Hacker News Reader

Comment by tiffanyh | Hacker News Reader

Off topic, but PHPBB would not have been the first forum software I would have expected Facebook to use.

https://forums.oculus.com/

One problem is that migrating away from phpBB is hard (especially if it's phpBB 3). Anyways, it's not hip but it's not horrible either.

That forum pre-dates the acquisition.

They could've at least gone with Discourse. But I guess owing to the abundance of PHP talent at hand, they might've chose to stay with a widely used one.

I really like Discourse. But having looked into it quite seriously, it has a lot of gotchas, drawbacks, and limitations. The interface is very nice, but the feature set isn't as "mature" as other older forum software. It seems like if you're using it exactly the way they use it on the official demo/Discoure site, then you're good, if you need to use it in any other way then tough luck.

PHPBB is fine if you skin it well. Plus PHPBB's system requirements are extremely easy to meet (PHP and MySQL). Discourse requires a more niche tech' stack and requires a much more powerful machine to run. Good luck running it on a $10/month VM.

Many customers run Discourse sites on the $10/month Digital Ocean instance just fine. It is true that you can't go below that, though, as 1 GB RAM is the minimum.

It was a legacy from the acquisition and I believe they have already had to pay out bug bounties on it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com