phpBB2 headed for Retirement

The long (and Somtimes Tumultuous) Road for phpBB2 is Nearing an End

[thecoalman]

This is not exactly new news as it was announced in April but I haven't seen it mentioned here so I figured I give a heads up for those of you still using phpBB2. The wind down has already begun as some phpbb2 forums are closed. Support at phpbb.com for phpbb2 will cease the first of the coming year.

[phpbb.com...]

Commencing Thursday 1st January 2009, phpBB 2.0.x will be formally retired, and support will no longer be actively provided for 2.0.x. Converting from 2.0.x to 3.0.x will continue to be supported.

Security patches, if required, will be provided until Sunday 1st February 2009.

Support for MODS and Styles apparently will be phased out the first of May at which time the phpBB2 forums may be removed entirely. Only support for conversion from phpbb2 to phpbb3 will be supported.

[encyclo]

The reason for the early retirement is the PHP Group's decision to retire PHP 4. phpBB 2.0 mainly runs on the PHP 4 codebase and it would be unwise to require people to have an unsupported version of PHP installed in order to use phpBB.

Fair enough, phpBB 2.x came out in about 2001/2002 so we can't really complain too much. :) However, I've not migrated to 3.x yet, and have no compelling reason to do so other than this enforced deadline. I suspect I will leave it until early 2009 - unless there is a separate community effort to provide legacy support, in which case I will stick with 2.x for the foreseeable future.

Has anyone transitioned a substantial phpBB 2.x forum to 3.x? How did it go?

[Swanny007]

I've transitioned all small forums to v3, I just have one left with almost 500K posts. I'm apprehensive to upgrade that board, again I have no reason to. I have a custom style that matches the site and it's 99.99% spam free. Plus if I upgrade phpBB I also have to upgrade 3 other scripts on the site first. OK, so part of it is being lazy too :-)

[thecoalman]

@encyclo, unless a major vulnerability arises I'm not so sure there is any support to provide. There's only been two updates in 2 years. The .20 ish update was major security overhaul. It's quite stable. There's very few people using it so the chances of someone actually trying to exploit it is getting smaller every day.

I know one admin that has a forum with nearly 2 million posts and he did a test conversion without issues. It took a few hours. I believe he also ran the option for recreating the search index which also has to be done and that took half a day... LOL

The conversion process creates new tables for phpbb3. All mods or custom tables/columns are not converted. Essentially a fresh a start. If you want to run a test conversion go right ahead, your current forum will remain functional.

@Swanny , the new phpbb3 captcha hasn't been broken AFAIK so spam shouldn't be an issue yet. Technically it could remain unbreakable because its adjustable, you can turn it up to unreadable. There's lots of things done in phpbb3 so there is little incentive to join, you actually have to post to get a link in the SE's. If in the event the image captcha becomes unusable there is already anti-spam mods that should more than make up for the slack.

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One major thing to be aware of SEO wise, it creates all new URL's. The new URL scheme ads a variable for the forum. The old URL's still work.

[Swanny007]

Speaking of new URLs, they suck. I noticed they link the title of each topic to some cryptic &this&that&another&one&just&for&fun and Google picks that garbage up too. It's a shame they didn't build a bit more SEO / simpler URLs into v3. Ah but it's primarily a message system, not SEO system. I think that's what they said about that :-)

Oh, I'm still going to upgrade, it's a matter of when though. I guess I really should get on that... thanks for the reminder...

[thecoalman]

You could just mod the forum variable out. The only thing it's used for is for the "who's online" when viewing a particular forum so its really just fluff.

I'll venture to guess the sort parameters will be removed in the future.

[phpbb.com...]