Forum software nostalgia — phpBB, SMF, and the vBulletin golden age

Been thinking about the old days lately. Back in 2009 I ran a phpBB board on a $15/month dedicated from some place that probably doesn't exist anymore. Pentium 4, 512MB RAM, 80GB IDE drive. Took 8 seconds to load the index page with twenty users online and I thought that was blazing fast.

They don't make them like that anymore. The whole vibe was different. Everyone had a signature image, usually some animated gif with their specs or a quote from a movie. Post count was right there under your name and people actually cared. Hit 500 posts and you were basically a local celebrity. Hit 1000 and the admin gave you a custom title.

I still remember the sound of the hard drive grinding when someone ran a search. Good times. Miss it more than I should probably admit.

Back when I started in this business, forum software was something you compiled from source after patching three dependencies by hand. VBulletin 3 was the gold standard and it cost real money, which meant the riffraff stayed on phpBB where they belonged. These kids these days with their Discourse containers and their "serverless" nonsense wouldn't know a proper my.cnf tuning if it bit them.

I ran a vB license from 2004 to 2014. Spent more on that license than on the server it sat on, mark my words. But it worked. Threaded view that actually made sense. Plugin architecture that didn't require a Node.js build step. The new stuff is all JavaScript bloat that eats 400MB to display ten lines of text.

Twenty years in this business and I've watched every forum I ever administered die or migrate to Discord. The remaining ones are all ghost towns or SEO spam farms. Give it another five years an

For what it is worth, our current setup handles roughly forty times the traffic on one quarter of the resources. I do miss the simplicity of the old templates though.

We migrated from SMF in 2019 after a particularly memorable weekend where the database decided that 2.3 million posts was an acceptable time to stop accepting connections. The recovery took fourteen hours and I still have the error log framed in my office. Dry humor, that.

The new software does not let you set a 400x200 signature with autoplaying audio. I am told this is a feature, not a regression. — Admin

Harold said "riffraff stayed on phpBB" while admitting he paid actual money for vbulletin in 2004 This is the same energy as people who bought $8000 plasma tvs to watch standard def cable

What is BBCode? I only ever used facebook groups for my shop. Is it like html? 😬

I got a tiny vps from Contabo last month to learn and the control panel scares me a little. Back to topic though, did people really pay for forum software? Seems wild now

Just use Discourse

Oh wait you want it to BOOT in under 30 seconds

Skill issue

PhpBB on a 64MB VPS back in the day was peak efficiency. Now you need 2GB for a "modern" forum that does 90% of the same thing with extra javascript tracking garbage. I ran one on a NAT box from OVHcloud for €4/month just to prove a point. Worked fine.

IMO the social status thing was more about community size than software. YMMV but my favorite board ever ran punBB on some ancient FreeBSD box. No signatures, no avatars, just text and the occasional [code] block. Take it with a grain of salt though, I was never one for the flashy stuff.

The post count obsession did get weird. Remember people posting "bump" or "+1" just to pad numbers? Moderators had to make rules about minimum character counts. Every platform has its own version of that problem now, just dressed up different.

Hello sir, I made forum last month with smf for my small community in jakarta. Very light sir, running on 512MB kvm from Hetzner. Thank you very much sir for sharing old stories, I learn many thing.

Back in my country we still use phpbb for school alumni, very popular there sir. Old software but still working good. 🙏