Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

PhpBB 3.3.10

phpbb.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 203 posts

Re: PhpBB 3.3.10

#81

Post by college_physics »

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…

The fediverse will easily integrate more organized and persistent forms of online interaction such as the forum format you miss. All it takes is for the platform to develop an activitypub plugin to allow different instances (different forums) to exchange feeds.

Mastodon is simply the frontrunner and most mature and battle tested implementation, it does not represent the only form of the fediverse, only its 'twitter' mirror. Eg Both wordpress and discourse are said to develop plugins and something like bookwyrm (a goodreads alternative) points out how other designs implement the protocol.

But it is true that activitypub only goes so far. We should be thinking how two decades of trials and errors (mostly errors) motivate the next steps in social protocols.

Re: PhpBB 3.3.10

#82

Post by joshxyz »

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…

Haha oh god, I miss the days when you will tell someone "I'm userxyz on xyzforums.com", and if they are admin account they promote you to staff to help them moderate the community.

Re: PhpBB 3.3.10

#83

Post by echelon »

jdwithit wrote: post #37
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 a fellow internet old timer, I agree that social media never really hooked me. I still spend vastly more time reading and posting on the SomethingAwful forums, which have been going for more than 20 years at this point, than I do Twitter. Maybe it's just "old man yells at cloud" and me refusing to change with the times, but I just strongly prefer the dynamics of forums. Forums are also great for niche interests an…

Oh, the memories! I feel you. There were so many good forums. Mostly lost to time.

If anyone wants to see a classic 2000's-era forum, here's a bespoke one that I built back in 2005:

https://web.archive.org/web/20070104021525/http://forums.dsm...

https://web.archive.org/web/20060630114446/http://forums.dsm...

https://web.archive.org/web/20060415053845/http://dsmeet.com...

https://web.archive.org/web/20070103011534/http://forums.dsm...

Or older:

https://web.archive.org/web/20060116021218/http://dsmeet.com...

All the cool kids were building hyper customized forums. I was so proud of myself to have written something that wasn't phpBB/Invision/vBulletin. I wanted "clean" URLs, avatar randomization and interactive signatures. So many other weird features. I didn't have a mind for "product" and just built whatever came to mind. I think a lot of us were, and that's why that era of the web was so weird and special.

I built this back before I started college. This was my hobby that consumed me, taking over from video games. I had no idea that what I was learning at the time would become a lucrative career or bring me any money at all. It was just fun. Showing off amongst friends. Building a community of like-minded people to talk with.

Hacking RM2K and Zelda Classic, bouncing around AIM/IRC, moving from IGN/EzBoard to hosted forums, exploring what others were building... It was a different time. MySpace, Xanga, and Facebook ultimately put a stop to it. People used to build so many weird and wonderful ways to talk to one another, but it wasn't scalable.

I know my view is tainted by rose colored glasses, but I do miss it.

I'm so tempted to build forums into my newest website, FakeYou.com. I know it would probably distract me from building actual product features that matter. With all the kids that are are using Discord, it wouldn't make any sense. But I always gravitate to forums. They're special.

Re: PhpBB 3.3.10

#84

Post by Medox »

z57 wrote: post #76
BlueTemplar wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Sounds like a job for archive.org

Re: PhpBB 3.3.10

#85

Post by PetahNZ »

benatkin wrote: post #74
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.

Eh, it doesn't matter that I know PHP. I don't want to use it and have barely touched it in the last few years, despite understanding many of its quirks. I'm still using WordPress at the moment but if I have to write PHP I might just quit using it. Such a simple question as whether something is passed by reference or by value shouldn't result in "This is a super interesting piece of information! Looks like it's true;…

Are you asking what php version uses copy on write for arrays? If so, it's all of them (at least in the last decade). I have never known it not to do this.

Re: PhpBB 3.3.10

#86

Post by nik736 »

nigamanth wrote: post #69
javchz wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think people who hate PHP, forgot how painful it was to develop server side apps before PHP. I think one of the greatest legacy of PHP was brining "Serverless" hosting to the masses, where you only focus on the "upload" of the code, and you didn't need an ISS or Linux expert to deploy your projects. Yeah, PHP had a weird teenage phase, but even JS and Python still have a lot of weird things too (specially JS). But…

Rails is gone, aside from a few use cases there is always a better alternative.

What are those use-cases and what are the alternatives?

Re: PhpBB 3.3.10

#87

Post by PetahNZ »

rabuse wrote: post #33
nsonha wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

every figgin web dev topic, popularity does not evidence merits. It's just a shitty language that existed at the right time when web technologies were booming. When more options become available, people stop choosing PHP. And please don't reply with js, like "but PHP is better than shit", that's a real high bar.

What exactly makes PHP 8 shit?

No typed variables, no generics, threading/async is hard(er than other languages).

[This is coming from a long time PHP dev who actually loves it.]

Re: PhpBB 3.3.10

#88

Post by piperswe »

derrida wrote: post #71
avx56 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was (is?) Python: https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit

It was definitely lisp before it was python - they used to talk about a rewrite - one of the earliest reddits were the lisp reddits - my question is if it was Arc by Paul Graham or a seperate program in Common Lisp

Reddit was Common Lisp, not Arc (or Racket at all): https://web.archive.org/web/20060114065748/http://reddit.com...

Arc was released a few years after Reddit announced their Python rewrite anyways

Re: PhpBB 3.3.10

#89

Post by PetahNZ »

rabuse wrote: post #33
nsonha wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

every figgin web dev topic, popularity does not evidence merits. It's just a shitty language that existed at the right time when web technologies were booming. When more options become available, people stop choosing PHP. And please don't reply with js, like "but PHP is better than shit", that's a real high bar.

What exactly makes PHP 8 shit?

But what makes it good? It's fast, it uses low memory, it has a great package manager, it has great backwards compatibility, it has a huge ecosystem of libraries, it is easily integrated with other technology, it scales, it has an easier learning curve, it's easy to hire for (although it has been getting harder).

Re: PhpBB 3.3.10

#90

Post by Ayesh »

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.

Post reply on HN