On 17/10/2026 02:59, Thorsten Froehlich wrote:
> Chris Cason <del### [at] deletethistoopovrayorg> wrote:
>> You are looking in the right direction: our forums (as most of the world sees
>> them) were originally written in an era where the majority of users were
>> connecting via NNTP and the web view was kind of a fallback. Now most posts and
>> views are from the web. New forum software is definitely on the tables -
>> potentially with an import from the existing one, or if not the existing one
>> will serve as a read-only reference side-by-side with the new one.
> 
> Having written most of the forum software in PHP and a bit of C++ a quarter
> century ago (!!!), I think it had a pretty good run an should really be retired
> :-) I would never have imagined it running for that long, and in all those years
> no NNTP server ever appeared as open source that also supported a web forum
> software, which, iirc was the original hope when developing this stop-gap
> solution.

Your code has held up remarkably well! A few things had to be changed for PHP 7 but
the database schema and other functionality is still pretty much as you wrote it all
those years ago. The one thing I occasionally tweak is the thumbnail generation as we
never anticipated all the way back then the size of some of the images that are being
posted :)

I do need to do a cleanup run of all the thumbnails as some are missing due to not
being able to be handled at the time. But overall it's held up remarkably well, even
when being pummeled by hordes of bots.

One problem we have now is that Google has changed the way it scrapes forums and for
quite a while they have not been indexing us properly. I have added JSON-LD markup but
they still don't like it; the next step would be to using structured markup. I also
need to unroll the short page size - while 10 pages was about all a 1990's-era browser
would like, nowadays there would be few if any threads on this server that would be
too long for a current-generation browser to handle. As it is I have set the default
page size for new visitors to I think 50 messages, and allow up to 100.

I am also playing around with Algolia as a search provider, plus Cloudflare has its
own search in a beta phase. But I need to get the structured markup sorted before I
return to trying to get it all indexed.

-- Chris

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