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Comment by rtpg | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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