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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
For a real trip down memory lane, here's how "mods" were installed for phpBB: https://github.com/MapBBCode/mapbb-phpbb2/blob/master/1_0_to...
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.
This was literally my first experience of programming. Applying phpBB mods. We have lost the ancient texts.
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.
Don't pick the wrong side of the merge or your save game might be completely broken 40 hours from now!
I used to spend hours just adding mods to random boards that i would just delete later on.
> Let's say you want to go back to 2001 and experience the glorious days of the early forum-sphere.
‘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...
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.
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.
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
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.
I also have some fond memories of WWWBoard instances, from Matt's Script Archive.
https://www.scriptarchive.com/wwwboard.html
I recently got a reminder that my vbulletin license had expired.
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
You could always stay with phpbb - seems it still feels authentic:
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.
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/ and Unreal: https://forums.unrealengine.com/categories?tag=unreal-engine
Discourse UX is so much worse than phpBB because it merges all categories.
I was looking into forum software maybe 10 years ago and came across Flarum. Worth a look
https://flarum.org/
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.
I wonder how well Cloudflare et al defend against the class of “nobody could still possibly be using this” vulnerabilities.
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.
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.
This is wasting too much water and energy!
Nice now do PHP-Nuke!