As a 12-year-old I could barely afford shared hosting let alone a license for Invision or vBulletin. I recall that phpBB also had a reputation for stability (manually-applied RPG mods excluded) that Invision sacrificed in favor of more features and faster development.
Hah I actually just had 5.6 sol upgrade my old heavily modified IPB3 forum’s code to run on modern php8/mariadb11, backported cve fixes, gave it strict CSP etc and have it running seemingly securely exposed to the internet.
vbulletin 3.8 was peak for me. the 4.x major broke a ton of mods so there was still a huge community sticking to 3.x. was a big fan of xenforo too, the default design was quite refreshing compared to vB and IPB
As a forum administration enthusiast, I still remember the fiasco when Invision rugpulled "lifetime" and "perpetual" licence holders by saying that it was only for those major versions.
I was so glad when XenForo came about and gave those sleazebags some competition.
You'd download a mod that contained installation instructions like the above, fire up your code editor of choice and then would manually change the source code of phpBB.
Later on, automated mod installers started being somewhat reliable, but especially if you had multiple mods touching similar parts of the codebase you had to learn how to adjust the instructions.
I don't really miss these times, but I did learn a lot about PHP through it.
The automated installers only showed up later, in the phpBB2 era. Early "mods" for phpBB had to be applied by hand - the typical format was a text file (or a series of forum posts) containing descriptions of changes that had to be made to apply the mod.
That's sort of similar to how modding in the Witcher 3 works. The scripting is distributed with the game itself and compiled during launch, which is great in terms of how much stuff is easily moddable, but a complete nightmare in terms of how the mods have to deal with conflicts. I had a double take when I saw that one of the common tools people use to deal with it literally bundles in kdiff3 and opens it up with merge conflicts to solve.
No no, not "mods". The phpbb people were always weirdly militant about calling them them MODS, uppercase.
Why, I'm not sure, because it's not an acronym. Eventually they decided to start calling them Extensions, which is probably a more apt term. Or maybe a more APT term.
Is there a good forum stack that is as moddable as phpbb was back in the day? Every Discourse instance I see seems _very_ similar so I've assumed there's not much of an interesting plugin ecosystem
It is pretty easy to do plugins and custom themes in Discourse, most look the same just because the UX is good enough and we don't live in an era of hyper customization that early 2000s forums did. A good example of a pretty customized Discourse install is the Blizzard forums: https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/blizzard/
10 years ago it was at very slow pace of development (don't know how it is now). but the blocker for me back then was the need for SSH access (which greatly limited choice of suitable shared hosting providers) to run composer for installation and upgrades. while with phpBB you could just upload it via FTP, open installation url and you are done.
Simplemachinesforum is a BSD licensed php bulletin board software that is very amenable to modification by a smart LLM. You can add just about anything you want into it.
Most of it is divided up into a large number of medium-sized discrete php files.
It run on just about the most boring apache2 (or nginx), mariadb, PHP stuff...
Wonder if anyone will make memory/injection-safe imitations of old software like this. I'd imagine it'd be pretty eye-catching if you did run a public discussion board with exactly the vibe, syntax, etc. of old phpBB.
Cloudflare likes to block anything that looks like code even if an application is not vulnerable, so I'd imagine it would stop some beginner attacks. (most likely not nearly all possible attacks though)
Yeah a few years ago I got a bug report from someone in the business about getting a weird error when trying to update some text. Turns out they were trying to add (*) as a disclaimer at the end of something and Akamai was just giving a blank 403 because it looked to much like SQL.
Not sure - Akamai seem to roll out defenses against most new attacks, and Akamai isn't a new company so presumably they've been doing it for a while? Never dug too deeply into the WAF settings so maybe it's possible to turn them on or off.
Honestly it was the first thought I had after seeing a link someone above posted to an Invision Power Board repo. I wanna point claude at it and tell it 'remake this for me in [some modern language]'.
I accidentally SQL injected phpBB without even trying. Registered user "*" (just the asterisk), searching posts for * resulted in a list of everyones post together. Fun times.
Initially I tried to build PHP4, with Squeeze being what I hoped amenable to that. It didn't work so well. So I later opted to try PHP5 with some patches, which it now does. I imagine it could run on something a bit more recent.
That said - we'll call it compounded nostalgia for now.
Just on the off-chance anyone should see this: if you were one of the brothers involved in running the Blinkys "R" Us forum back in the early 2000s - I still think of it regularly. I can't even remember what my username was these days, and Archive.org never archived it at the time, but I still remember it very fondly.
37 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 48.4 ms ] thread‘Peak’ would have been Invision Power Board 1.3 IMO, but still cool archaeology project :)
And lo:
- https://github.com/ernestbuffington/IPB-1.3.1-LegacyArchive
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invision_Community#Version_1.x...
https://www.scriptarchive.com/wwwboard.html
I was so glad when XenForo came about and gave those sleazebags some competition.
You'd download a mod that contained installation instructions like the above, fire up your code editor of choice and then would manually change the source code of phpBB.
Later on, automated mod installers started being somewhat reliable, but especially if you had multiple mods touching similar parts of the codebase you had to learn how to adjust the instructions.
I don't really miss these times, but I did learn a lot about PHP through it.
Why, I'm not sure, because it's not an acronym. Eventually they decided to start calling them Extensions, which is probably a more apt term. Or maybe a more APT term.
https://flarum.org/
https://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=2672425
(I'm guessing flarum.org makes more sense, though).
A cursory search didn't turn up any golang based modern and well maintained forums, which surprised me a bit.
Most of it is divided up into a large number of medium-sized discrete php files.
It run on just about the most boring apache2 (or nginx), mariadb, PHP stuff...
https://www.simplemachines.org/
https://github.com/SimpleMachines/SMF
https://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=593...
Eventually discovering a nulled vbulletin was like finding a pot of gold. You just had to be there.
That said - we'll call it compounded nostalgia for now.