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.
While not my technical first, it was the first of real consequence for me as well.
And then I got so frustrated that I went to write my own forum software! And showed it to my friend, who promptly showed me how badly I understood security by posting as me.
No no, not "mods". The phpbb people were always weirdly militant about calling them them MODS, uppercase.
Why, I'm not sure, because it's not an acronym. Eventually they decided to start calling them Extensions, which is probably a more apt term. Or maybe a more APT term.
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.
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.
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.
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
I accidentally SQL injected phpBB without even trying. Registered user "*" (just the asterisk), searching posts for * resulted in a list of everyones post together. Fun times.
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
Simplemachinesforum is a BSD licensed php bulletin board software that is very amenable to modification by a smart LLM. You can add just about anything you want into it.
Most of it is divided up into a large number of medium-sized discrete php files.
It run on just about the most boring apache2 (or nginx), mariadb, PHP stuff...
10 years ago it was at very slow pace of development (don't know how it is now). but the blocker for me back then was the need for SSH access (which greatly limited choice of suitable shared hosting providers) to run composer for installation and upgrades. while with phpBB you could just upload it via FTP, open installation url and you are done.
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.
Honestly it was the first thought I had after seeing a link someone above posted to an Invision Power Board repo. I wanna point claude at it and tell it 'remake this for me in [some modern language]'.
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.
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!
This was literally my first experience of programming. Applying phpBB mods. We have lost the ancient texts.
While not my technical first, it was the first of real consequence for me as well.
And then I got so frustrated that I went to write my own forum software! And showed it to my friend, who promptly showed me how badly I understood security by posting as me.
I used to spend hours just adding mods to random boards that i would just delete later on.
No no, not "mods". The phpbb people were always weirdly militant about calling them them MODS, uppercase.
Why, I'm not sure, because it's not an acronym. Eventually they decided to start calling them Extensions, which is probably a more apt term. Or maybe a more APT term.
> 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 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.
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.
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
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
I recently got a reminder that my vbulletin license had expired.
I accidentally SQL injected phpBB without even trying. Registered user "*" (just the asterisk), searching posts for * resulted in a list of everyones post together. Fun times.
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
Simplemachinesforum is a BSD licensed php bulletin board software that is very amenable to modification by a smart LLM. You can add just about anything you want into it.
Most of it is divided up into a large number of medium-sized discrete php files.
It run on just about the most boring apache2 (or nginx), mariadb, PHP stuff...
https://www.simplemachines.org/
https://github.com/SimpleMachines/SMF
https://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=593...
SMF which was a PHP fork of YaBB SE which was a rewrite of YaBB which was perl based. I loved the forum ecosystem back then.
Eventually discovering a nulled vbulletin was like finding a pot of gold. You just had to be there.
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/
10 years ago it was at very slow pace of development (don't know how it is now). but the blocker for me back then was the need for SSH access (which greatly limited choice of suitable shared hosting providers) to run composer for installation and upgrades. while with phpBB you could just upload it via FTP, open installation url and you are done.
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.
Honestly it was the first thought I had after seeing a link someone above posted to an Invision Power Board repo. I wanna point claude at it and tell it 'remake this for me in [some modern language]'.
Nice now do PHP-Nuke!
Now that’s a name I’ve not heard in a long time.
Laughs in exploit. Loved nuke but just painfully exploit ridden.
This is wasting too much water and energy!