one of my absolute dipstick hobbies is installing and messing around with old forum software a bunch. i've played around with vBulletin 3, a whole bunch of
Acmlmboard versions, phpBB 3, 2, and even 1 (!). i'm gonna mess around with IPB 1.3 and 2.0 at some point.
(fun fact about phpBB 1: it's a complete rickety mess. i thought maybe it'd resemble 2 a bit more, but it's full of like grammatical errors and feels like a kid's crappy custom forum project. it had a long way to go)
i'm missing vB 2.0 -- i'd really like to play around with that. also early UBB/threads versions, i think, would be fun... i'd also like to play around with GameFAQs message board clones. i can't find any of them anymore. i've legit thought about writing my own, actually, just cuz i think that'd be a fun exercise.
if it were physically possible at all to mess around with ezboard, too, that'd be a lot of fun in its own way.
honestly, it's just really aesthetically interesting and fascinating to me. it's an incredibly niche interest, but i really enjoy it. a lot of these systems were the engines that drove internet culture throughout a lot of the 2000s, and they have aesthetic qualities that just aren't seen in web design at all anymore. it's fun to explore the different feature sets and themes and aesthetics that people communicated and connected to each other with.
one of the fun things about it is sort of similar to the pleasure i think you can get from messing around with old OSes in VMs -- you get to really experience the vibes and the mood of a particular time and place. i've talked about how
forums feel like spaces to me in other forum threads here, and there's a particular feeling you get i think from going back to a forum and seeing everything that's the same. it really does feel like going back to a place in time...
anyway, it's just something i find kind of fun. i dunno if it's an interest anyone else has at all, but if so, it'd be cool to hear about other peoples' experiences with this sort of thing
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