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ziggus | 4 years ago

This looks interesting, but the coolest part of this site is the forums. I had no idea that phpBB was still in active development/maintenance. It's surprising how ridiculously fast it is, and how much information is packed into each page. The topic pages are full of images and complex layouts, but it still renders completely in less than a second. Granted, Cloudflare and caching are a big help, but it goes to show what years and years of continued development and optimization can do.

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Cthulhu_|4 years ago

> It's surprising how ridiculously fast it is

This is why server-side rendering is making a comeback; for over a decade, ever since Chrome and V8 came out, the focus has been on making JS faster, but in the meantime rendering plain old HTML and CSS (especially without animations or other complexer calculations) hasn't stopped. Especially newer versions of rendering engines, employing 3D acceleration and tile-based rendering will make these things really fast.

Years ago we decided that vBulletin 3 was getting too old (it had been superseded by the slower 4 and 5 by then; slower because they did more 'tidy' coding in the back-end (object-oriented PHP) and tried to build a more JS-heavy front-end.). We first tried Discourse - we tried it for days, trying to migrate posts, but it was just so heavyweight, it seemed aimed at enterprise companies with a free-to-spend credit card linked to AWS, not some random fansite out on the internet. I gave up eventually.

Instead we went to Xenforo, which was built by the same people behind vBulletin up until v3, after which that company was bought out and the people left. They built Xenforo with similar goals as vB 3, just with a fresh start, and the result was an old-fashioned but fast forum software, suitable for mobile, some JS sprinkled here and there for e.g. instant posting without a full page reload, but other than that a pretty vanilla piece of software.

lpcvoid|4 years ago

This was pretty much always the case with these old school forums. They where always pretty fast if run on decent hardware. Unlike modern web things.