The permissions control system in 3 is horribly complex and difficult to use. The phpbb3 forum has several different hidden sections accessible to different groups of users and we’ve had a lot of problems with users being able to see sections they’re not supposed to be able to see because it’s such a bugger to get the permissions set up right. The other admins on it tend to pass all the permissions-setting tasks to me because they can’t understand the system, and I find it a brain strain myself.

The page code produced by 3 is very bloated and slow to render. The rendering speed can be somewhat improved by turning off javascript – but unfortunately most of the ACP pages require javascript, and these are some of the biggest pages. So a lot of ACP tasks are infuriatingly tedious. I shouldn’t need a Cray to get decent rendering speed.

A further problem with the ACP is that several pages are too wide to fit in 1024×768, and moreover they display without any horizontal scroll bars, so necessary controls disappear off the right hand side of the screen unless I frig about.

Another problem is that it has been written to produce pages in XHTML, for no reason, since XHTML is not actually required to display such pages. The problem with this is that the retards who wrote the XHTML standard removed the target=”_blank” attribute and seem to think that javascript is an acceptable replacement, so phpbb3 is afflicted with javascript for opening external links. This is no bloody good at all. For one thing it is desirable to turn off javascript to improve rendering speed, as I have mentioned. We also have users who disable javascript as a matter of course anyway. And for some reason the javascript for opening external links is unreliable and causes problems even to people using completely vanilla setups. Fortunately all browsers seem to still honour target=”_blank” in XHTML pages so I have sacrificed formal validity in favour of usability and got rid of the javascript.

The code for 3 is many times more complex and difficult to understand than 2. Coding for 2 is a lot easier than coding for 3.

Mod installation is easier in 2 than in 3 because, as mentioned, the mod authors for 3 present the instructions in XML files and refuse to provide plain text versions. This means I have to use a browser to display the instructions in a legible form. I can’t just do “less foo.txt” in a terminal window any more. Also in the case of mods which require changes to the database, there is an unpleasant tendency to provide some semi-automated means of making the changes… which wouldn’t be so bad if mod authors didn’t _only_ provide that form and decline to also provide instructions for making the changes by hand from the command line.

It is however a good thing that we are not yet afflicted with automated mod installation because if we were you can bet your boots that the mod authors would not provide any instructions for doing it by hand at all. The more the installation has been modified from its out-of-the-box state the less likely it is that an automated system will be able to correctly handle it. When the modifications include our local one-off hand-made alterations to the code as well as “official” mods, it is almost certain that an automated system could not be guaranteed to work correctly.

Upgrading to new releases is an example of how automated methods fail – doing it “by the book” simply wipes out most of our local changes. It is necessary to diff all the new versions against the old ones and implement the required changes by hand, which may be tedious but does at least avoid breaking things.

Lack of HTML support is not a disadvantage. The phpbb2 installation has it turned off anyway: it is a security hazard and it is not a useful feature in the first place. Any formatting that needs to be done on a forum post can be done by means of bbcode; if it can’t be done with bbcode it shouldn’t be done at all anyway.

Nor is the lack of “quick reply” a problem. How hard is it to click the “reply” button? A half-arsed reply feature with most of the facilities missing for people who are too lazy to click the “reply” button isn’t something to lose any sleep over.

As for SEO… there is an excellent SEO resource for both 2 and 3 at http://www.phpbb-seo.com/ – we don’t need it on the 3 installation, but the 2 has it installed and it works very well. The same site provides XML sitemap mods.

#2 is an example of how phpBB seems to always be about 3 years behind the 8-ball. When phpBB was built, it was one of few free forums and it had a lot of functionality for its time. Today, other free packages abound and they do it all better than phpBB. I actually moved most sites I run to SMF (a wonderful free forum that doesn’t have half the issues of phhBB) and haven’t gone back (the SSI features are great). The defense for not having SEO urls boils down once again to “phpBB’s old-fashioned way of doing things” and you either like it or lump it.

#3 They are actually. I poked around with the automated system and it’s pretty neat. Being able to make small changes quickly and easily to files through the admin panel is also handy (though I wouldn’t recommend it). Most other forum packages have had an automated “click here to install” option for mods for a few years now and it’s nice that phpBB finally got one too.

#4. Yep, once again, phpBB is 3 years behind the 8-ball on basic functionality. “Oh, but there are mods that do that!” you’ll no doubt be told. Constantly installing mods is what made me come to loathe phpBB in the first place.

#5. Yeah, she’s a little heavy considering the amount of basic functionality she’s missing.

#6. It’s from the phpBB group! What did you expect? 😉 At least they let you change the FAQ now without having to edit raw files! (Yet more basic functionality that came with a “well it’s about time” sigh).

It may seem small but #7 is actually the reason why I haven’t bothered with phpBB3. Once again, phpBB are behind the 8-ball. It’s a little red warning flag that said to me “We are stuck in our ways. There is our way to do things and if that’s going to take more clicks than it should, than you have the problem, not us!”. I got sick and tired of upgrading phpBB2 with every security update and then having to re-install all the basic functionality mods afterwards. Upgrades either involved pouring through code for a few hours doing a manual upgrade because the mods you installed to make the thing worked necissitated it or sometimes re-installing everything from scratch and re-doing all the mods again manually, only in order to have anything other than basic forum functionality.

#8 annoys me to no end. We had a CMS that used HTML on the front-page (kind of necessary on the internet). A test upgrade to phpBB3 meant anything posted through the CMS wouldn’t display properly in the forum because it couldn’t parse HTML. That means more coding and more modifications to get basic functionality. How hilarious that HTML, the language websites are built in, can’t be handled by phpBB. Apparently because some retards mis-use it, everyone else has to suffer.

#9. That’s why vBulletin exists. phpBB isn’t supposed to be professional. If you’re serious about your website, you spend a few bucks and get a vBulletin license with all the support you can eat (and a tonne of features that work right out of the box). phpBB is for the free-ware crowd who like to poke around and play with things. It’s why I started on it. 😉 It’s why I moved on from it. phpBB is a good forum for mucking around with code-wise but when you finally reach the point that you start getting serious about it and no longer have the desire to spend a weekend making your forum work, you either move to another free-ware forum or get vBulletin.

#10. It’s true, nothing else does quite work the way phpBB does.There is some other stuff that works a lot easier. 😉 As I’ve said, SMF has become my new favourite, though MyBBoard and Phorum were fun for a time.

re Spam: Hands down the best mod ever for stopping spam was a question mod made for phpBB2 (pretty sure it’s available for phpBB3 now as well). It allows you to enter questions a human being has to answer on registration. Things like “According to this forum thread [link] what does user X think about Z?”). Captcha images are a God-awful idea and whomever thought of them needs to be shot. They may make it harder for machines but they also make it harder for humans. Nobody wants to have to try several times because they mis-read your strangely curved letters that had been layered over a background of noise that make it impossible to read. With the question mod, all spam attacks were stopped on a forum I run that used to get 20 or more spam registrations a day without any Captcha and at least 5 a day with Captcha enabled. I wished they’d added it as basic functionality however everyone still seems stuck on stupid images that are difficult to read.

#phpBB4? Sure if you want to wait another 10 years for functionality that other free-ware forums have available right now.

The one last thing I’ll say is that whenever you raise any of these issues at phpBB, you get a bunch of screaming fans shouting “Oh but there are mods!”. I want to install a forum package that works out of the box, not have to install a bunch of mods that almost make the actual forum software itself incidental. As I said, it’s great fun if you’re in the “I want to spend a weekend mucking about with code” group but if you want a forum that works, look elsewhere. True, no off-the-box forum has everything you want but I’ve found phpBB always needs a lot more coding than other packages in order to get it right.

I’ll admit, I spent one frustrating morning debugging a botched install of “Prime Multi-Quote”, but once it was fixed, I realised that it was an excellent learning experience, being able to see how modifications interact with core codes.

Finally, while it’s annoying to find style templates very complicated to work with, again, it is because each style has different ways of working with the same information. Sometimes some of the features aren’t available for all styles.

In summary, those who think PHPBB3 should be a walk-in-the-park to mod need to realise that there is no such thing as a one-package-fits-all deal with free forum engines – if you need extras, you’ll have to work for them.

1. With a community and history behind it, and early addons like EasyMod… there is no excuse why they shouldn’t have one of the best mod systems and largest community base of addons. SMF has topped ALL other forums with their addon system, and its not even that complex.. its almost silly.. a simple xml parser and some simple php commands to extract and copy files or add edits to an existing file.

2. Web 2.0? Why do I have to click so much? Deleting a post->redirects to a confirmation page->redirects to the “deleted,…. return to last forum” page->Finally gets me back.
SMF has a simple alert box.. “Are you sure you want to delete”.. ok.. deleted and returns back to the current page.

3. No multi-line url or bbcode effects… this is something that smf also suffers from.. vBulletin is the only one that has this figured out properly.. but still.. you pioneered the damn languaged and it works the worst in phpbb.

Its just as clunky as its ever been.. it took SOOOO long for phpbb2.2… then phpbb3.. and its really not impressive after waiting so long. Hopefully you can get phpbb4 to be a bit more year 2000