PhpBB 3.3.10
phpbb.com
phpbb.com
As someone who never understood the appeal of Twitter or Facebook, the new wave of FOSS social apps feels very alien to me.
The most extreme end probably being some old school chat apps and IRC on one side, and encylopedic wiki's (not the only kind) on the other. And while both forums and Usenet were closely rooted in current conversation, they had a more long-standing meaning, too. Where you could follow whole discussions even years later and where the writing style recognized this, often having single posts that more closely resemble articles.
Twitter and Mastodon seem a lot more ephemeral. As do sites like this or reddit, after all, they're concerned with "news".
StackOverflow seems closer to the forums of olden time out of most of the contemporary outlets.
So apart from the UI, you might miss that different conversational character resulting out of this.
As a final note, I do miss Wikis like the original one, where you had a lot of long-standing information, but with a conversational bent.
The difference is basically that comments in threads are not linear by time and threads are not sorted by most recent comment.
Free app idea.
Forums felt like writing emails in the open.
Twitter felt like texting in the open.
Not sure what the next thing will be! I say this as someone with 1k+ posts on multiple forums (essentially archived at this point).
Actually, most of my favorite forums were only accessible if you registered, which in several cases required an invite. So it was less like writing letters in the open and much more like getting together with my bowling buddies or whatever. Just a group of friends who you hang out with from time to time.
I more meant "email" for content length, at least with my personal experience--forum posts were more like longer letter/email lengths, and Twitter felt more like texting with shorter notes (huge twitter threads aside).
I feel like reddit's success is somewhat similar. You don't have to futz around with a bunch of accounts, but you're still working within different worlds, so to speak.
Granted, this is less than, say, Discord's "each server you can have a different profile" thing, which I think is kind of the ideal here, but I feel like being able to deal with the technical issues lets communities exist!
PhpBB kind of has this, with all the plugins, a sort of uniform interface... it's not the worst thing in the world to have a solid base for running communities. We definitely don't need everyone to be _in_ that same community.
It's still based on a model that is fundamentally different than the way that people socialize in the real world.
You could do it differently, but the way it's designed you're supposed to have a single Mastodon account and pick an instance that hosts it. Instances decide whether to federate with other instances or not. The focus of the design is on content and creators, not on relationships.
The old phpBB model was much closer to the way that social networks actually work in the real world. A friend might introduce you to a forum about writing, so you create an account and start hanging out with their friends there and discussing writing. You get to know someone else in that group and you find out that you're both into programming and they're involved in another forum that focuses on that. You join them over there with a new account.
It's all just friend groups. You might be in many different friend groups or just a few. You may be the only one who is in both groups, or there might be several people who overlap. With some friends you avoid discussing politics, while with others you're comfortable discussing it in depth. Some friend groups form around a game, others around a shared interest. You show different facets of yourself to the different groups, and this is codified in the structure of the apps.
This model is not well supported by Mastodon because it set out to solve a very different problem. They approached federation with the question "how do we avoid leaving our content in thrall to a corporation?" I want to approach it with the question "how do we get back to the informal friend groups that we used to have?"
Why wouldn't you just have a different Mastodon account on every instance where you want a presence?
That sounds quite a lot like the old usenet model actually. You got an account on one usenet server and it was up to the server admin to decide which usenet groups they wanted to partake in and which other usenet servers it wanted to pull/push posts from/to. Other usenet servers could also decide to cut off certain servers if they misbehaved.
He was right!
Forums are also great for niche interests and communities. I used to be super into homebrewing beer (til kids happened), and there's a site called HomebrewTalk that was THE place to go to geek out on the hobby. People would share recipes, tips, photos of cool equipment they'd bought or built, industry news, etc. It's not something you can really replicate on Facebook or Twitter. I'm sure there is a homebrewing Twitter community, but by the nature of the app it's going to be much more what you're doing in the moment commentary than long form writeups preserved for all time. Both formats have their place.
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.
I also don't think your problems with threaded discussion are unsolvable. I've not seen any forum implement this but I don't see why you couldn't allow someone to reply to multiple comments at once. For display you'd show the reply under the topmost parent and then only a link (or pre-collapsed comment) under the other ones.
For updates, Reddit solves this by highlighting new comments since your last visits (or other previous visits you can select from), which works really well - except that they limit the feature to paying users and subreddit moderators. HN doesn't have that feature presumably because HN doesn't want long-running discussions.
For (2) Reddit (or RES anyway) also has a solution: hovering over the [parent] link shows the parent post.
The clutter vs. minimalism is an entirely separate issue. While I wouln't advocate for giant signatures, I think some customization (avatar, titles, etc.) can be important for community building.
The main comments are chronological, but you can also inline reply to a main comment. So the hierarchy is restricted to one level deep. I think this design flows more naturally, you avoid deep branching, and you avoid quoting a comment that was 3 pages back.
* https://github.com/godotengine/godot-proposals/discussions
The good thing about web forums is they allowed you to disable those things at the user level. Social media is top-down by design. Want to get rid of Twitter's useless 'For You' default tab? You can't, because the company has decided that that's something they want you to use, regardless of your preference.
I don't know the typical lifecycle of homebrew equipment, but a similar bell curve distribution should apply.
Very different timeline from discussing news and/or random gossip where nobody will care about that particular conversation a week later.
(everything2 was incredible back when it was active and I really wish there was something like that again too)
I used to run a phpBB forum and there was something about being an admin of a forum where people you didn't know in real life came to talk. The fact that Discord distorts the term 'server' to mean 'a channel managed by us' irks me.
1 - https://discord.com/blog/forum-channels-space-for-organized-...
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/http://forums.dsm...
Or older:
https://web.archive.org/web/20060116021218/http://dsmeet.com...
All the cool kids were building hyper customized forums. I was so proud of myself to have written something that wasn't phpBB/Invision/vBulletin. I wanted "clean" URLs, avatar randomization and interactive signatures. So many other weird features. I didn't have a mind for "product" and just built whatever came to mind. I think a lot of us were, and that's why that era of the web was so weird and special.
I built this back before I started college. This was my hobby that consumed me, taking over from video games. I had no idea that what I was learning at the time would become a lucrative career or bring me any money at all. It was just fun. Showing off amongst friends. Building a community of like-minded people to talk with.
Hacking RM2K and Zelda Classic, bouncing around AIM/IRC, moving from IGN/EzBoard to hosted forums, exploring what others were building... It was a different time. MySpace, Xanga, and Facebook ultimately put a stop to it. People used to build so many weird and wonderful ways to talk to one another, but it wasn't scalable.
I know my view is tainted by rose colored glasses, but I do miss it.
I'm so tempted to build forums into my newest website, FakeYou.com. I know it would probably distract me from building actual product features that matter. With all the kids that are are using Discord, it wouldn't make any sense. But I always gravitate to forums. They're special.
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.
It's like the answer has been in front of us the whole time, but we're distracted by needless complexity.
We assume that all problems have a technological solution and that any suitable technological solution will be adopted. It follows that any unsolved problem needs new tech, since if the old tech were sufficient we wouldn't have the problem.
Mastodon is simply the frontrunner and most mature and battle tested implementation, it does not represent the only form of the fediverse, only its 'twitter' mirror. Eg Both wordpress and discourse are said to develop plugins and something like bookwyrm (a goodreads alternative) points out how other designs implement the protocol.
But it is true that activitypub only goes so far. We should be thinking how two decades of trials and errors (mostly errors) motivate the next steps in social protocols.
ActivityPub *should* (though nobody currently does, as far as I know) solve the problem of requiring a new identity for each service that you want to interact with. Ideally in a federated network you only need an account on one server and then have fun with everyone else.
I'm only speaking for myself but I feel account management fatigue having to juggle multiple ones for each social network/forum/etc. I want to interact with.
It's like real life: I might really enjoy hanging out with my in-laws and also love my D&D group, but I don't want to introduce them to each other and I show each of them slightly different facets of my personality. I don't mind having multiple accounts if that's what it takes to keep the interactions in separate boxes.
What kind of "interlocking" and "overlapping" are you writing about here?
In real life I can be a part of a bowling club and a church, and I don't need the club to know anything about the church. They're distinct entities related only by the fact that I am part of each of them.
This confusion is kind of what I'm getting at: modern "social media" and "social networks" have coopted the vocabulary of real human relationships to the point where people assume these words have technical meanings.
And if you'd get really unlucky, the pigs or MAFIAA would come sending nasty C&D letters, subpoenas or a court-issued search order for some shit some of your users did.
So many communities switched over to Reddit simply because Reddit would take care of anything but "normal" moderation duties.
Twitter has millions of users and you have a direct connection to each of them. You can look for something and instantly view conversations about that topic and participate in them. An event happens and you can see what people are saying about it, in real time. Forums don't give you any of that.
The problem with Mastodon is that it doesn't quite get there. Federation (or at least, the way Mastodon implements it) has a lot of friction, and search is very limited. I really wanted to like it but I find it to be the worse of both worlds: neither the universality and immediacy of Twitter, nor the more intimate and archival nature of forums.
I do miss those days, I still feel different when I interact with these old websites.
So far I’m the only user, but it’s a surprisingly nice system for keeping track of notes and regular status updates on my projects. And when I need to collaborate with someone, the permission system is quite nice as well.
The fact that it’s free, mature, and relatively easy to install and maintain are what led me to give it a try.
I have plans to eventually write a kanban view and scheduled post plug-ins to make it a bit better project tracker.
Here’s a link and some screen grabs of my topic list.
https://gist.github.com/masenf/d0a4d274da7b7a6175f50d1f1246b...
Seems like the slang has bled out to incorporate all types of volunteer moderators.
While the pictures that were actually hosted on the forum itself are usually fine.
https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Xfire
And that was for video too ! (Hopefully YouTube shutting down will give more warning... speaking of which, has anyone backed up Google Video before it shut down ? I have a collection of links in a forum post that would be nice to have back up and working again.)
Still, imgur is pretty big these days, this might be quite expensive (how do they stay afloat, BTW ?).
- lack of threads
- signature noise
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 still do that. Ultra long topics with hundreds of posts, somewhere between page 157-178 there are some nuggets you will never find.
Also the extremely annoying UIs - as an example look at the minimal navigation / pagination buttons in many forums. Well, OK, that started to change slowly, but still we have horrible UIs everywhere. Annoyances like most space on a forum page still wasted for unimportant side information do exist - some designs are so bad that the most important information has the smallest font size.
But while the good old slick and dirty PHP forums still delivered with all that warts, mostly because these people still knew how to program fast software, then came the ruby programmers and brought us a vision of forum software that should get a premium lifetime award for coding horrors. JS heavy frontend with grotesque front-end anti-patterns and a monstrous bloated backend that breaks when your forum actually has some attention. The time of "internet software as a satirical art form" has not stopped until today.
So hopefully the old-school PHP devs can easily iron out the annoyances of the past and still deliver internet software that is fast and usable.
Happy release party, PhpBB!
Yep, you have to go through each page to find them all, it's called research.
That's basically the default experience of discord.
In retrospect I miss it just as much. I really do mourn the loss of communities I was part of, I even owned one for a short while.
The friends, the discussions, the projects, all lost to time.
PunBB, Flux, and MyBB were fantastic for small admin teams. There was very little overhead for modification and maintenance. I ran a PunBB board for over a decade. It was extremely lightweight, and if you left off the footer ID & version info in the template you wouldn't get hacked nearly as easily as with the popular systems.
(One of the worst ever was when I used a Joomla-integrated forum though...that install seemed to be sniffed at by bots endlessly)
(There was also a German commerical PHP board that I was paid to maintain for my city, can't remember the name but it worked really well. It's probably still around)
Shocked they haven't been hacked and defaced, but PunBB never seemed to attract much attention compared to PhpBB and others.
So if you're after the 'best' forum solution now, your best bet is definitely not vBulletin anymore.
Drupal doesn't really seem to have an ecosystem left anymore.
There are still things you can only do with a custom sytem, but for most use-cases commercial site-design tools can get you up and running with much less upfront cost.
I designed & built about 20 websites from 2007 to 2014 or so, all with custom designs and backed by an off-the-shelf CMS. Except for the few I maintain for close friends & family, everyone has moved to Squarespace.
While I'm incredibly happy with that arrangement — nobody's pestering me about code I wrote a lifetime ago — it means a whole bunch of sites look much more generic.
For example I wrote some custom JS to dynamically tile pictures on this site: http://web.archive.org/web/20130722050828/https://www.firstc.... Now it displays photos in a generic fashion: https://www.firstchairpromo.com
Just think that before WordPress people were coding a whole website from scratch for the local photographer or news agency, with often sub-optimal and/or overpriced results.
> a whole bunch of sites look much more generic.
True, but that's just a consequence of letting the customer deal with it directly rather than a professional. Most PaaS still allow custom designs, nobody is stopping you from adding a Flash intro page.
It's terrible for a simple blog or small community or nonprofit site these days. I know because I still run my blog on it, only due to inertia at this point (golden hammer).
I think one of the greatest legacy of PHP was brining "Serverless" hosting to the masses, where you only focus on the "upload" of the code, and you didn't need an ISS or Linux expert to deploy your projects.
Yeah, PHP had a weird teenage phase, but even JS and Python still have a lot of weird things too (specially JS). But modern frameworks as Laravel, make PHP a great alternative for DJango/FastAPI, Rails or Nest.js.
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.
[This is coming from a long time PHP dev who actually loves it.]
Its likely getting harder because PHP has developed its own specializations in the form of frameworks. Laravel is one, WordPress has become another. People look for 'Laravel developer', not 'PHP developer'. Or, 'Wocoomerce developer' -> not 'WordPress plugin developer', not 'WordPress developer', the least, not 'PHP developer'.
Specializing in one of such emerging specialization fields pays !much more! than just developing on PHP, so it will become more difficult to find PHP developers into the future. Especially the WordPress enterprise ecosystem sucks a lot of WordPress/PHP developers out of the contracting market into high-paid, long-term jobs.
For that reason its also the most successful front of Open Source where an actual thriving ecosystem was able to develop on it through freemium business formats like in WordPress ecosystem. The plugin ecosystem of WordPress was estimated to have $1 bn volume a few years ago. And its quite streamlined in providing software and services at scale to the point of providing ordinary users and small businesses with features at price points they would not hesitate to pay. It does constitute an example for the rest of the Open Source world could follow or at least learn from.
that is not the merit of PHP itself, more like characteristic of the period (when tech salary hasn't yet been inflated and consumer devices' computing power has not yet become abundant).
Probably rare but I had task to rewrite Node API to PHP because of deployment...
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.
Such a simple question as whether something is passed by reference or by value shouldn't result in "This is a super interesting piece of information! Looks like it's true; but I couldn' find any official documentation supporting this fact. We also need to know which versions of PHP support this lazy copy concept. Anyone has more info?" https://stackoverflow.com/a/9740541/3461
The price of a dedicated cpu is down to under $4 /month in common web hosts. Meanwhile the IO and other performance also improved so much that you dont ever, ever notice such things. So nobody cares about that kind of stuff. That's overoptimization that nobody asked for.
The same user found the documentation after they bothered doing an interesting modern technique called "looking for it".
You'd have known that if you read the comment right after the one you copied.
Maybe they will make a comeback?
Having said that in many contexts a forum with threads that have a clear topic are just so much more of an appropriate solution than chat apps. I don't understand why people prefer the latter (although it does explain why I prefer Zulip since it manages to be a good hybrid in how it organizes discussions).
That means that they won't be indexed by search engines, so I cannot serendipitously stumble across them during a random web search in the first place, and even if I somehow learned about them, having to sign up merely to read some stuff is annoying.
I don't really like Discord, so I don't use it, and have no feedback on it.
I used to run a SimpleMachines forum, and we actually wanted to prevent the contents from being indexed.
Arc was released a few years after Reddit announced their Python rewrite anyways
They are tremendously useful still, and they also contain a lot of esoteric domain-specific knowledge you can't find elsewhere.
The few forums that I still use seem to run vBulletin or Invision (both PHP bulletin boards but both paid software).
I'm not sure I like Discourse's UX, but XenForo is made by former vB devs and seems nicer than modern vBulletin.
Between the above and Google simply not sending traffic to small web sites, I am not sure if there could be any kind of a comeback.
Facebook Groups did damage to communities aimed at older and less savvy audiences.
Stack Overflow likely replaced quite a few tech communities (as did its spinoffs in that network).
Reddit replaced a lot of forums for niche topics and hobbies.
And Discord seems to have taken over for a lot of 'young person focused' topics like games, film, tv shows, web series, etc.
Discord has basically annihilated about two of those services as well as many smaller communities too. Stack Overflow is losing out to Discord servers (and possibly Slack instances) aimed at the users of a specific framework or language, and many of Reddit's communities seem to be switching over to there too.
Asked a pretty basic question, and immediately got two close votes; probably because it was a short, basic question.
It did get answered, though, as opposed to being ignored, like so many questions.
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.
Conforums seems defunct
I rejected NodeBB because MongoDB is no longer developed under a free license. I'll list some other forum software I have considered in case you find it useful: Fossil Forums (https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/forum.wiki), nimforum (https://github.com/nim-lang/nimforum), Talkyard (https://github.com/debiki/talkyard), Misago (https://github.com/rafalp/Misago), FlaskBB (https://github.com/flaskbb/flaskbb). All of these have less momentum behind them than Flarum. Most are lightweight. I found it very appropriate that nimforum's name is inconsistently capitalized. :-) I am still kind of amazed that Fossil has integrated a forum and a chatroom. During my research I also found an interesting fork of SMF: https://github.com/elkarte/Elkarte.
The Flarum community seems much more friendly, DIY and open. Having to use PHP in 2023 is a little depressing, but it would presumably integrate more easily into other PHP projects like Wordpress.
I was hoping to use NodeBB for the pure js stack but it's missing some important features and the front end is greybearded out of using a modern framework because of "speed"[1]. You can use Postgres instead of Mongo, by the way:
> NodeBB Forum Software is powered by Node.js and supports either Redis, MongoDB, or a PostgreSQL database
[1]: https://community.nodebb.org/topic/14371/nodebb-reactjs/3?_=...
Honestly, if I was going to pay for a forum, I'd probably go with (self-hosted) XenForo from the start. It has the most polished user experience of any forum software I have seen. I understand people sell custom mobile apps for it, too, though I haven't really looked.
I thought using NodeBB with PostgreSQL was not recommended for production. Looks like I was wrong. Thanks for telling me.
What's the easiest/cheapest way to test-host a forum?
Discourse wants payments, which doesn't make a lot of sense for something that might not even get used.
PHP, in my recollection, has always been a pain to deploy and to take care of. Does there exist something lightweight, storing data in sqlite, not requiring JS to even operate, and easy to update? I'm talking libre ofc.
If you're happy to use Docker then the story of hosting it is pretty easy.
I wouldn't generally consider PHP a pain to deploy either for that matter, but I'm sure that all depends on your particular situation.
I think PHPBB ticks all those boxes, doesn't it?
It's build with Python and React, so obviously not so easy to setup like PHP solutions, but there's also a magic docker setup that you can just git clone to your server and get forum running in minutes.
But with Misago I am trying to find a sweet spot between "new wave" of forum software and old solutions. So there's plenty of interactivity in the UI that JS provides and there's markdown support, but there's also classic pagination instead of infinite scrolling.
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 were often left paying for the servers out if their pockets or dumb banner ads.
Facebook groups took everything away, and the ads were replaced with creepy personalized ones.
There are some really strange things in the PhpBB codebase - I remember that the software somehow found out that I injected custom code and therefore stopped working.
(My biggest problem was the upgrade from 3.0.12 to a newer version (probably 3.1) back in 2014 / 2015)
Recently, I was looking for Espresso Machines and found https://www.home-barista.com/forums/ which is actually powered by PhpBB.
The amount of knowledge and information on that forum is changing the way I research products and search for things on the internet. I've learned so much deep knowledge on espresso machines and I've gone down rabbit holes of how water affects espresso machines.
It gave me a deep feeling of how awful Google and reddit are at having good quality information from experts. The users on the barista forums are just experts and have been around the forum for a very long time.
It's almost like Reddit and Google are fast food and Home Barista (and other forums that use PhpBB and similar technologies) are quality, home cooked meal past down from generations of knowledge.
Now I exclusively try to find forums for a specific topic and try to find the experts on those forums to get my information, usually through a forum.
Long live PhpBB and forums and these experts on there, it's a breath of fresh air exploring the internet away from the major social media products (including Google honestly.)
Note:
The fact that home-barista is using PhpBB is purely ironic, I did not know it was, this post just reminded me of a forum that had a wealth of information and that forums are great even in 2023, heh!
I'm on a soccer messageboard, and it's the only place on the internet where I recognize handles. Like Cheers, it's a place to chat, where everybody knows your name. You aren't crowded out by a thousand new people joining every day. Social media-centric tech bloggers turned this into a disadvantage ("low growth"), where for actual users, it's a godsend.
Brigading and derailaing cthreads, common on Reddit and Twitter, is largely impossible because you have to set up a user account first, and that friction drives away all but the most dedicated trolls.
I've had a Reddit account for 10 years and don't know a single person on it. It's no different from Facebook or Twitter, they're all just a amorphous chattering mass.
I know with SMF, one can disable lots of features and make it lightweight, but would like to know more.
Also Flarum [1] looks good in terms of being lightweight. It is based on Laravel Framework, so it has own pros and cons, but thanks to wise implementation of mithril.js, it feels very fast from a user perspective.
On a different spectrum, I would list Discourse [2], followed by Invision Power Board (IPB) [3]. Both require 2GB+ of RAM and a good CPU to run the server.
[0]: https://punbb.informer.com/forums/
[1]: https://flarum.org/
[2]: https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/main/docs/INSTAL...
Long-live forum software :)
HN is not a forum
Several categories had this feature enables, including any news discussion areas and the designated shitpost area.
HN and PunBB look quite similar. Even more so when using the orange skin.