alt Hacker News> Let's say you want to go back to 2001 and experience the glorious days of the early forum-sphere.
‘Peak’ would have been Invision Power Board 1.3 IMO, but still cool archaeology project :)
And lo:
- https://github.com/ernestbuffington/IPB-1.3.1-LegacyArchive
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invision_Community#Version_1.x...
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As a forum administration enthusiast, I still remember the fiasco when Invision rugpulled "lifetime" and "perpetual" licence holders by saying that it was only for those major versions.
I was so glad when XenForo came about and gave those sleazebags some competition.
Hah I actually just had 5.6 sol upgrade my old heavily modified IPB3 forum’s code to run on modern php8/mariadb11, backported cve fixes, gave it strict CSP etc and have it running seemingly securely exposed to the internet.
I also have some fond memories of WWWBoard instances, from Matt's Script Archive.
vbulletin 3.8 was peak for me. the 4.x major broke a ton of mods so there was still a huge community sticking to 3.x. was a big fan of xenforo too, the default design was quite refreshing compared to vB and IPB
I recently got a reminder that my vbulletin license had expired.
As a 12-year-old I could barely afford shared hosting let alone a license for Invision or vBulletin. I recall that phpBB also had a reputation for stability (manually-applied RPG mods excluded) that Invision sacrificed in favor of more features and faster development.