Getting phpBB 1.4.4 working in Docker

(thran.uk)

25 points | by HeckFeck 1 day ago

4 comments

  • bartman 1 hour ago
    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.

    • dbbk 1 hour ago
      This was literally my first experience of programming. Applying phpBB mods. We have lost the ancient texts.
  • Lammy 2 hours ago
    > 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...

    • alexjplant 14 minutes ago
      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.
    • duskwuff 17 minutes ago
      I also have some fond memories of WWWBoard instances, from Matt's Script Archive.

      https://www.scriptarchive.com/wwwboard.html

  • rtpg 1 hour ago
    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
  • LoganDark 43 minutes ago
    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.
    • bgc 33 minutes ago
      I wonder how well Cloudflare et al defend against the class of “nobody could still possibly be using this” vulnerabilities.
      • LoganDark 8 minutes ago
        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)