Look how ancient this forum software is...

[LigH]

Yes, okay, it still works, but :o it still offers to enter ICQ and AIM messenger ID's despite these services being quite obsolete today. :p

Just a pun. I know it will probably not be trivial to upgrade. Nor cheap.

[Swede]

Yeah, thats true. And it's mainly because of me. I'm an old geezer who likes continuity. Let's face it, many of the users here wasn't even born when I started to host the forum (yeah, almost a millennia ago).

We actually bought a vB6 license a year or two ago and I spent quite a few hours updating and testing but the conclusion was that we then have to freeze the current forum and start a new one. OR, just keep things as they are.

So there is a reason why things are as they are (yeah, me :) ) and hopefully it doesn't scare you all brilliant coders/users/humans/testers/lurkers off.

[Jamaika]

It's so technologically backward that I don't even know what ICQ and AIM stand for. So, out of boredom, I look it up on Google.

ICQ was a cross-platform instant messaging (IM) and VoIP client founded in June 1996 by Yair Goldfinger, Sefi Vigiser, Amnon Amir, Arik Vardi, and Arik's father, Yossi Vardi. The name ICQ derives from the English phrase "I Seek You".[1] Originally developed by the Israeli company Mirabilis in 1996, the client was bought by AOL in 1998, and then by Mail.Ru Group (now VK) in 2010.[2]
AOL Instant Messenger (AIM, sometimes stylized as aim) was an instant messaging and presence information computer program created by AOL that operated from 1997 to 2017. It used the proprietary OSCAR instant messaging protocol and the TOC protocol to allow users to communicate in real time.
AIM launched in May 1997 and became popular by the late 1990s; teens and college students were known to use the messenger's away message feature to keep in touch with friends, often frequently changing their away message throughout a day or leaving a message up with one's computer left on to inform buddies of their ongoings, location, parties, thoughts, or jokes.[1]
AIM's popularity declined during the 2000s and 2010s as AOL subscribers started decreasing and as Gmail's Google Talk, SMS, and Internet social networks like Facebook gained popularity. Its fall has often been compared with other once-popular Internet services, such as Myspace.[2][3] In June 2015, AOL was acquired by Verizon Communications.[4][5] In June 2017, Verizon combined AOL and Yahoo into its subsidiary Oath Inc. (now called Yahoo). The company discontinued AIM as a service on December 15, 2017.[6]

As someone put it, there isn't and won't be a translator for other languages ​​into English. This has its pros and cons.
I recently registered on a forum and it turned out it wasn't locally owned, but from Luxembourg. You could be fooled.
Users these days are unknown whether they're bots. So I don't know what "modern" or "fast" means.
After a huge uproar in my country about Kaspersky antivirus software, everything associated with Russian was removed from official websites. Did it help? Not much.
Private emails, whether on smartphones or not, are still very easily hacked.

[VoodooFX]

Something must have changed recently in the forum's code because my Darkmode userscript stopped working here.

[ChaosKing]

but the conclusion was that we then have to freeze the current forum and start a new one. OR, just keep things as they are.


Why? Usually all posts are kept (or imported/migrated) with a new version.

The german doom9 forum https://gleitz.info/ migrated from vBulletin to Woltlab and everything is still there.

[LigH]

Well, yeah, uhm ... the migration worked quite well (despite some efforts in the background); but a later update to a newer major version messed things up later. And then our admin was Locked Out of Heaven (the interwebz) and it took a while to fix it. But we are back and running well.

[RetsimLegin]

If it isn't broken......

[ChaosKing]

If it isn't broken......

It does not get any more updates it's like internet surfing with windowsXP.

[FranceBB]

it's like internet surfing with windowsXP.

which still works like a charm thanks to Supermium (chromium fork), Serpent (Firefox fork) and New Moon (Palemoon fork). :P


The german doom9 forum https://gleitz.info/ migrated from vBulletin to Woltlab

I took a peek at it.
I kinda still prefer the retro look-and-feel of the classic vBulletin Doom9.

I'm a big fan of homeostasis: if it ain't broken, don't change it. It would be sad to see it change the skin after 26 years.

[Emulgator]

Second that.

[ChaosKing]

which still works like a charm thanks to Supermium (chromium fork), Serpent (Firefox fork) and New Moon (Palemoon fork). :P


There's a difference between beeing responsible only for you or for hundreds of user accounts (bots steal emails and/or passwords if hash is weak)

[FranceBB]

There's a difference between beeing responsible only for you or for hundreds of user accounts (bots steal emails and/or passwords if hash is weak)

maybe, but then again a password manager (or a randomly generated password via openssl from the command line or powershell or the terminal if you're on Linux) should be enough. Worse case scenario, they steal an hash of a password that you would use only for this forum.

Not reusing passwords on several websites is a good security practice regardless.

For anyone on Windows who doesn't wanna use things like the Google Password Generator etc, you can simply open Powershell and use


('abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz1234567890~!@#$%^&*()-_=+\|/?.>,<;:'.ToCharArray() | Get-Random -Count 100) -join ''


or something similar and tweak it to create pseudo-random temporary passwords for various websites.

That being said, Doom9 doesn't really have any sensitive information. It's not like we have bank details or anything in here. Besides, it's a non political, non profit, community driven forum of people from all over the world who work on free and open source projects, so there would be no reason at all to hack into it (and there would be no reward whatsoever either). I mean, no money to steal, no sensitive info to resell on breachforum (if it's still a thing), no ransom to ask... etc. That's probably why we haven't had any issues (other than one that occurred a long time ago).