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Comment by thiscatis | Hacker News Reader

Modding phpBB and starting new forums using phpBB (and later Invision Community) got me into php dev and basically the job and career I now have.

Such a great product for building communities. It would be so good having this feeling again browsing forums on this software. The Subsilver theme was iconic and legendary.

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Same. But for vBulletin. I then went on to build my own forum software (because who didn't?): http://web.archive.org/web/20040523030817/http://www.webtric...

I remember wtcBB! Such a neat little script, reminded me a lot of vBulletin 2 :D

Same here! Originally phpBB, then IPB 1.3, then vBulletin. Good times. :)

I was entirely obsessed with this space when I was a teenager/young adult. I would search out and try every forum software I could get my hands on, and of course (because who didn't) made my own.

God that is peak mid-00s design. Wonderful job, you hit me right in the nostalgia.

Same. Used to moderate the official vbulletin.org with some good people. This got me started in my career and I would not be where I am today without all that time spent learning the internals of vBulletin. Of course, it's a shitshow nowadays after the company took it over and the majority of good people (including developers) created XenForo. I have not been involved for over a decade :)

That's amazing. I spent a fair bit of time on vbulletin.org (I think) back in the day. Wasn't a huge poster, but lurked a lot and remember reading Kier's posts.

that era of three column layouts, solid borders, pixel graphics, tiny text, etc. is so nostalgic

Templating was such a drag though as a designer. Don’t know how it is now. I don’t think I saw many exciting designs that veered away from the distinctive phpbb look. You could always tell.

I remember a few pretty big sites that templated the living daylights out of it for commenting/etc, but now many seem to use Xenforo instead.

The mods being distributed as manual diff application instructions and then auto mod installers became a thing. Also called all caps MODs to distinguish them from forum moderators.

This is the hardest nostalgia. I'd forgotten about the manual diff! I was doing this at 13 and was basically what got me started in PHP development in general.

Oh yes! Same for Wordpress. And then you try to combine two mods but the patches don't merge cleanly.

I remember when Drupal introduced actual plugin hooks how revolutionary that felt :D

And doing the equivalent of partial compilation by just dragging and dropping your php install over FTP and telling it to ignore the unchanged files. Then writing .htaccess files everywhere to tell Apache what to do if you had a 'front controller' pattern.

20 years later and people are doing CGI through WASM or lambda so they can use their language of choice. Full circle as always.

That's made my afternoon! I had good fun making the original subsilver and prosilver themes all those years ago :)

I loved those themes!

Wow, thank you.

I can also thank phpBB for kicking off my career. In the mid-2000s I spent a lot of time on a few specialist gaming forums, but also a webdev forum where I was sharing what I learned about XHTML and the new CSS with other newbies.

JavaScript back then was a total obscurity - I didn't actually learn it until maybe 6 years later because, before then, everything was rendered by the server and you'd just copy DHTML snippets for silly things.

Someone approached me to help modify their phpBB forum and while I did that as a hobby for a short while, they were also the first people to pay me for it. Basically validated my work and put me on the career path I have now.

Came here to say this! I hacked phpBB to build a “Facebook before Facebook” for my friends in high school. Added features like a poetry authoring tool, turn based games, and a blog feature. While I don’t use php any more I absolutely would not be where I am today without phpBB!

Same - started using phpBB in 2000? 2001? Started my career in web development.

Same here, phpBB and vBulletin are basically what kick started my career, though I had built a ton of small static html sites before when I was in HS. I built a small but still pretty big community. I think the board ended with ~30k users, not all active, but still. I only just shut it down a few years ago. Reddit essentially killed it, and once I actually got a job it was harder to maintain my presence there and keep up with the personalities. Never made a dime from it, but it ended up being a solid investment.

I still have all of the files, etc, the database is a monster. So, I could theoretically put it back up. Took it from phpBB to vBulletin 3.6 to 4 to 5, so it was an older and long lasting. I remember setting it up my freshman year in college ('06) taking advantage of a protest of moderators on a different board (they were reading user's PMs). Some of my favorite internet memories came from internet forums. The thing I always hated about vB though is that even a minor update could cause part of a custom theme to break, and the CP felt dated, even in the early 2000s. Finding a theme template or option was so overly complicated.

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