Good Old phpBB

And that’s how we carried on for several years. Talking, taking photos, making videos, sharing ideas… Inevitably, the time came to update the whole setup. I got out a calculator and added it all up: the forum software, the theme, the mods and add-ons — quite a collection by then. I looked at the total and stopped to think. Was it worth it?

Perhaps I should look for something simpler? At that point, I was willing to give up some features, even a little convenience. Above all, I wanted something reliable and predictable. And then I remembered good old phpBB.

I’d tried it years before, and it had left me with mixed feelings. On the one hand, lightweight software that wasn’t fussy about hosting, plenty of features out of the box, a large community and lots of free extensions. On the other, a few things had left me completely baffled.

Dear developers… who thought this was a good idea? I remember getting stuck on the time zone setting when I first tried it. At the time, it felt as though I couldn’t get anywhere until I’d sorted that out. And first I had to find the setting, tucked away somewhere in the User Control Panel. I spent an entire day on it the first time!

Permissions were a whole other adventure. Create a new forum section, and you have to work out which groups can see it and what they’re allowed to do there. That was anything but music to my ears… Honestly, I never quite untangled the whole system back then.

The familiar story: what’s obvious and logical to a developer can be anything but obvious to an ordinary user. You sit there staring at the settings, trying to work out what you’re supposed to do.

Still, I installed phpBB for testing. Had a look around, tinkered, tried again. Beneath those difficulties was a foundation that suited me. And by then I’d gained enough experience not to close the page at the first unfamiliar setting.

So I decided: this would be the foundation I’d build on.

I’d figure it out.