What is the Future of phpBB?

[Mannix_]

....

pinging all those people is not a good idea

[halil16]

pinging all those people is not a good idea

This made me nervous. Shall I delete it?

[Mannix_]

pinging all those people is not a good idea

This made me nervous. Shall I delete it?

I think it may be a bit late for that those people probably already got a notification don't know if removing those pings will remove them

[halil16]

I think it may be a bit late for that those people probably already got a notification don't know if removing those pings will remove them

Anyway. I think even this view shows that mentions should be the default. It will come in future releases but probably still in phpBB 4.

[[Dimetrodon]]

pinging all those people is not a good idea

This made me nervous. Shall I delete it?

May be a bit annoying for them, but its not the only thing that triggers notices. I'm sure they get a notice every single time someone on the Moderation Queue posts after all.

[GanstaZ]

Since when quantity is better than quality?
There are people who think that some parts of code should be removed from the core & are against new bloat.
Why many think that everything can be done inna fast & easy way?
No. It's not that simple.. Everything requires time, motivation, inspiration, effort & not to mention manpower.
Everyone can contribute by fixing a bug or working on a new addition.

At current moment.. there is no point to talk about phpBB 4 that will have Chameleon & what not.
In short.. there is no info about the future.. Only thing that we know is what we see on github.
Observe current statement of development, extension development & activity along community.. You will get some answers.

People love to compare everything, but there is no point in comparing. Some will like one thing while others another.. It's as simple as that.

[Kailey]

pinging all those people is not a good idea

This made me nervous. Shall I delete it?

You did this in another topic. Please don't ping members of this community (team or not) unless you are quoting something they posted.

[axe70]

People love to compare everything, but there is no point in comparing. Some will like one thing while others another.. It's as simple as that.

this assertion make me think, that you think, that they are quite the same.
I want phpBB the be best instead. To be the best it require to be more responsive, and in the way halil mentioned below are only few examples.
To be the best, it should add something like the extension i did, by default, allowing user's to create audio/video discussions within the board. Maybe?

I have think also to do something to push live notifications to online forum's users and yes, as simple i could do i may will proceed with.
May i will take again a look into the audio/video extension improving it soon.

But in the while that you consider mine just random and capricious ideas, i may consider the default phpBB just like an archive, with all within, to be in short (and already) much better than other competitors.
It is possible to know which way, about new features, next phpBB will be? There is a roadmap about it?
Thank you all.

[GanstaZ]

Where did I say that something is same?
What i said.. is that comparison itself as a whole is pointless.. it doesn't have any value. In other words.. what some take as good.. may be bad for others.

If i remember correctly, then there wont be any special updates to prosilver.
In other words.. either some style designer will surpass prosilver with his/her style or we wait for version 4 that is far from completion (based on available info).

There is a push notification PR for master branch.. Be it for 3.4 or 4.0.. Future will tell.

In short.. there is no info about the future.. Only thing that we know is what we see on github.

[axe70]

I tend to agree with you.
Further more there is more space for extensions and coders that can offer a product.
I've been not able to stop folks on moving the forum into the new mentioned platform. BUt still phpBB is running.
I just expect Discourse team to have a big headache moving 16GB of attachments, and customized services.
I cannot compete with a team like them, also because still i do not know Ruby, and even if.
They say the task will be accomplished in 3days.
Anyway, if a ready script is not ready into their hands about it, i expect Epifanio Vargas that will say them:
"Cuando te toca unq' te quites y si no te toca, aunque te pongas."

[robboZ]

I'd like to add my 2 cents.
Of course the popularity of classical forum systems are in steadily decline - and it is unavoidable. There are now so many different ways to communicate with almost instant access and quite comfortable mobile apps. I do not even try to enumerate them, but the list will start with whatsup, twitter, facebook, slack, discord, etc..

On the other hand all this instant messaging systems are pure junk. These apps are great as a way of instant pushing of messages, but in a long run the content of these messages is without any real value. From this point of view the content gathered in classical forum systems is a completely different league. I hope you know what I mean. From this point of view phpbb still have it's important place/niche in the ecosystem.

But there is a real competition. From my point of view there two/three types of topics - (A) (kind of) announcements with little discussion below, (B) question-answer, (C) general discussion (like this topic).

For (C) phpbb is great, but this is a minority of topics.
For (B) the king is stackoverflow and its children.
For (A) people often prefer wordpress style systems.

So if you ask for the ideas for the further development of phpbb - just look at the stackoverflow ratting system to improve the (B) part of the engine and improve the integration with the static content for part (A).

From technical point of view, the development team is great, and I am really thankful that they

• moved the core engine to symfony framework
• manage to keep the project working with new versions of databases and php 8. Unfortunately many projects died because of changes in php.
• manage to follow the most important trends - like recaptcha or oauth. It is not ideal, but it is working.

I hope for more integration with symfony framework and transition to newer versions of that framework, but of course this a lot of work to be done.

Another (crazy?) idea - maybe at some point a thin version of phpbb could be a module for symphony. Kind of commenting system for static content + general discussion board. And I would remove styling from such a thin version, or make it very very basic to ease its overriding.

But, leaving the wishful thinking aside, phpbb is a very mature piece of software, and I hope it will stay with us in this very difficult and changing environment.

[halil16]

Of course the popularity of classical forum systems are in steadily decline - and it is unavoidable. There are now so many different ways to communicate with almost instant access and quite comfortable mobile apps. I do not even try to enumerate them, but the list will start with whatsup, twitter, facebook, slack, discord, etc..

On the other hand all this instant messaging systems are pure junk. These apps are great as a way of instant pushing of messages, but in a long run the content of these messages is without any real value. From this point of view the content gathered in classical forum systems is a completely different league. I hope you know what I mean. From this point of view phpbb still have it's important place/niche in the ecosystem.

Absolutely I agree. I think the solution to instant sending could be full Ajax implementation. As for the application, there is nothing that prevents you from doing the application. For now, I'm managing with PWA. It works like an app, I don't have many complaints.

But there is a real competition. From my point of view there two/three types of topics - (A) (kind of) announcements with little discussion below, (B) question-answer, (C) general discussion (like this topic).

For (C) phpbb is great, but this is a minority of topics.
For (B) the king is stackoverflow and its children.
For (A) people often prefer wordpress style systems.

All of these are suitable for phpBB. You just have to customize it as a design and show that things are actually easy.

I give you credit. I had shared my dream of phpBB serving a different use like wordpress.com vs wordpress.org. and building a system to allow people to set up a phpBB board just as they would a Facebook group. Thus, more people use phpBB, and phpBB also earns money because it provides paid and free services there. I still argue that it should be. However, this requires the style and design to be at least basicly customizable from dashboard. I don't think this would be too difficult for phpBB.

[axe70]

Somebody say that Ruby on rails framework is going to end his life soon.
But i do not really know if it is true.
I only know that after installed discourse, to test it on my localhost, i had a big headache between gems, rails versions, ruby versions... a crazy framework world to me. It look like an hell.

One thing is surely true to me: native javascript and php and a db are probably all what you need to build the web actually, and in the future.
React native demonstrate that's true, maybe. It is very easy for a javascript user, to build an app for any device with it (and yes, react-native is also a framework, the one i recognize useful, but it is just my poor point of view).

[Prosk8er]

Elias best bet to see progress is probably here https://github.com/phpbb/phpbb/milestones

[Mick]

@Elias - I deleted your post in error for which I apologise. Your question has been answered though.