My recent unusual selection of a new forum software

Until a few days ago, the forum software I used on my company's website was the E-Blah Bulletin Board System, which is implemented in perl. But because of some technial details and other cumbersomenesses like that the administration panel of that board is filled with quotes and instructions from the bible (?!), I wanted to replace it.

Unfortunately, I didn't find a forum which I really liked. It had to be open source or free, lightweight, should have been unpopular enough so that its security flaws are not too often targeted by hackers and spammers (had some experiences with this already) but have decent enough features to fully replace the current eBlah sofware, a nice editor with code tags etc. In addition, it should be possible to import the old forum somehow.



So after some hours of evaluating several software (the winner so far was Phorum, btw, which I am using on my RGP game website already), I had an idea: Why not writing my own forum software? Of course not, this would be quite some work, right? But then I remembered that I alread did something like this: For our small dating website bienen und blumen, I already had implemented a working forum (And somehow I had forgotten this). So I only took this piece of software and refactored it. I added some new features like

• Anonymous Posting
• Simple math based CAPTCHA
• User registration (on Bienen und Blumen, all users already have an account)
• Preview functionality
• EBlah forum importer (had to reverse engineer the text file based database of eblah for this)

And voila, the perfect forum for the ambiera website was born. Try it out, if you like
to. One feature still is missing - highlighting forum threads with unread posts - but for basic support request handling it is pretty ok now, and I think, and I can add this feature later if at all.