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Lightweight, uncluttered forum systems?
December 19, 2003 12:58 PM   RSS feed for this thread Subscribe

phpBB, Invision, etc., are all great forum systems. The main drawback, for me, is that they all seem so bloated and cluttered. Statistics, rankings, avatars, signatures, etc., all seem to get in the way of actual content. Are there any good, robust, flexible, but more lightweight message board systems out there?
posted by oissubke to computers & internet (5 comments total)
Well, I've written a (IMO) nice, lightweight message board system in Perl that is in good use by my friends and I, as well as my personal blog. I wrote it because I didn't like any of the other options out there. I won't link here, but if you're interested, do some exploring or contact me.
posted by thebabelfish at 2:08 PM on December 19, 2003


I agree. There should be a place in hell reserved for the people who designed UBB and vBulletin to default to all whatchamacallits ON.

Personally, I like MeFi's lightweight comments style and flat threads (as I've said before, it's quite similar to an early discussion board for Unix called PicoSpan, still seen in evolved form at The WELL). MeFiClones links to a few; the one running most of the *Filters is MetaPhilter. I'm still toying around with using it for a site sometime by summer of 2003 or so. </deadpan>
posted by dhartung at 11:46 PM on December 19, 2003


metaphilter is really nice - i'm using it after years of suffering a bloaty ubb - the only drawback is you have to do all your post formatting by hand, the very convenient quick bold, italic, & link feature that we have here is not included.
posted by t r a c y at 2:48 AM on December 20, 2003


I just took base phpbb2, chopped out all the extraneous code and features I didn't want, did a few optimisations and bam. Weeks and weeks later I was done :)
posted by Mossy at 5:29 AM on December 20, 2003 [1 favorite]


Blosxom rocks: no dirty database work, extensible via plugin architecture, and most importantly, as lightweight as you can get!
posted by elphTeq at 7:04 PM on December 22, 2003


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