Why Not Open Source Forums?

[Skofo]

This forum seems to be all in the spirit of open source development and everything, except for the fact that it's powered by a closed-source BBS service that costs up to $300 up front and up to $50 every 6 months afterwards. What's wrong with phpBB, PunBB or some other open source alternative?

 

[sam fisher]

In comparison they are relatively shit and resource hogs (punBB excluded but it has no features at all - aside from being fairly shit).

 

[Rico]

Resource hogs? Have you actually looked at Invision Power Board's source code?

PunBB is still not easily moddable and while the core forum is very secure, mods are usually not heavily tested and often expose XSS/SQL injection points.

Although Invision is quite bloated it does the job and unless Hando has dire problems with running the site on his servers, it would a lot of pain to switch.

 

[sam fisher]

Even phpBB 3 would require heavy modification to get it to the state that it can replace an IPB install.

 

[Skofo]

I reiterate my suggestion for an open alternative to IPB. The bugs in this forum seem to be pretty darn close to taking over and becoming our overlords.

 

[Nova]

I'd like to see it run on Vanilla, personally.

 

[PoisonedV]

yes, the bugs in the forum suck, but thats not really the fault of the forum software
lets list the alternatives
phpbb- 0day sploits posted every weekday
most other stuff - yabb, vanilla, smf etc - all way too underwhelming for a forum of this nature

 

[klikklak]

Is phpBB that bad? I've only got a passing familiarity with it, being a moderator on an old version installation of it. It's very small and there haven't been any problems yet. I did read the wikipedia article on it and got the impression that the 'reputation' (all news to me) it has for vulnerability dates back to 2004 and some virus. Maybe it's a lot better now. Generally when it comes to security I think free software beats closed any day. OK, maybe not Sun/IBM level support, but generally speaking.

 

[Squidge]

I reiterate my suggestion for an open alternative to IPB. The bugs in this forum seem to be pretty darn close to taking over and becoming our overlords.

The bugs only occured recently. I'm guessing something was upgraded which caused them (php probably) and which contained a different config. It could most likely be fixed very easily when Hando has the time.

Other than that, it works so why change it? Other than to say "We now run on open source forums!". Sounds like a lot of work for nothing. There would still only be one person who could alter the board software, so bugs wouldn't be fixed any quicker.

Anyway, since this thread was started in September last year, thats 6 months, and the rules clearly state not posting in threads older than 3 months! Bringing it back to the top to just reiterate your suggestion when people have already said why its impractical is not a good enough reason.