The APBoard is alive!

Discontinued in 2007, the famous APBoard now comes to life again! New Design, new technique, new APBoard! Fixed and ready for PHP 8.1 and MariaDB 11.

APBoard Next Generation

The APBoard was a very extensive, modular discussion forum system with portal, news, polls, private messages, many plugins and addons and much much more. Back in 1999, when it was built by Christin (aka Alexander Mieland), it was revolutionary.

Christin Löhner was formerly known as Alexander Mieland (dma147). As Alexander, or dma147, she built the first APBoard with PHP3 in 1999 and continued to develop it all by herself until 2002. Then Lacritima, Relict and Funlex joined her and helped her to develop the APBoard further. One of the first APBoard versions later became the very famous Woltlab Burning Board (version wwb1, later versions were completely redeveloped). In a very short time, a huge and great community formed around the APBoard. Many hundreds of thousands of people actively participated in the support forum and the APBoard was downloaded, installed and used millions of times. For some time even the game company Ubisoft used the APBoard for their support forum. Since 2006 the APBoard was not further developed and discontinued. But since 2000 until today there is one APBoard that keeps online quite persistently and successfully: http://www.rcpanzer.de/apboard/.

Christin is a woman with a trans* past. She changed her first name and gender registration in 2016, which explains the name change from Alexander to Christin. In 2018, she had gender reassignment surgery and has since fully arrived as a woman. Since then, she has been fighting for rights, a better life, and less discrimination against trans* people. You can read more about her here: https://r3y.de/ich (german)

The old APBoard lay in the back corner on a backup disk for many, many years. But now Christin has brought it out again. In honor of rcpanzer.de and because she just finds it exciting to get her old software working again under current circumstances, she wants to revive the APBoard and develop it further under uptodate environments.

Christin has now, in 2023, tried for a few weeks to bring this old APBoard to a current state. But she has come to the conclusion that it makes no sense. Instead, she started from scratch and created the APBoard Next Generation. Start was at 12th June 2023…

And the best: It always will be Open Source under the GNU Public License and free as in Free Software. Everybody can download and install it by himself.

Many great and modern discussion forum systems are really expensive. We just only want to bring the good old APBoard back to live. This may be nostalgic, but hey, yes this is it.

Current state of development

The state of development can be seen here: https://main.apboard.de/topic/view/6

Developer Notes

We use Gitlab as our Git server for the development of the APBoard. This Gitlab server is hosted and maintained by Christin Löhner. Likewise, all developer instances (for example https://dev.apboard.de, https://christin.apboard.de or also https://main.apboard.de) are hosted by Christin on the same server.

In Git we currently have three main branches: master, develop and christin.

Each developer who wants to participate in the bug fixing and further development gets his own branch and subdomain, into which his own branch is automatically deployed.

The development flow looks like this:

  1. the developer has to take care that his branch is always up to date with the branch „develop“.
  2. the developer fixes bugs or builds a new feature in his own branch.
  3. on his own developer subdomain he can test himself if the feature he builds works.
  4. when he is done and has tested everything, the developer may merge into the develop branch.
  5. then the developer should initiate a review and ask Christin to take a look at it.
  6. if everything is OK and works, then Christin merge the changes into the master branch (go live).

If YOU would like to be a part of this and help us fix bugs or further develop the APBoard, please contact Christin (christin@apboard.de). She will then initiate everything else.

Christin uses Visual Studio Code on her Ubuntu machine for development. If you also want to use VSC, Christin can give you tips on which settings and extensions are useful.

Credits

The documentation was written many years ago for APBoard 2.1.0 and is a joint project of Christin Löhner (dma147), madsnake and lakeside.

Thanks to the modification writers of EW1 and older APBoard versions:

Ampfinger, Arne, Ascii, Bunny, Commander66, Darksky, Darth Paul, Der Al, Elton, Fabian, Floo, Funlex, Hilfe_Fehler, Jörn, Manu, Markusw, MisterS, PG-Computer, Sir_Berick, Slanker, Snoopy, Stiwi, SuSeLinux, Temardo, The Master, Tool-Time, Voller17, Yyoshii and Zago.

This list does not claim to be complete. If users do not find themselves here or have any other suggestions for additions, please contact Christin.

Furthermore we would like to thank all still loyal users for testing and making suggestions.