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Forum Backends


Optic

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For those that are interested, here is a list of active forum backends that I know of which are still being updated. These ones you'll need to install on your webhost.

 

Free:

  • MyBB
  • SMF
  • Vanilla
  • Flarum
  • Discourse (requires Ruby, not PHP)

 

Paid:

  • vBulletin
  • IP.Board (formerly Invision Power Board)
  • Xenforo

 

 

Of course... why leave one of the best forums around? *cough* AN. :D

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  • 4 years later...

I know this is bloody damn well ancient, but it's something that I have a little bit to say about so... forgive me my indulgence? ^^;

 

MyBB

 

 

 

vU0Qxea.gif.ab1bfefc7ef741f912b79e30e666ce3e.gif

- My reaction to operating a pre-1.0 MyBB forum.

 

 

 

I feel the need to pull this thread back up to the top, if only to talk about how much I really, really dislike MyBB. I'm not sure how it is these days, but years back I was stuck in the unenviable position of lording over a forum that for some fool reason was using a prerelease version of it - it was either RC1 or 2.

 

At the time it felt like a bootleg version of phpBB, with an admin panel that often felt like a scavenger hunt whenever you'd need to go in and do much of anything. It was a bit of a pain.

 

vBulletin

 

 

 

q4VS7Fm.gif.71c818f27283c67a5052a2eef94f9982.gif

- My reaction to realizing that a forum I'm joining uses vBulletin.

 

 

 

I've never really been a fan of vBulletin either, to be honest, though I only have experience with it from a user perspective. I've never been able to put my finger on what it is specifically about it that bothers me, but there's something about the interface that just grinds at me when I use it. The fact that nearly every vBulletin forum I've visited has had awful themes installed probably hasn't helped.

 

SMF

 

 

 

IqMW4fx.gif.8bd6ecbfcb6d85ac7d5957686b08bb18.gif

- My reaction to being reminded that SMF exists.

 

 

 

SMF is... well... that one thing, that I always forget exists. Similar to MyBB, it has been years since I've used it, but the one thing that sticks in my memory regarding it is just one word:

 

Boring. Not always a bad thing, but not terribly inspiring all the same.

 

IP.Board (formerly Invision Power Board)

 

S7SsZf0.gif.cf052a52607009e95cb8ca7c90e30e81.gif

- "IP.Board"

 

Have you ever used a piece of software that you want to like? That you really, really, really, want to like --- but you can't? You can't because for all the things it does right, it does roughly eleventy zillion things completely and absolutely horribly?

 

I have. Her name was IP.Board. Our relationship was beautiful, at first, as these things tend to be. She had beautiful curves, you know, and a personality to match. Easy to get along with, not lacking in charm, a real trend setter that one. The first year was a dream, but then... well... then the wrinkles began to show.

 

I have about five years of past experience with IP.Board from an administrative perspective split between two different forums, and through that time the sheer amount of things that would just break, seemingly at random was never anything short of astounding. The forum search died frequently, requiring tremendous amounts of time spent debugging, little features like the Most Liked Content page would sputter and time out, meticulously crafted user profiles would randomly get garbled up, and ... and ... to be honest I've purged most of the issues I had from my mind.

 

Originally, on the first of the two forums I helped out on, I thought these issues to be the fault of the owner - someone who, in hind sight, fancied himself a master programmer and server admin, but in reality just had delusions of grandeur. I wasn't entirely incorrect in thinking this, he did in fact create a huge number of issues through simple carelessness, but that wasn't the whole of it.

 

When the second forum frequently experienced those same issues, with an owner who's skill and care I knew to be top notch, it became slightly more difficult to blame them on operator error. This became increasingly clear when we'd have IPS Support assisting with debugging our issues (one of the perks of paid forum software) - during our not infrequent communications with them, we slowly came to a horrible conclusion:

 

They didn't actually understand their own software.

 

This was during the final years of their 3.0 forum software, when the bulk of their attention and efforts were on completing 4.0, and it showed. Updates to the 3.x versions to fix one bug often introduced another or more, and so on. Sometimes the bugs introduced were worse than the bugs being fixed. It was obnoxious as hell, though I suppose that underlines just why they were so focused on getting 4.0 out - the old version was simply too bloated and overly convoluted to deal with.

 

True story: it was so bad it drove that second owner to just write her own damn forum software, though it's no longer around these days. Fun tidbit: while working on importing the old IPB data into the new software, we gained new appreciation for just how horrifyingly messy IP.Board's database is.

 

So yeah... I have some fairly strong feelings about forum software, to say the least. :D

 

That said, this is actually my first time using Xenforo. It's taking a bit of getting used to here and there, but overall it seems to deliver on IPB's strong points fairly well, with none of the issues I've become used to.

 

If anyone has actually read through this without just skipping to the end or questioning my sanity, I applaud you.

 

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Edited by Guest
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Thanks for writing about your experiences @zoop, very interesting!

 

Out of the ones in my list from an admin perspective I have only used MyBB, IPB and of course XenForo.

 

This community originally started many years ago on MyBB under a different name (AN Community). Although MyBB was a breeze to customise, the user experience felt outdated.. specifically the editor. So migrated to IPB, and it was better... but it felt clunky and performance felt sluggish.

 

I've been really happy with XF so far. Never had any performance issues with it and it's very robust. Been on it for over 2 years and I do feel it's a good platform. Two of the developers are actually ex-vBulletin developers that left due to being bought out by Internet Brands who weren't happy with the way they were running things. I think forums are in an interesting situation at the moment. They're not as popular as they used to be, but I do feel it is easier to search for previous discussions and have more in-depth ones - my biggest priority is making the experience easier to use.

 

If anything though I do miss having more smaller anime communities and fan-sites as competition.

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MyBB more or less felt to me like it was designed more to be a direct replacement for phpBB more than anything else, though I can't entirely fault them for that - phpBB exploits always seemed to have been a dime a dozen back then. It isn't really fair of me to hold a decade-plus old release candidate against them at this point, but... well... it left one heck of an impression. :D

 

I got my forum start around 1999 on an emulation site that used an extremely ancient and unreliable forum software, which is entirely and utterly nonexistent today, to the point that even scrounging up that link took a decent little bit of intraweb detective work. My first crack at forum staff work, meanwhile, came around 2001, with a particularly miserable bit of forum software written in Perl called YaBB... which, I've now learned, eventually evolved into SMF. Huh.

 

The forum running YaBB ended up getting dumped in favor of an early version of PhpBB2, which despite its various shortcomings (aforementioned security issues, and painful customization), was from both a user and administrator perspective, more or less a complete dream to use. Following that is when my adventures with MyBB began for a short while. In 2006, the forum that had gone from YaBB to phpBB2 further evolved into a phpBB3 forum, which brought with it a much more powerful admin panel... which I didn't appreciate at the time, since it carried with it an increase to complexity with regards to user administration and privileges.

 

That was about it for me until my adventures with IPB started in 2011, which I've rambled on about a bit. ^^;

 

I think forums are in an interesting situation at the moment. They're not as popular as they used to be, but I do feel it is easier to search for previous discussions and have more in-depth ones - my biggest priority is making the experience easier to use.

 

If anything though I do miss having more smaller anime communities and fan-sites as competition.

 

Aye, you've probably noticed by now that I'm a bit (just a bit!) of a forum nerd, so the fact that forums in general have given up so much ground to things like Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, and Tumblr is a real bummer to me. Small communities focused around anime and other niche interests have always been fairly close to the top of my favorite ways to engage with people online (heck, my spouse and I met on one!), so it kinda sucks to see them become an increasingly endangered species even as the user experiences improve by leaps and bounds.

 

Speaking of user experiences, I have to give you tremendous credit in that area - around the time I registered here, I'd been poking around some other forums, and this one easily out classes all of the others in terms of look and feel. It's one thing to toss up some forum software, it's another thing to take it and make it beautiful.

 

So yeah, kudos on that. :D

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  • 3 months later...

Ahhh... Forum backends...

 

I have actually had a long and somewhat complicated relationship with forum software. I don't mean to stamp myself with a date, but the very first time I tried to use a forum backend was back in 2002 or 2003. I tried phpBB at that time, set everything up, and then ran away from it, screaming in terror. It was ugly, buggy, and filled with security holes. I didn't even wait to see how it would end up.

 

Right after that, I said "fuck it" and tried writing my own forum in Perl. Everything was going well, and I had a basic forum put together. Then, I stepped away from the coding for about 6 months and came back to it. Ummm, it looked like some weird kind of line noise, or what you would get if you attended a Xenomorph opera and tried to transcribe the events. I ran away screaming, again, and decided that forums were not for me.

 

Then, I entered college, this is relevant because I realized that obsessive compulsive usage of the Internet was not compatible with actually getting good grades while getting my face dragged through the muck. I vanished from the Internet for basically the next 7 or 9 years, don't remember how long exactly. When I came back, it was 2012, and -

 

Free:

  • MyBB
  • SMF
  • Vanilla
  • Flarum
  • Discourse (requires Ruby, not PHP)

 

Paid:

  • vBulletin
  • IP.Board (formerly Invision Power Board)
  • Xenforo

 

This was basically the state of forum back ends. I was like a kid in a candy store. I tried out a bunch of forum packages before realizing that I had nothing to make a forum about. After a little bit of a lag while I thought about this, I stumbled onto an absolute jewel of a forum. The community there was kind and nice, the forum itself was sleek and pretty. It seemed like heaven. I volunteered to help when they ran into some technical problems, and before I knew it, I ended up as an admin.

 

tumblr_m8o90d6Zgz1ryrdxjo1_500.gif.843c85cf78f79f438e06266e4712a678.gif

 

THAT WAS A MISTAKE!!!!

 

The forum was powered by IP.Board. I had thought that IPB was pretty damned good based on my own short trial run. I was completely wrong. I have never, ever, ever, in my entire life been faced by a piece of software that was so wildly engineered. On the backend, it was both beautiful and utterly terrifying, like some eldritch horror unleashed upon a small village during a moonlit night. The screams were musical.

 

Let's review some of the things that I ran into.

  • The theme system made no sense, it was overly engineered and prone to both bugs and being hacked (we'll come back to this).
  • The developers had completely lost control of the caching code, and it had a life of its own. I would report bugs and get responses that were basically like "woah, never knew that could happen! good luck! :o"
  • The database code was "good" but not particularly durable when faced with weird situations. As an example, multiple posts by the same person at the same time could sometimes make the forum sputter. Why? Well, it had to do with database locking. For some inexplicable reason, the default setting for the forum was not the "safest" when under high load. Who would expect defaults to not crash your site? Right?
  • Let's talk about patches. They were frequent, broke often, and required extreme amounts of babysitting to ensure that they didn't blow up and melt your face.
  • Now, let's talk about modding. I like mods, and I tend to mod the hell out of everything I can mod (I had over 80 mods in Fallout NV, not remarkable, but they RAN PERFECTLY). Anyways, I wrote my own IP.Board mods to add features for roleplaying and character limiting. On the surface, their system is brilliant as fuck. However, when you actually need to tap into the posts database, you hit a problem - IP.Board, lacking the ability to decide how to store posts, basically just tossed them in using whatever format felt good at the time. We had some posts that were stored entirely as complex bbcode alongside posts that were stored entirely as (poorly formatted) html. In the midst of this all, we had mismatched bbcode/html abominations that actually broke the post rendering engine.

*deep breath*

 

Look. I spent many, many, many sleepless and relatively thankless nights trying to keep that forum running. In the end, I parted ways with that community due to quite a substantial change in direction (on their part, not mine). When I stepped down, they had to bring on board 3 technical admins to replace me. They still struggled. That's just how bad it was. It was like opening Alice in Wonderland only to find yourself in Dante's Inferno.

 

True story: it was so bad it drove that second owner to just write her own damn forum software, though it's no longer around these days. Fun tidbit: while working on importing the old IPB data into the new software, we gained new appreciation for just how horrifyingly messy IP.Board's database is.

 

*slowly raises hand*

 

I did it. Hahaha. I wrote my own forum software, because I couldn't be damned to work with IPB anymore. I started a forum when I left the other site, and I ended up getting hacked by Russians due to an unpatched and unpatchable vulnerability in the theme code (that allowed arbitrary theme uploads). The only "solution" to the hack was to track the version of every file in your installation and monitor them for replacement, hoping that you caught it before it resulted in information theft or worse.

 

I didn't want to deal with that stuff anymore, but I also really didn't want to give up on the IPB prettiness. At that time, I don't think that Xen Foro had quite what I needed, and I was becoming a little insane due to too much forum administration :crazy:. So, like a lunatic, I decided to write my own software. I spent basically a year, stayed up late at night, and nearly lost my spouse in a sea of Python code (note: this is a dramatization and may not accurately depict real events).

 

The end result was a beautiful forum in Python, a work of art on the front end, and a reliable mish mash on the backend. I used it for about a year and a half before getting sick of the type of people that had drifted towards my forum. At that point, I shut it down, but I still have the code... All 40,000 or 60,000 lines of it. A beautiful monster of Python and CoffeeScript. At some point, I want to open source it and share it with the world, but like... Hahaha... Time! I don't have any of it (more specifically, productive time, I have time, but I'm normally brain fried and in a stupor after work). @_@

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The end result was a beautiful forum in Python, a work of art on the front end, and a reliable mish mash on the backend.

 

I still miss the status updates that updated in real time and were functionally identical to mini-chat rooms. <3

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