The Magicball Netwok is 25.5 years old (October 2000). Actually a bit older as before that I had a temporary forum online for a few months, but that history is gone.
I started the forum not long after I bought a computer which I could run as a server on my university provider internet connection. The forum was running on vBulletin (final version 3.8) for 24 years until I migrated to Discourse, which took me about a year to prepare as I working on an improved import script for vB 3.
I created the forum to move an existing community which existed on the InsideTheWeb forums since 1997. InsideTheWeb had many problems and even died not long after I created the new forum.
I is not really a big forum and active forum, the subject is rather niche: a video game series which had a release in 1994 and 1997; and eventually a remake in 2024. It is still visited by a bunch of people I met online in 1997, and new people which have we’ve picked up along the way.
Originally I had no plan to migrate the forum away from the ancient vBulletin 3.8 install. The forum’s activity was decreasing a lot given the subject manner and the likes of Facebook keeping people in that ecosystem. Effort to keep vBulletin running while PHP kept introducing new problems with the old codebase kept increasing. Paying money to migrate to a newer vBulletin seemed like a waste, also vB 4 and leter were not really better forums, as they tried to pivot to a social network. I had already decided years before that if I would migrate to different software I would migrate to Discourse.
I think somewhere in 2018 I installed Discourse as an internal forum at work as a place where consultants to workout, discuss, and vote for certain product improvements which me might eventually put on a roadmap. (Unless a customer was footing the bill for the development.) But that plan never worked out. But I loved the setup of Discourse, and the fact that it was open source.
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