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PhpBB 3.3.10

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Re: PhpBB 3.3.10

#21

Post by rtpg »

lolinder wrote: post #9

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…

I do think that Mastodon does accomplish this somewhat, honestly! Like each instance has its own vibe, and the sort of cross-instance virality is way less than "everyone in the same bucket" stuff.

I feel like reddit's success is somewhat similar. You don't have to futz around with a bunch of accounts, but you're still working within different worlds, so to speak.

Granted, this is less than, say, Discord's "each server you can have a different profile" thing, which I think is kind of the ideal here, but I feel like being able to deal with the technical issues lets communities exist!

PhpBB kind of has this, with all the plugins, a sort of uniform interface... it's not the worst thing in the world to have a solid base for running communities. We definitely don't need everyone to be _in_ that same community.

Re: PhpBB 3.3.10

#22

Post by lolinder »

matthew-wegner wrote: post #20
lolinder wrote: post #9

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…

As someone who never understood the appeal of Twitter or Facebook, the new wave of FOSS social apps feels very alien to me. Forums felt like writing emails in the open. Twitter felt like texting in the open. Not sure what the next thing will be! I say this as someone with 1k+ posts on multiple forums (essentially archived at this point).

> Forums felt like writing emails in the open.

Actually, most of my favorite forums were only accessible if you registered, which in several cases required an invite. So it was less like writing letters in the open and much more like getting together with my bowling buddies or whatever. Just a group of friends who you hang out with from time to time.

Re: PhpBB 3.3.10

#23

Post by chx »

thejosh wrote: post #16
chippiewill wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

...

Re: PhpBB 3.3.10

#24

Post by ThatPlayer »

jamesfinlayson wrote: post #12
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #6

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?

Yeah I remember using lots of phpBB forums back in the mid 2000s but it seems like Discord is now the replacement. The few forums that I still use seem to run vBulletin or Invision (both PHP bulletin boards but both paid software).

The forums I use seem to all be Discourse and XenForo these days.

I'm not sure I like Discourse's UX, but XenForo is made by former vB devs and seems nicer than modern vBulletin.

Re: PhpBB 3.3.10

#25

Post by lockhouse »

nigamanth wrote: post #3

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

PHP is still one of the fastest ways to not only program a quick and dirty web app, but more importantly deploy a web app.

Re: PhpBB 3.3.10

#26

Post by lolinder »

rtpg wrote: post #21
lolinder wrote: post #9

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…

I do think that Mastodon does accomplish this somewhat, honestly! Like each instance has its own vibe, and the sort of cross-instance virality is way less than "everyone in the same bucket" stuff. I feel like reddit's success is somewhat similar. You don't have to futz around with a bunch of accounts, but you're still working within different worlds, so to speak. Granted, this is less than, say, Discord's "each serve…

> I do think that Mastodon does accomplish this somewhat, honestly! Like each instance has its own vibe, and the sort of cross-instance virality is way less than "everyone in the same bucket" stuff.

It's still based on a model that is fundamentally different than the way that people socialize in the real world.

You could do it differently, but the way it's designed you're supposed to have a single Mastodon account and pick an instance that hosts it. Instances decide whether to federate with other instances or not. The focus of the design is on content and creators, not on relationships.

The old phpBB model was much closer to the way that social networks actually work in the real world. A friend might introduce you to a forum about writing, so you create an account and start hanging out with their friends there and discussing writing. You get to know someone else in that group and you find out that you're both into programming and they're involved in another forum that focuses on that. You join them over there with a new account.

It's all just friend groups. You might be in many different friend groups or just a few. You may be the only one who is in both groups, or there might be several people who overlap. With some friends you avoid discussing politics, while with others you're comfortable discussing it in depth. Some friend groups form around a game, others around a shared interest. You show different facets of yourself to the different groups, and this is codified in the structure of the apps.

This model is not well supported by Mastodon because it set out to solve a very different problem. They approached federation with the question "how do we avoid leaving our content in thrall to a corporation?" I want to approach it with the question "how do we get back to the informal friend groups that we used to have?"

Re: PhpBB 3.3.10

#27

Post by Gigachad »

bluedino wrote: post #15
mostlysimilar wrote: post #2

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.

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).

They also got flooded with spam and were regularly hacked.

Re: PhpBB 3.3.10

#28

Post by muglug »

chippiewill wrote: post #10
hunter2_ wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Drupal is up there, maybe not as a household name like WordPress, but in some big organizations.

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.

Sites like Wix and Squarespace really undermined Drupal and other similar OSS offerings.

There are still things you can only do with a custom sytem, but for most use-cases commercial site-design tools can get you up and running with much less upfront cost.

I designed & built about 20 websites from 2007 to 2014 or so, all with custom designs and backed by an off-the-shelf CMS. Except for the few I maintain for close friends & family, everyone has moved to Squarespace.

While I'm incredibly happy with that arrangement — nobody's pestering me about code I wrote a lifetime ago — it means a whole bunch of sites look much more generic.

For example I wrote some custom JS to dynamically tile pictures on this site: http://web.archive.org/web/20130722050828/https://www.firstc.... Now it displays photos in a generic fashion: https://www.firstchairpromo.com

Re: PhpBB 3.3.10

#29

Post by kxrm »

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.
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