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.

Woah, that's kind of awesome

Thanks! Yeah I never expected it to work as well as it does.

If you want to better interact with people that are using LemmyBB, remember to sort your front page by "New Comments" (in PieFed it's just called "Active"). The BB users might start bumping threads without other people knowing :(

Neat!

Which fork of the interface are you using, or are you maintaining your own? From what I remember, the main Mylmym repo hasn't seen updates in a few years

https://code.mschae23.de/mschae23/mlmym

It's actively being maintained.

Edit: and lemmybb is 3 year old software. I have no intention of updating or maintaining it. This is mostly a proof-of-concept for LemmyBeProxy. And it's cool that we can get old lemmy software to run on modern lemmy/piefed.

Thank you for using a federated version of phpBB! I love threaded forums more than any other platform online, so when I seen that RetroLemmy had a forum instance I had to join as soon as possible! Reddit like boards are okay, I just like threaded forums better than nested ones.

No problem! If there's any topic/community you feel is missing, let me know, and I can add it.