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.

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[–] Kichae@piefed.ca 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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.com 2 points 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.