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PhpBB 3.3.10

phpbb.com

111–120 of 203 posts

Re: PhpBB 3.3.10

#111
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 not understand what do you mean by "interlocking" and "overlapping" networks. The word "federate" you use very near to these words make me believe that you are talking about some technical feature - but I do not know that.

What kind of "interlocking" and "overlapping" are you writing about here?

Re: PhpBB 3.3.10

#112
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

My fav is Action Mailer in rails. AFAIK no other framework has something similar included.

Re: PhpBB 3.3.10

#113
post #95
post #90

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 w…

I hated signatures. Often posts were one-line short while signature had several lines with images. It was hard to scroll and read forum like that.

Making forum signatures for the Spore (yes, the game) forum back in 2008 was my introduction to image editing. Never got quite as good as the "pros", but I enjoyed having my own style of sig.

Re: PhpBB 3.3.10

#114
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…

SomethingAwful has bar none the best tech related forums and discourse.

Re: PhpBB 3.3.10

#115
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same - there is just something about the forums style experience (and especially SA) that appeals to me more than other forms of social media.

I can see the appeal in the discussion, but I certainly don't miss the forum UI. There's too much clutter to accomodate post metadata, avatars, titles, and mostly obnoxious signatures. Pagination and the lack of hierarchical comments to create sub-threads made it difficult to navigate and find interesting discussions.

Personally I think hierarchical comments are the worst part of reddit/HN. They try to force a structure where there is none, and make it more difficult to navigate a discussion.

1. With hierarchical comments, you can't respond to multiple people. If you want to make an observation about the way a thread is heading, or point out a mistake multiple posters are making, you have to either (a) respond to the comment that seems most appropriate to call out (b) respond to the highest voted comment to make your post more visible or (c) make a seperate subthread to make your point (but risk your comment being ignored). With chronological comments you don't have to choose, you can do all 3 at the same point and your comment is just as visible as every other comment. Believe me, there are lots of scenerios where you wish you could respond to multiple comments.

2. With hierarchical comments it's difficult remember the context of a discussion. You always have the mental overhead of remembering what all the previous posts were talking about or risk having to scroll all the way up (personally I just use Ublock Origin's element zapper functionality to hide the comments I'm done reading to get back to the parent). On the other hand with chronological comments you always know all the comments a comment is responding to, and if your forum software supports backlinks you also know all the comments responding to a comment. 4chan has the best UX for this, you can click on any post link or backlink to open a post and then go through all of the posts that post was responding to or all of the posts responding to that post, and so on. No other forum I've used comes close IMO.

3. With hierarchical comments if you're halfway done through reading a thread and want to refresh the page you have to scroll all the way to the top and go through every comment to see if you've missed any newer comment (but I bet no one actually does this and just gives up). With chronological comments newer comments always appear at the bottom so you don't miss any part of the discussion.

You're right about the clutter but you can disable all of those, with avatars and signatures disabled the average comment takes up the same space as an HN comment.

Re: PhpBB 3.3.10

#116
post #5

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

I think this applies mainly because of WordPress, not PhpBB and any other project.

From what I hear facebook is also mostly hack, which is a similar language to php. I believe it is even backwards compatible with php (or at least it used to be).

Re: PhpBB 3.3.10

#117
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.

PHP was / (is?) hacky but there's no denying the very good culture of "getting stuff done" (and monetizing it) around it.

Was hacky. It's awesome now.

Re: PhpBB 3.3.10

#118
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They also got flooded with spam and were regularly hacked.

Which really didn't matter back then. People just deleted the spam, recovered from backup, patched whatever flaw they found, and changed passwords. It wasn't the end of the world.

Lots of the forums I used to use died this way. The site owners eventually got tired of having to janny the site daily to fight an endless wave of attacks. It's all moved to reddit and discord these days.

Re: PhpBB 3.3.10

#120
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/htt…

Trying to moderate and keep spam off forums really us what keeps me from wanting to deal with them these days.
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