot. Many of these things are personal and YMMV of course.
- worldofmatthew 3y ago
alexjplant 3y ago
I was very into deploying and modding PhpBB when I was in middle school. I learned PHP because of it (though I didn't build any substantial mods) and how to work with RDBMSes, Unix filesystems, HTML, etc. The sites that I built never engendered much community interaction though. I was never a fan of Reddit and find traditional forums much easier to navigate. I also think that the slight friction involved in creating a separate account for these sites instead of re-using the same one across multiple lends itself better to building tight-knit communities. I hope that these systems make a comeback.
- hk1337 3y ago
  I liked the modding but I preferred Invision Power Board, at the time it looked really nice out of the box and had a lot of good features. PunBB was really nice too, was really clean looking both in the UI and the backend code.
- guestbest 3y ago
  Reddit is easier to read (comment threading) and is text only, which is its unique value proposition. PhpBB forum, which I ironically use way more than Reddit these days, have almost no threading and limits to 10 posts per page with no hiding posts unless block all user posts, and ad banners everywhere. But I welcome any return to self-hosting, even though most site require membership until a user can view full scale images.
  - lagniappe 3y ago
    Reddit comments can contain images that display with the text, without requiring a click to open. Previously it was text only, but that is no longer the case.
    - guestbest 3y ago
      That is only for new topics/posts. They don’t display in the comments in the vanilla user experience.
zackees 3y ago
I don’t like the flat style comments of sites like PhpBB. Is there an equivalent open source solution that does reddit style hierarchical comments?
- bombcar 3y ago
  HackerNews? It was never fully open sourced but there are older versions: http://arclanguage.org/install http://arclanguage.org/install
  - stock_toaster 3y ago
    lobste.rs maybe? https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters
  - LinuxBender 3y ago
    Another similar one I saw recently was Postmill [1a][1b] but I have not tried it. [1a] - https://postmill.xyz/ https://postmill.xyz/ [1b] - https://gitlab.com/postmill/Postmill https://gitlab.com/postmill/Postmill
- 7373737373 3y ago
  This is relatively easy to do with recursive components in Vue
  - _cenw 3y ago
    I don't think rendering is the problem.
- drannex 3y ago
  [Tildes](https://tildes.net https://tildes.net) is open source and does something like that. Not a direct 1:1 to phpBB but more like a cross between old school forums and reddit.
  - tumult 3y ago
ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago
Such an amazing tool. So much value this single free and open source has given the world. Much more than many vc backed startups combined. We need to get back to people building software instead of vc backed companies building software. I think the last decade has shown us that that is a failed experiment.
- nologic01 3y ago
  It is interesting to ponder what people might come up with given this lost decade and the countless disappointments and anti-patterns discovered. The fediverse/activitypub design is just a building block, the real difference will be made by inventing more human-centric experiences, protecting people from the online warfare, encourage the generation and preservation of good content and meaningful exchanges. I don't know if software can be designed to heal people's psyche, but this is what is needed now.
zozbot234 3y ago
Related: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmyBB https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmyBB a Fediverse frontend based on phpBB. Example instance on fedibb.ml
scblock 3y ago
Funnily enough a small collaboration group I'm part of just started a new phpBB forum to supplement our IRC chat and replace some of what we lost with reddit (most have deleted their accounts). It's really a relic, the defaults assume minuscule server resources and features and fairly limited. But presentation and use is straightforward and it fills a niche between IRC and formal documentation on the team Wiki.
rchaud 3y ago
This thing saved the 2000s Internet from being dominated by crappy blogspot.com sites.
Ralfp 3y ago
I would like to use this opportunity to also mention a forum software I am building, Misago: https://misago-project.org/ https://misago-project.org/ (GitHub: https://github.com/rafalp/Misago/ https://github.com/rafalp/Misago/) Around year ago I've started aggressively pursuing improvements to it's UX and features which to my surprise resulted in project getting new (small) wave of attention and a lot of great feedback on what else is missing and what needs changed that I am working on at. I've grown on old school forums, phpBB2, Invision Power Board 2.3, vBulletin 3 and I am trying to hit a sweet spot between old and new, taking inspiration from both other modern solutions like Discourse or Flarum, but also from latest versions of XenForo and Invision Community.
- junon 3y ago
  Every little icon on the right side has a scrollbar on mobile Android chrome.
  - Ralfp 3y ago
    Thanks. You mean icons in navbar or icons on thread list?
    - m_t 3y ago
      On the thread list. They appear briefly on Firefox android, then disappear.
- babypuncher 3y ago
  It looks like thread replies are presented sequentially rather than nested. Is this something you're looking to support in the future?
  - Ralfp 3y ago
    No, classic forums never really offered threaded discussions alike to HN or Reddit. IPB and vBulletin had "threaded" mode where you would see a tree of replies, but it would only display a single reply, requiring you to manually select next reply to see in the UI. In future I plan to track which post the poster clicked "reply" for and have UI to let you see direct replies to given posts, or see that post was made as a direct reply to other post, but I am not planning a "proper" tree view like how reddit does it. Also some good opinion pieces from Discourse's creator on the subject: https://blog.codinghorror.com/web-discussions-flat-by-design/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/web-discussions-flat-by-design... https://blog.codinghorror.com/discussions-flat-or-threaded/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/discussions-flat-or-threaded/
lcmatt 3y ago
I still run a couple of fairly popular forums which I setup coming on nearly 15 years ago now. All powered by phpBB and recently Flarum was used for the latest site. There's still demand there for smaller communities and while some members have dropped off over the years it's still the most popular way to keep in touch with the latest happenings, none of the other social networks really took any of the traffic away. I'd love to see more spring up - for me there's always more of a community feel, you get to know the regulars and everyone is there for that specific topic. It's a little clunky these days but it's still a great piece of forum software.
seydor 3y ago
Most people don't want to admit it, but running a subreddit is much more fun than running your own forum. Even if you magically had the users, you also have the FULL responsibility , up to the legal consequnces for the stuff that your users do, plus you have all the technical trouble. Reddit gives that for free to moderators. They can make any community for shits n giggles, break it, fix it, abandon it etc. and none of the real-life consequences.
- rpastuszak 3y ago
  Makes sense, although I've never considered that--the communities I modded via forums were so small / close-nit that we never had to worry about someone misbehaving. It was always "a friend of a friend" at most in terms of degrees of separation, so social pressures still applied.
- bovermyer 3y ago
  The other side of that is that people who are willing to pay the cost (time, dollars, etc.) to run a forum are generally going to be more committed to that community. It may be more fun to run a subreddit, but subreddits are also less coherent communities than forums.
- hbn 3y ago
  It's also way easier to build a community when the buy-in is clicking a "subscribe" button with an account you already have and are logged into and knowing you can unsubscribe at any time, as opposed to registering another username, giving a random site admin your email, verifying your email, trusting they're not gonna leak your info or password, etc. Plus everyone already knows how to use all the functionality, and they already have an app on their phone they can access you and posts will appear in the feed they're already checking.
  - BasedAnon 3y ago
    This can be a feature rather than a bug. One of the things that I appreciate about forums is that you actually get to build relationships that are more personable than something like Reddit, because there's more commitment involved.
ulrischa 3y ago
The mastodon for reddit. Oldie but goldie
ComputerGuru 3y ago
I actually recommend myBB [0] over phpBB for anyone looking to set up a LAMP forum. It's cleaner, better written, and possibly better maintained and with a much less scary vulnerability history. I believe it started off as an attempt to create an OSS version of IPB (or was it vB?). [0]: https://github.com/mybb/mybb https://github.com/mybb/mybb or https://mybb.com/ https://mybb.com/
- 72736379 3y ago
  myBB was my preference too- I believe it’s the latter btw (very similar look and feel vBulletin back then).
BasedAnon 3y ago
Does anyone else remember Beast? It was a pretty small time piece of forum software back in the day. The Yoyogames Forums used to run on it, even way after it had stopped being maintained until some guy with an axe to grind ('patrick') brought the site to its knees thanks to a number of security exploits that had been out in the wild for a while.
systemvoltage 3y ago
IMO Discussions on phpBB forums are much better than on voting/likes based discussion platforms. Less mob mentality.
mortenjorck 3y ago
The old PhpBB/VBulletin format has a certain familiar charm to it, but I find it hard to go back after using modern forum systems like Discourse that fix a lot of the old paradigm's UX shortcomings. Anyone have experience with Flarum (https://flarum.org https://flarum.org)? I've been peripherally aware of it for years (it it looks like it's still quite active on GitHub) and it looks like a nice lighter-weight alternative to Discourse which I know gets some flak for being resource-heavy.
- edgyquant 3y ago
  I tried flarum before but iirc it was just a single “board” and not a forum of boards like I was used to. It has a feed of threads etc and IMO these are not the “modern” things that we should use to try and actually improve forum software. Just my opinion though
asciimov 3y ago
Yeah, no... Everybody I know that once ran PhpBB stopped using it because they would always get overrun by spam bots.
- chromanoid 3y ago
  The only way we fixed this, was to use recaptcha + manual approval of the first post. but in the last days we got some AI generated posts. the manual approval method becomes harder and harder. Especially when the bots hibernate for a while before they edit spam into their posts.
whalesalad 3y ago
takes me directly back in time to hotscripts.com, mod_php and kernel 2.6
jacooper 3y ago
Honestly no body should use PhpBB when Discourse exists.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- sergiotapia 3y ago
  I kind of dislike Discourse. They hijack the ctrl+F search, they lean too heavily on "infinite load", it's just too ajaxy. I used to use old.reddit.com, so that's what I enjoy. Just load the markup and get out of the way.
- mlsmith 3y ago
  I never understood the appeal of Discourse. It feels heavy with an overutilization of negative space. The D programming language forum is a good example of a well-designed forum in my opinion.
  - jacooper 3y ago
    If you want to use something lighter, Flarum exists, modern but lightweight built using PHP. The grapheneOS forum uses, but I like discord because its more advanced with many features and integrations.
    - jacooper 3y ago
      Discourse*
- Nasreddin_Hodja 3y ago
  I don't like their infinite scrolling instead of normal pagination.
101008 3y ago
I have set up a forum in the past few months and it's so hard to find young people to participate. They may be interested in doing it but the UX seem so out of place for most of them that they won't even try. Also, the missing "app/notifications" makes them forget quickly that it exists and they may never come back.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
pythonbase 3y ago
I ran few forums on phpBB and vBulletin, spent a lot of time in flame wars. Those were the days.
marcosdumay 3y ago
I wonder if it's possible to create a Lemmy community that behaves like a PhpBB forum, that is, threads are supposed to be long-lived, so they are not sorted by age, comments are supposed to be single topic, so they are not sorted by thread, and you can jump right into the last thing you saw. It looks like a great experience to after you publish something, you just go and create a Lemmy instance (with closed down registration) to host QA forums, news discussion, and just community meetings. It looks much simpler and straight forward than managing it with all of twitter, reddit, and facebook.
- pipe01 3y ago
  Well, there's this https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmyBB https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmyBB
  - marcosdumay 3y ago
    This does create a forum out of Lemmy, but the forum behavior does not survive federation. It does not add a forum for the Lemmy community at large. My question was more on the lines of adding an enum into a community's data saying this is a forum|discussion.
dang 3y ago
Related: PhpBB 3.3.10 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34670280 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34670280 - Feb 2023 (200 comments) Ask HN: Why did phpBB forums go out of fashion? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33726098 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33726098 - Nov 2022 (42 comments) PhpBB's site hacked - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=461798 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=461798 - Feb 2009 (8 comments)
snird 3y ago
A forum is not an alternative to Reddit. In forums, exposure of topics depends only on recency. While Reddit and the likes combine recency with community upvotes. Upvotes are important and allow for automatic quality control as well as keeping important things up for more exposure, even if they are not the most recent. Forums alone are no longer the best way to go.
7ero 3y ago
what decade is this?
unixhero 3y ago
I would not recommend phpbb. Nodebb or discourse is where it is at

PhpBB

161 points by rpastuszak 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

azangru 3y ago

Oh yes, it brings happy memories.

thiscatis 3y ago

Modding phpBB and starting new forums using phpBB (and later Invision Community) got me into php dev and basically the job and career I now have. Such a great product for building communities. It would be so good having this feeling again browsing forums on this software. The Subsilver theme was iconic and legendary.

subblue 3y ago
That's made my afternoon! I had good fun making the original subsilver and prosilver themes all those years ago :)
- green-salt 3y ago
  I loved those themes!
- thiscatis 3y ago
  Wow, thank you.
prox 3y ago
Templating was such a drag though as a designer. Don’t know how it is now. I don’t think I saw many exciting designs that veered away from the distinctive phpbb look. You could always tell.
- bombcar 3y ago
  I remember a few pretty big sites that templated the living daylights out of it for commenting/etc, but now many seem to use Xenforo instead.
Macha 3y ago
The mods being distributed as manual diff application instructions and then auto mod installers became a thing. Also called all caps MODs to distinguish them from forum moderators.
- dbbk 3y ago
  This is the hardest nostalgia. I'd forgotten about the manual diff! I was doing this at 13 and was basically what got me started in PHP development in general.
  - progbits 3y ago
    Oh yes! Same for Wordpress. And then you try to combine two mods but the patches don't merge cleanly. I remember when Drupal introduced actual plugin hooks how revolutionary that felt :D
  - ljm 3y ago
    And doing the equivalent of partial compilation by just dragging and dropping your php install over FTP and telling it to ignore the unchanged files. Then writing .htaccess files everywhere to tell Apache what to do if you had a 'front controller' pattern. 20 years later and people are doing CGI through WASM or lambda so they can use their language of choice. Full circle as always.
burntsushi 3y ago
Same. But for vBulletin. I then went on to build my own forum software (because who didn't?): http://web.archive.org/web/20040523030817/http://www.webtrickscentral.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/20040523030817/http://www.webtric...
- Ralfp 3y ago
  I remember wtcBB! Such a neat little script, reminded me a lot of vBulletin 2 :D
- mostlysimilar 3y ago
  Same here! Originally phpBB, then IPB 1.3, then vBulletin. Good times. :) I was entirely obsessed with this space when I was a teenager/young adult. I would search out and try every forum software I could get my hands on, and of course (because who didn't) made my own.
- thesuitonym 3y ago
  God that is peak mid-00s design. Wonderful job, you hit me right in the nostalgia.
- deanc 3y ago
  Same. Used to moderate the official vbulletin.org with some good people. This got me started in my career and I would not be where I am today without all that time spent learning the internals of vBulletin. Of course, it's a shitshow nowadays after the company took it over and the majority of good people (including developers) created XenForo. I have not been involved for over a decade :)
  - burntsushi 3y ago
    That's amazing. I spent a fair bit of time on vbulletin.org (I think) back in the day. Wasn't a huge poster, but lurked a lot and remember reading Kier's posts.
- whalesalad 3y ago
  that era of three column layouts, solid borders, pixel graphics, tiny text, etc. is so nostalgic
lsiunsuex 3y ago
Same - started using phpBB in 2000? 2001? Started my career in web development.
- partiallypro 3y ago
  Same here, phpBB and vBulletin are basically what kick started my career, though I had built a ton of small static html sites before when I was in HS. I built a small but still pretty big community. I think the board ended with ~30k users, not all active, but still. I only just shut it down a few years ago. Reddit essentially killed it, and once I actually got a job it was harder to maintain my presence there and keep up with the personalities. Never made a dime from it, but it ended up being a solid investment. I still have all of the files, etc, the database is a monster. So, I could theoretically put it back up. Took it from phpBB to vBulletin 3.6 to 4 to 5, so it was an older and long lasting. I remember setting it up my freshman year in college ('06) taking advantage of a protest of moderators on a different board (they were reading user's PMs). Some of my favorite internet memories came from internet forums. The thing I always hated about vB though is that even a minor update could cause part of a custom theme to break, and the CP felt dated, even in the early 2000s. Finding a theme template or option was so overly complicated.
ljm 3y ago
I can also thank phpBB for kicking off my career. In the mid-2000s I spent a lot of time on a few specialist gaming forums, but also a webdev forum where I was sharing what I learned about XHTML and the new CSS with other newbies. JavaScript back then was a total obscurity - I didn't actually learn it until maybe 6 years later because, before then, everything was rendered by the server and you'd just copy DHTML snippets for silly things. Someone approached me to help modify their phpBB forum and while I did that as a hobby for a short while, they were also the first people to pay me for it. Basically validated my work and put me on the career path I have now.
yesimahuman 3y ago
Came here to say this! I hacked phpBB to build a “Facebook before Facebook” for my friends in high school. Added features like a poetry authoring tool, turn based games, and a blog feature. While I don’t use php any more I absolutely would not be where I am today without phpBB!

consultutah 3y ago

That's awesome! My first memory of PhpBB was using it for a developer job board in Utah and adding a VoiceXML script to it so folks could call a number and have the jobs read out to them - circa 2001-2002?

lockhouse 3y ago

Honestly, at this point I think the post Reddit internet very well could be a return to lots of independent PhpBB powered forums and Discord groups. Unlike when Digg destroyed itself there just really isn’t a single heir apparent.

hombre_fatal 3y ago
If a bunch of independent traditional forums was such a compelling experience, you have to ask yourself why Reddit was so successful despite them. The hay day of even large forums like Neogaf and SomethingAwful has also passed. The reality is that registering to N forums to discuss M topics isn't very compelling. And even a large forum with a diverse off-topic section can't compete with the long tails of Reddit subreddits where people can come together to make a forum on any topic at any time with zero friction participation. So traditional forums will keep losing to something like Reddit in the future just like they did in the past, though they still have their own niche.
- bunkerbewohner 3y ago
  One thing that’s different today is authentication options. Modern APIs (eg WebAuthn), Oauth, passkeys, WebID… Also password managers were not as ubiquitous as they are today. I think there’s the potential to make using many different sites a lot more frictionless nowadays. Maybe the only missing part would be an aggregator to keep track of the different communities.
  - chongli 3y ago
    Those technologies may be frictionless for users to sign on, but they're not frictionless for administrators to deploy. Creating a new subreddit is as simple as clicking a button and filling in half a dozen fields or so, plus toggling some checkboxes, and you're done! Plus it's really easy for users to find your new subreddit via the site search. Just think of what it takes to get a new forum going: purchasing a domain name, setting up hosting, installing the forum software, setting up the aforementioned authentication APIs, dealing with SEO so people can actually find your site on Google (that one seems almost impossible now). It's absolutely dizzying. At least something like Lemmy solves all of this for you, bringing you back to a Reddit-like level of effort.

65 3y ago

I miss PhpBB. So much more well organized than Reddit or Discord or Instagram or Twitter. It feels like we've lost user experience sensibilities from the mid 2000s and now rely on algorithms and feeds to give us things we may or may not want. Hashtags and flair never made any real sense compared to threads and topics.

coldpie 3y ago
Forums are still around. Less popular, sure, and definitely a much smaller fraction of the entire online footprint. But if it's the experience you want, you can still get it. I've been on the Something Awful forums for almost 2 decades at this point, and there are definitely others.

neverminder 3y ago

Discourse is a good modern alternative.

BasedAnon 3y ago
Discourse is the single worst forum software I've ever had the displeasure of using. Everything is difficult to navigate and hard to discern. It's as if someone actively sought out to create the worst user experience.
Kelteseth 3y ago
This. NodeBB made me switch to Discourse, because it was a nightmare to update and backup.
raun1 3y ago
You know, I actually actively dislike Discourse's UX. I've always found there to be a cognitive load to usage that I never found with PhpBB, other older forum software, or Reddit. I think my issue with it has to do with too clean of a UI, not enough visual hierarchy, delineation between post replies, etc.
scblock 3y ago
I only realized yesterday that all the company web support forums I use are using Discourse, and I really hate the UI. Information density is low and infinite scrolling is a usability disaster.
hpb42 3y ago
I'd say that Discourse is an alternative, some people consider it good, but I personally don't like it. What I like in PhpBB forums I joined is the organization of topics, usually hierarchical; balance of information density, not too high, not to low; good pagination that is fast to load; ctrl-f does what you expect: search in current page; theming that usually makes each forum look unique; profile and signature customization; no gamification of usage; and probably many other stuff I forgot. Many of these things are personal and YMMV of course.
worldofmatthew 3y ago

alexjplant 3y ago

I was very into deploying and modding PhpBB when I was in middle school. I learned PHP because of it (though I didn't build any substantial mods) and how to work with RDBMSes, Unix filesystems, HTML, etc. The sites that I built never engendered much community interaction though. I was never a fan of Reddit and find traditional forums much easier to navigate. I also think that the slight friction involved in creating a separate account for these sites instead of re-using the same one across multiple lends itself better to building tight-knit communities. I hope that these systems make a comeback.

hk1337 3y ago
I liked the modding but I preferred Invision Power Board, at the time it looked really nice out of the box and had a lot of good features. PunBB was really nice too, was really clean looking both in the UI and the backend code.
guestbest 3y ago
Reddit is easier to read (comment threading) and is text only, which is its unique value proposition. PhpBB forum, which I ironically use way more than Reddit these days, have almost no threading and limits to 10 posts per page with no hiding posts unless block all user posts, and ad banners everywhere. But I welcome any return to self-hosting, even though most site require membership until a user can view full scale images.
- lagniappe 3y ago
  Reddit comments can contain images that display with the text, without requiring a click to open. Previously it was text only, but that is no longer the case.
  - guestbest 3y ago
    That is only for new topics/posts. They don’t display in the comments in the vanilla user experience.

zackees 3y ago

I don’t like the flat style comments of sites like PhpBB. Is there an equivalent open source solution that does reddit style hierarchical comments?

bombcar 3y ago
HackerNews? It was never fully open sourced but there are older versions: http://arclanguage.org/install http://arclanguage.org/install
- stock_toaster 3y ago
  lobste.rs maybe? https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters
- LinuxBender 3y ago
  Another similar one I saw recently was Postmill [1a][1b] but I have not tried it. [1a] - https://postmill.xyz/ https://postmill.xyz/ [1b] - https://gitlab.com/postmill/Postmill https://gitlab.com/postmill/Postmill
7373737373 3y ago
This is relatively easy to do with recursive components in Vue
- _cenw 3y ago
  I don't think rendering is the problem.
drannex 3y ago
[Tildes](https://tildes.net https://tildes.net) is open source and does something like that. Not a direct 1:1 to phpBB but more like a cross between old school forums and reddit.
- tumult 3y ago

ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago

Such an amazing tool. So much value this single free and open source has given the world. Much more than many vc backed startups combined. We need to get back to people building software instead of vc backed companies building software. I think the last decade has shown us that that is a failed experiment.

nologic01 3y ago
It is interesting to ponder what people might come up with given this lost decade and the countless disappointments and anti-patterns discovered. The fediverse/activitypub design is just a building block, the real difference will be made by inventing more human-centric experiences, protecting people from the online warfare, encourage the generation and preservation of good content and meaningful exchanges. I don't know if software can be designed to heal people's psyche, but this is what is needed now.

zozbot234 3y ago

Related: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmyBB https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmyBB a Fediverse frontend based on phpBB. Example instance on fedibb.ml

scblock 3y ago

Funnily enough a small collaboration group I'm part of just started a new phpBB forum to supplement our IRC chat and replace some of what we lost with reddit (most have deleted their accounts). It's really a relic, the defaults assume minuscule server resources and features and fairly limited. But presentation and use is straightforward and it fills a niche between IRC and formal documentation on the team Wiki.

rchaud 3y ago

This thing saved the 2000s Internet from being dominated by crappy blogspot.com sites.

Ralfp 3y ago

I would like to use this opportunity to also mention a forum software I am building, Misago: https://misago-project.org/ https://misago-project.org/ (GitHub: https://github.com/rafalp/Misago/ https://github.com/rafalp/Misago/) Around year ago I've started aggressively pursuing improvements to it's UX and features which to my surprise resulted in project getting new (small) wave of attention and a lot of great feedback on what else is missing and what needs changed that I am working on at. I've grown on old school forums, phpBB2, Invision Power Board 2.3, vBulletin 3 and I am trying to hit a sweet spot between old and new, taking inspiration from both other modern solutions like Discourse or Flarum, but also from latest versions of XenForo and Invision Community.

junon 3y ago
Every little icon on the right side has a scrollbar on mobile Android chrome.
- Ralfp 3y ago
  Thanks. You mean icons in navbar or icons on thread list?
  - m_t 3y ago
    On the thread list. They appear briefly on Firefox android, then disappear.
babypuncher 3y ago
It looks like thread replies are presented sequentially rather than nested. Is this something you're looking to support in the future?
- Ralfp 3y ago
  No, classic forums never really offered threaded discussions alike to HN or Reddit. IPB and vBulletin had "threaded" mode where you would see a tree of replies, but it would only display a single reply, requiring you to manually select next reply to see in the UI. In future I plan to track which post the poster clicked "reply" for and have UI to let you see direct replies to given posts, or see that post was made as a direct reply to other post, but I am not planning a "proper" tree view like how reddit does it. Also some good opinion pieces from Discourse's creator on the subject: https://blog.codinghorror.com/web-discussions-flat-by-design/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/web-discussions-flat-by-design... https://blog.codinghorror.com/discussions-flat-or-threaded/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/discussions-flat-or-threaded/

lcmatt 3y ago

I still run a couple of fairly popular forums which I setup coming on nearly 15 years ago now. All powered by phpBB and recently Flarum was used for the latest site. There's still demand there for smaller communities and while some members have dropped off over the years it's still the most popular way to keep in touch with the latest happenings, none of the other social networks really took any of the traffic away. I'd love to see more spring up - for me there's always more of a community feel, you get to know the regulars and everyone is there for that specific topic. It's a little clunky these days but it's still a great piece of forum software.

seydor 3y ago

Most people don't want to admit it, but running a subreddit is much more fun than running your own forum. Even if you magically had the users, you also have the FULL responsibility , up to the legal consequnces for the stuff that your users do, plus you have all the technical trouble. Reddit gives that for free to moderators. They can make any community for shits n giggles, break it, fix it, abandon it etc. and none of the real-life consequences.

rpastuszak 3y ago
Makes sense, although I've never considered that--the communities I modded via forums were so small / close-nit that we never had to worry about someone misbehaving. It was always "a friend of a friend" at most in terms of degrees of separation, so social pressures still applied.
bovermyer 3y ago
The other side of that is that people who are willing to pay the cost (time, dollars, etc.) to run a forum are generally going to be more committed to that community. It may be more fun to run a subreddit, but subreddits are also less coherent communities than forums.
hbn 3y ago
It's also way easier to build a community when the buy-in is clicking a "subscribe" button with an account you already have and are logged into and knowing you can unsubscribe at any time, as opposed to registering another username, giving a random site admin your email, verifying your email, trusting they're not gonna leak your info or password, etc. Plus everyone already knows how to use all the functionality, and they already have an app on their phone they can access you and posts will appear in the feed they're already checking.
- BasedAnon 3y ago
  This can be a feature rather than a bug. One of the things that I appreciate about forums is that you actually get to build relationships that are more personable than something like Reddit, because there's more commitment involved.

ulrischa 3y ago

The mastodon for reddit. Oldie but goldie

ComputerGuru 3y ago

I actually recommend myBB [0] over phpBB for anyone looking to set up a LAMP forum. It's cleaner, better written, and possibly better maintained and with a much less scary vulnerability history. I believe it started off as an attempt to create an OSS version of IPB (or was it vB?). [0]: https://github.com/mybb/mybb https://github.com/mybb/mybb or https://mybb.com/ https://mybb.com/

72736379 3y ago
myBB was my preference too- I believe it’s the latter btw (very similar look and feel vBulletin back then).

BasedAnon 3y ago

Does anyone else remember Beast? It was a pretty small time piece of forum software back in the day. The Yoyogames Forums used to run on it, even way after it had stopped being maintained until some guy with an axe to grind ('patrick') brought the site to its knees thanks to a number of security exploits that had been out in the wild for a while.

systemvoltage 3y ago

IMO Discussions on phpBB forums are much better than on voting/likes based discussion platforms. Less mob mentality.

mortenjorck 3y ago

The old PhpBB/VBulletin format has a certain familiar charm to it, but I find it hard to go back after using modern forum systems like Discourse that fix a lot of the old paradigm's UX shortcomings. Anyone have experience with Flarum (https://flarum.org https://flarum.org)? I've been peripherally aware of it for years (it it looks like it's still quite active on GitHub) and it looks like a nice lighter-weight alternative to Discourse which I know gets some flak for being resource-heavy.

edgyquant 3y ago
I tried flarum before but iirc it was just a single “board” and not a forum of boards like I was used to. It has a feed of threads etc and IMO these are not the “modern” things that we should use to try and actually improve forum software. Just my opinion though

asciimov 3y ago

Yeah, no... Everybody I know that once ran PhpBB stopped using it because they would always get overrun by spam bots.

chromanoid 3y ago
The only way we fixed this, was to use recaptcha + manual approval of the first post. but in the last days we got some AI generated posts. the manual approval method becomes harder and harder. Especially when the bots hibernate for a while before they edit spam into their posts.

whalesalad 3y ago

takes me directly back in time to hotscripts.com, mod_php and kernel 2.6

jacooper 3y ago

Honestly no body should use PhpBB when Discourse exists.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
sergiotapia 3y ago
I kind of dislike Discourse. They hijack the ctrl+F search, they lean too heavily on "infinite load", it's just too ajaxy. I used to use old.reddit.com, so that's what I enjoy. Just load the markup and get out of the way.
mlsmith 3y ago
I never understood the appeal of Discourse. It feels heavy with an overutilization of negative space. The D programming language forum is a good example of a well-designed forum in my opinion.
- jacooper 3y ago
  If you want to use something lighter, Flarum exists, modern but lightweight built using PHP. The grapheneOS forum uses, but I like discord because its more advanced with many features and integrations.
  - jacooper 3y ago
    Discourse*
Nasreddin_Hodja 3y ago
I don't like their infinite scrolling instead of normal pagination.

101008 3y ago

I have set up a forum in the past few months and it's so hard to find young people to participate. They may be interested in doing it but the UX seem so out of place for most of them that they won't even try. Also, the missing "app/notifications" makes them forget quickly that it exists and they may never come back.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

pythonbase 3y ago

I ran few forums on phpBB and vBulletin, spent a lot of time in flame wars. Those were the days.

marcosdumay 3y ago

I wonder if it's possible to create a Lemmy community that behaves like a PhpBB forum, that is, threads are supposed to be long-lived, so they are not sorted by age, comments are supposed to be single topic, so they are not sorted by thread, and you can jump right into the last thing you saw. It looks like a great experience to after you publish something, you just go and create a Lemmy instance (with closed down registration) to host QA forums, news discussion, and just community meetings. It looks much simpler and straight forward than managing it with all of twitter, reddit, and facebook.

pipe01 3y ago
Well, there's this https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmyBB https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmyBB
- marcosdumay 3y ago
  This does create a forum out of Lemmy, but the forum behavior does not survive federation. It does not add a forum for the Lemmy community at large. My question was more on the lines of adding an enum into a community's data saying this is a forum|discussion.

dang 3y ago

Related: PhpBB 3.3.10 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34670280 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34670280 - Feb 2023 (200 comments) Ask HN: Why did phpBB forums go out of fashion? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33726098 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33726098 - Nov 2022 (42 comments) PhpBB's site hacked - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=461798 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=461798 - Feb 2009 (8 comments)

snird 3y ago

A forum is not an alternative to Reddit. In forums, exposure of topics depends only on recency. While Reddit and the likes combine recency with community upvotes. Upvotes are important and allow for automatic quality control as well as keeping important things up for more exposure, even if they are not the most recent. Forums alone are no longer the best way to go.

7ero 3y ago

what decade is this?

unixhero 3y ago

I would not recommend phpbb. Nodebb or discourse is where it is at