2009Scape Official Forums

Aight so the forum is already setup, themed, and does exactly what we want. So what am I suggesting here?

LemmyBB is visually the same as phpBB - it can even use phpBB themes. Unlike phpBB however, it's Lemmy is federated. This means posts can be made cross-site and cross-community, including on regular Lemmy instances like Lemmy.ml. It's a great way to keep engagement up on forums without needing everyone to be on forum.2009scape.org. In addition, Lemmy follows a fantastic open source license (AGPL), is free, is actively developed, and already has a large federated userbase.

Long story short, Lemmy is closely aligned with 2009scape in a lot of ways, and we can benefit from it too.

In any case, this is likely a huge ask, but I wanted to bring it up to get it on people's radar. I've also requested a migration script to be developed by Lemmy, so if you want to give that ticket a cheeky thumbs up go ahead:

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmyBB/issues/8

To see what's going on in the Lemmy fediverse, check out one of the popular instances, Lemmy.ml. Btw, I'm not endorsing anything you see there or any communities on it. That instance is big and federates with a lot of other places too, so you'll see weird stuff.

While I do admire federated services (as you would know by my preference for Matrix), phpbb is GPLv2, which is more than acceptable enough for my licensing standards, and is easier to moderate and maintain than a federated forum node would be. 2009Scape's forums intentionally pertain exclusively to 2009Scape, and I see no particular benefit we would receive from the overhead of a federated instance.

That said, LemmyBB certainly seems like an interesting service, so it's not completely off the table, only highly unlikely at the moment. I will definitely keep it in mind, however. Thank you for raising this to my attention

Honestly didn't know phpBB was GPL, shows how much I researched

Thanks for having an open mind in any case though. Wanted to mention it before we customize forum.2009scape.org too hard, since that would make any theoretical migration harder.

As far as advantages federating.. None. Until OpenRSC, Darkan (which is now more open source than before), et al. start joining the fediverse, at which point it would be a really niche RSPS group. I think it's kind of obvious being the only community of a type in the fediverse is pointless, but it gets better with growth.