Old nostalgic forum softwares

Wombat

What's your most favorite nostalgic forum software?

Mine is IPB v1.3.1 final. D2jsp.org was based off of it, and here is another one that is still running it:
http://idforums.net/index.php

It's incredible, the speed and how lightweight it was still amazes me today. (Once you fix the exploits for it).

I know there are some other ipb 1.3.1 boards running that are secured.

My second would be the old vBulletin. You can see the old nostalgic theme still active at http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/index.php. They bring back tons of memories for some reason, love these old school designs.

And just between you and me.. I think the old vBulletin theme looks better than the new vBulletin 'connect' crap... lol

Dominion

Wombat I think the old vBulletin theme looks better than the new vBulletin 'connect' crap... lol

I agree ... though from the modern viewpoint, boy, does that old layout look crowded!

Wombat

Dominion Yeah, especially compared to Flarum's design and some other modern boards. Hell, even the new IPB looks less cluttered.

No idea what's going on with vbulletin, seems like their whole system went down the shitter. (in my opinion)

Berlyn

phpBB2 is where I started, I am struggling to find a demo of the software though.

Wombat

Berlyn Awww my gosh.. totally forgot about PHPBB2!

I remember the old GaiaOnline founder used to post in the phpbb2 support forum back in 2004 or so when he was creating his custom dynamic avatar's within the system.

Look how far gaiaonline has come! Although, I still think it's using phpbb as it's forum system under the hood. Or atleast has some roots of it left in there. But they removed the copyright and have edited it so much, not entirely sure. I think it's custom now though.

Aww the memories

Berlyn
Found it!

http://www.phpbbhacks.com/phpbb2/subsilver/demo/

Felli

@Berlyn Wombat
I would say phpBB2Refugees would be a better example of phpBB2 at work if you asked me. lol
For me I started out with iP.Boards 3.1 (I used to co-own a remake of the popular website called animeEDEN.)

Tim

I built my first forum which was also my first website using phpBB2. Tried a few premium options such as IPB and vBulletin over the years, but none of them satisfied what I wanted to achieve.

christicehurst

SMF was my first forum but sadly it never changed over the last ten years

Wombat

Felli Ha, didn't know there was a refugee center for the nostalgia people, that's awesome! Thanks for sharing that. I wonder if PHPBB2 is still secure for production?

Auk

Wombat I wonder if PHPBB2 is still secure for production?

I highly doubt it.

I started as a member of a forum that used vBulletin 3.0.1. The forum theme was custom, pretty impressive. - Since I couldn't afford something like that I always ended up with IPB 1.x and then eventually moved onto phpBB. MyBB 2 caught my eyes because of module management and soft-delete which most forums seemed to lack. phpBB3.1 is also nice, but I disliked the forum softwares because of how the code is written (using php global keyword for instance.)

HolyPhoenix

I started as a member on VBulletin. I eventually gained the courage to start a phpbb2 forum. :p I also was on several IPB 1.3 forums. All of these bring back memories for me.

HolyPhoenix

The website Felli posted I think had some security fixes for it somewhere. Honestly, I thought the original intent of that site was to release a maintained version, but they never did do that so its a little sad.

Meow

Absolutely FluxBB... Unfortunately, I cannot tell you what FluxBB is— you have to see it for yourself. 😉

Franz

Meow Ha! What about PunBB? 😉
That's where I learned PHP, and I started at the very basics... hehe.

Meow

Franz I may have used PunBB earlier than you. 🙂

Yggdrasil

Ah, back in the days I started with a forum on some free forum hosting service. I believe it was phpbb2. But my first real forum was the good old WBB 2. Such a good piece of software, I really miss it 🙁 .

Franz

Meow I think you have. 🙂

shri

Started with UBB (who remembers this over here?) a CGI perl / flat file based BB in the mid / late 90s. 🙂

Was probably one of the first 10 people to buy a license of a bleeding edge forum called vBulletin which used mySQL and PHP! Remember helping them fix UBB import bugs in the early days.

Still a vBulletin user even though I've tried Xen and a few other PHP based packages.

Looking forward to starting a new journey with either Flarum or something else that is modern, easy to manage / deploy, has an awesome community and hopefully coded in a language that I can read!

Wombat

shri UBB

Yeah, good old Ted O'Neill wrote that babe.

I wonder if there are any UBB forums up and running lol

doomrah

i remember way back in the day i installed forums that used cgi-bin and text files (as it's storing). no db required. at the time that was actually pretty nice not to need a db. it corrupted a lot though so you always had to have some cron tab job backing up all the .txt files 🙂

i wish i could remember what it was called...

edit: i just read about ubb up above me. that was probably it...so yes i do remember that! 🙂
edit2: http://sourceforge.net/projects/textmb/ - isn't this it?

shri

doomrah The sourceforge link is not UBB. I guess someone cloned the functionality of UB to PHP. A number of us moved from UB to vB / PHPBB (not sure if it existed then... but I never used or installed it).

Other pieces we've used include older versions of Drupal (3 or 4 I think), which never really struck me as complete forums.