RetroFed Forum
forum.retrofed.com

cross-posted from: https://retrofed.com/c/meta@retrofed.com/p/2373766/retrofed-forum-powered-by-piebb

Hi,

After getting forum.retrolemmy.com running with lemmyBB, I wondered if Retrofed could get something similar. Instead of getting lemmyBB (an ancient software for lemmy) to work through a proxy, we created a new frontend made natively for PieFed: PieBB. PieBB is more feature complete than lemmyBB and lighter on the server.

Note: This project was created with the help of an LLM.

It’s live at forum.retrofed.com, and makes PieFed look and work like an old phpBB2 forum. You log in with your normal Retrofed account. Posting, voting, polls, PMs, notifications and moderation all work, and you can even import (some) old phpBB2 themes.

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

If you want to use it yourself, it’s at Github. Tested on PieFed 1.8.x.

Known limitations:

  • Register sends you to Retrofed’s own sign-up page.
  • The index (Last Post, counts) can be a few minutes behind, to keep API calls down.
  • Votes made on Retrofed itself can take up to 10 minutes to show in PieBB, due to a cache in PieFed.
  • Kichae@piefed.caEnglish
    3·
    1 day ago

    This is cool. I hope it gets support from instances.

    But also, these projects just slap a bulletain board costume on Lemmy and Piefed. Which is great – I was reallly disappointed that LemmyBB seemed to die – but there are forum-first options out there, too. Discourse has an AP plugin, and I think that’s actively maintained. More interesting to me, though, is nodeBB.

    Seriously, people should check out nodeBB. It’s super cool.

    • DosDude@retrofed.comOPEnglish
      2·
      1 day ago

      We have lemmybb running on retrolemmy at forum.retrolemmy.com but yeah, unfortunately that project didn’t reach the heights it could have.

      I created PieBB with that idea, but I wanted it simpeler to set up, and more feature rich. The piefed topics and feeds helped for that.

  • tofu@lemmy.nocturnal.gardenEnglish
    7·
    2 days ago

    Looks very cool

    Edit: giving it a second look, I think the distinction between comments isn’t clear. The line between to comments seems “weaker” than the one between the commenter and the content. Bit confusing

    • DosDude@retrofed.comOPEnglish
      3·
      2 days ago

      I’ll try and clear it up in a future update. Thanks for the feedback!

      It might be cleared up with one of the other themes on the bottom of the page.

  • db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    4·
    2 days ago

    That’s pretty fucking cool! Make it sort by new comments (instead of votes) by default and you have an old-fashioned forum!

      • db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        2·
        23 hours ago

        The internal comments to a thread, yes. The sorting of the threads however was newest comment first

      • DosDude@retrofed.comOPEnglish
        1·
        1 day ago

        To get to new stuff you must first understand the beginnings.

        These here are beans and here are some more beans…

    • DosDude@retrofed.comOPEnglish
      2·
      1 day ago

      That’s pretty much what the frontend does. And the piefed topics and feeds are the forums. It works surprisingly smooth, and I’ve actually been using it on and off for a week

      Edit: I now understand what you meant. Sort by new only sorts by post date. You can sort by active, but this excludes posts that have no comment. So for every “forum” (community) the software will have to do 2 api calls, and sort them accordingly. Sort new and active and combine those 2.

      To prevent rate-limit I will only do the double api calls for the first page. Anything after will be sorted by new, to make sure the topics without comments still get potential views.