Hey, I'm Dion. I no longer hang out on phpbb.com but have been involved with phpBB since 2005. Through the years I've stretched the limits of what phpBB can do, first with MODs and then with extensions. I have a board (phpBB 3.0.14 running on PHP 8.1) that contains a large number of phpBB 3.0 MODs, including a set of patches to make phpBB 3.0.14 compatible with PHP 8.3.
From a phpBB standpoint, these days I mostly write custom scripts/extensions for clients that want something not available in phpBB or its extension database. I plan to upload some of them here, with one of the first being a replacement common.php file that implements "safe mode" for phpBB via a define('PHPBB_SAFEMODE', true) statement in config.php.
Kailey wrote: Fri Dec 06, 2024 7:35 pm
Why 3.0.14? Curious of your reasoning.
My two public phpBB boards (both with little activity these days) have been around for 11 and 13 years. They are very heavily modified and I saw no reason to think about newer versions of phpBB...that is, until PHP7.0 was released. I thought about it, and I decided it was worth the time and effort to patch phpBB 3.0.12+ to make it compatible with PHP 7.0. That was 8 years ago, and I've continued to update the patches as new versions of PHP have been released. At this point I see no reason whatsoever to convert the boards to a newer version of phpBB.
There are a large number of people who still use phpBB 3.0, several of whom have been clients for many years. Some use phpBB 3.0 because they have small/cheap hosting that doesn't meet the phpBB 3.3 requirements. Some because their boards are so heavily modified that it isn't worth the effort to convert to a newer version of phpBB. Still others enjoy that phpBB 3.0 was built from a geek/hacker standpoint where small code size and good performance was a high priority. Those people (including myself) believe that the rampant use of package managers (Composer/NPM/etc) has created mass bloat in today's PHP/JS scripts...why sit down and write 50 lines of code when you can simply-and-easily grab a package (and its dependencies) that uses hundreds (if not thousands) of lines of code in dozens of files to accomplish what 50 lines of original code in a single file would have accomplished? (I'll say it here: IMO the addition of Doctrine to phpBB4 will be a "jump the shark" moment for phpBB.)
My guess is that few of the above people will convert to phpBB 3.3, and given the already-large resource requirements of the alpha snapshot builds of phpBB4, virtually none will convert to phpBB4.
Sorry for veering off on a tangent. I hope I answered your question. If not, I'll do my best to clarify.
Hi Dion and others
I'm in the same situation - very ancient phpBB forum based on 3.0.14 but heavily modified. Still running on PHP 5.6 and I want at least 7, even 8 preferably. After a few hours searching I figured out the main goals - remove /e modifiers and start using preg_replace_callback, patch =& new assignments, and more. However, this is not a 5-minute job even for a tech guy like me. I was wondering if there are ready patches or even diffs that I can use as a base in my work? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks.
Unless Dion would like to share their work, this board does not support 3.0 anymore. I understand your board is heavily modded, but you are running a risk by continuing to use outdated software (not just phpBB, but PHP as well).
tgpsub wrote: Tue Apr 29, 2025 10:22 pmI was wondering if there are ready patches or even diffs that I can use as a base in my work?
Please send me a private message here, and perhaps I can be of assistance to help you update your phpBB 3.0.14 codebase to work with PHP 7.4.33 or even with PHP 8.3.20.
As Kailey mentioned, using such an old version of PHP can be dangerous, though to be honest, it's mostly due to lack of support for modern protocols/algorithms such as TLS 1.3 and Argon2 as opposed to code exploits. The most important reason you should update PHP is the HUGE performance increase when going from PHP 5.6 to 7.4. Going from PHP 7.4 to 8.x offers little performance increase and the memory hit is pretty significant, though both can be significantly improved by using --disable-opcache-jit when compiling PHP8. In fact, I'd argue that a patched PHP 7.4.33 is more secure than a JIT-enabled PHP 8.4.6, and also that a patched phpBB 3.0.14 is more secure than phpBB 3.3.15 (mainly due to the s9e stuff, which requires the security sieve otherwise known as libxml2).
Just upgraded a very ancient 3.0.14 forum with custom patches running on PHP 5.6. Then switched to PHP 8.4.5 + FPM/FastCGI + Zend OPcache. Everything is working like a charm. Big kudos to Dion!
