RetroLemmy forum. Powered by lemmybb

[supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz]

cross-posted from: https://retrolemmy.com/post/41731951

Hi,

A little while back we introduced old.retrolemmy.com. This is not really interesting on its own, but I wondered if we could also get it running on Retrofed. And this was successful by way of a proxy. The cool side effect the proxy had is that lemmy-only apps now also work if you enter old.retrofed.com in your preferred app.

This made the idea of preservation come up, and @Die4Ever@retrolemmy.com wondered if the proxy could be modified to also work on lemmybb and translate to older API versions. And after a while I got forum.retrolemmy.com to work with lemmybb - an old software for lemmy last updated 3 years ago - that makes the fediverse look and work like an old phpbb forum of older days. Most functions are working and functioning as intended, but there can still be some bugs here and there. Some we could probably fix, but some can also be attributed to the older software and it's quirks.

If you notice any bugs, you can message me, or reply here.

Also, this project got pretty big, but if you want to use it yourself, its at Github. It has full 0.17, limited 0.18 and full 0.19 support for the frontend, and lemmy(current) or piefed for the backend.

This thread is posted via forum.retrolemmy.com

Edit: Known limitations:

• No 2fa. As this was only added in lemmy version 0.18.x
• No last reply date/time. This can be enabled, but will call a ton of API calls for every page load, making the site unusable.
• 500: Internal Server Error -There is a real, pre-existing bug in lemmyBB's own code, where it makes a direct fetch, but doesnt handle a missing header gracefully. Unfortunately unfixable without changing the lemmyBB code (and that's against the idea of this project)
• Old posts are at the top instead of new ones - This is because the posts are stickied in the community, making them always be on top. This is especially visible in the "General" community. The new posts are under the stickied posts.

[rimu@piefed.social]

Pretty cool, I have a strong nostalgia for a phpbb forum that I spent years on back around 2000.

It's a bit awkward how the conversation is threaded on Lemmy but rendered in forum.retrolemmy.com as a single list of comments - it's hard to know who is replying to who. In phpbb it was common to quote the person you're replying to but we don't do that these days because it's unnecessary.

[dosdude@retrolemmy.com]

Yeah, that's definitely a downside. I'm still happy it worked though!