phpBB Discussion • 23 years with the phpBB, no idea about the forum's future

Hello,

I've been working with phpBB since version 2 — 23 years already!

Over time, I really liked phpBB2 compared to other bulletin boards; it was modern, progressive, and fast. But today, the project is struggling. phpBB 3.3 looks and feels like phpBB 3.0... Now, 18 years later, functionally the board is pretty much the same (more or less).

Maybe veterans will like this, but what about the new generation? I don’t think so. I visited the Reef2Reef forum, and OMG, felt like I was teleported to the bright future:

• Polls and the latest posts on the main page
  Ajax info when I hovered over the user avatar in the last post
  Forum description when I hovered over the forum name
  Ajax preview when I hovered over a topic
  Quick topic creation
  User and topic rating systems
  Award systems
  Functional editor that easily allows you to add images
  Top trending threads
  Similar threads
  Tags
  Ability to scale, crop, etc., avatars
  And who knows what else

After that, I felt sad about phpBB. I know, there are extensions. Yes, there are. But many are unofficial, many have been abandoned, and many will be. Not all are compatible with PHP 8, and some are horrible in terms of performance (e.g., Medal mod, old Karma mod in phpBB 3.0). There will be no updates for many of them, and you'll lose some data, even if you find an alternative. The modding community has gotten smaller every year.

I don't know — at some point, AI will be integrated into other boards that are years (decades) ahead of phpBB.

But the main problem is not phpBB, but Google, which started eliminating forums from search results over a decade ago. My forum lost 95% of its visitors, and Google's algorithms are unknown. They probably have some arrangements with the big companies (Reddit, Facebook, etc.), and their results come first.

But the future of Google is also unclear. The quality of search results as of 2025 is not bad, but horrible. When I search for something, the first page of results often looks like this:

• Cheap advertising articles trying to sell you something
  Very low-quality articles written by Indian authors to sell you something and get you to click on links
  Articles written by bots with very poor quality
  Sites full of ads, popups, fake browser notifications — an inexperienced user could catch a virus just by clicking somewhere
  Almost no useful information

Before, I used Google for 100% of my research. Now, I use it 5%. The other 95% goes to AI. Yes, it's not perfect, and yes, there is heavy censorship (Google-level or more) — but it provides better information and is much faster, without the need to visit tons of advertising-heavy sites.

There is AI search — I’ve tried it, but I’m not sure if it’ll be better for forum owners in terms of search results.

But I hope the situation changes, and forums will thrive like they did from 2000-2010. I hope phpBB will be great again.

ps. I won't switch to xen or vbulletin, too late for that

Statistics: Posted by SuperFedya — Sun Feb 02, 2025 5:33 am

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