I used to use this longtime ago. It's still ugly.
PhpBB 3.3.10
131–140 of 203 posts
Re: PhpBB 3.3.10
#132I jumped ship from phpbb as their develoment stalled. Then I switched to Simple Machines Forum, then development if that project stalled. Then I moved to VanillaForums, then development kind of slowed there. Now I am considering Discourse or NodeBB, which both are in an entirely different league of technology and sleekness. But now none of my friends wants to hang put in forums anymore. Oh well.
To be fair; I tried migrating a population from Invision Power Board (IPB) to Discourse over 10 years ago and it did not work.
The discourse software was sleek enough, speedy enough etc; but it was too far a disconnect from how forums of yore worked. Discourse is much better suited for QnA over Discussions where each comment has equal merit; there was also an emphasis on 'personality' with older forum technology which promoted some kitsch graphics design and made people cultivate a persona (which became a reason to put more effort into replies to things).
I'm not sure if I can correctly articulate what I mean, but, just be aware: Here may be dragons.
Re: PhpBB 3.3.10
#133Earlier 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…
Haha I can definitely relate to the obsession with clean URLs.
My programming career started with adding extensions to phpbb forums. I didn't know what I was doing, I was just following the install instructions that had me replacing code here and there.
Re: PhpBB 3.3.10
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could be - at least the communities I used to participate in seem to use Discord now.
I really dislike using Discord and I can't even figure out why (so it's probably me). I do know it's not the part where it is a chat app per se - I'm happily using Zulip, managing with Slack, and WhatsApp, Telegram and Slack all have their place. But something about the UI/UX of chatting in Discord just makes it a stream of conversations where I can barely follow what's going on. Having said that in many contexts a f…
I'm in the same camp, discord and discourse just aren't useful to me
Re: PhpBB 3.3.10
#135I jumped ship from phpbb as their develoment stalled. Then I switched to Simple Machines Forum, then development if that project stalled. Then I moved to VanillaForums, then development kind of slowed there. Now I am considering Discourse or NodeBB, which both are in an entirely different league of technology and sleekness. But now none of my friends wants to hang put in forums anymore. Oh well.
All these names I haven't heard muttered in years. What about vBulletin? Conforums?
Re: PhpBB 3.3.10
#136This has been mentioned before here, but I would like to high https://flarum.org/ as a more modern (looking) alternative, minus the nostalgia of course.
Re: PhpBB 3.3.10
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Haha I can definitely relate to the obsession with clean URLs. My programming career started with adding extensions to phpbb forums. I didn't know what I was doing, I was just following the install instructions that had me replacing code here and there.
Same! Modifying phpBB, oscommerce and Wordpress installs is how my career began!
Re: PhpBB 3.3.10
#138Ah the OG. Does anyone knowledgeable about forum software know witch is the most resource-less intensive? PhpBB, SMF, MyBB, Xenforo, BBPress (or others)?
I know with SMF, one can disable lots of features and make it lightweight, but would like to know more.
Re: PhpBB 3.3.10
#139Forum 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.
But people using forums also got so many things wrong. One thing that really went wrong: people using forums as issue trackers. Just look at the mega topics that exist for one $thing with never-ending addition of posts that are a nightmare to search and extract knowledge from. Instead of using an issue tracker, they post more and more messages to the one forum topic dedicated to $thing. Some hardware related forums s…
> Ultra long topics with hundreds of posts, somewhere between page 157-178 there are some nuggets you will never find.
Yep, you have to go through each page to find them all, it's called research.
Re: PhpBB 3.3.10
#140This goes on to prove that PHP is still relevant today. No matter how many new frameworks come up, we all know PHP anyways.
PHP has one great feature that makes it immortal. It's the only language that assumes that each code file is actually an HTML file. Try porting a simple PHP app to Ruby or Python and you'll see what a mess it becomes.
If you use a template system like Laravel Blade or Twig, like most modern PHP projects, then this feature of PHP isn't really used anymore and porting a PHP App to Ruby or Python isn't such a big deal anymore.
In my eyes, using something like Laravel takes away the "quick and dirty" aspect of PHP and adds a lot of things which have to be learned first, makes the project more stable and more comparable to a Python Django or Ruby on Rails project.