# In theory, could you make discourse look like phpBB?

**URL:** <https://meta.discourse.org/t/in-theory-could-you-make-discourse-look-like-phpbb/23652>\
**Category:** Feature\
**Created:** [January 4, 2015, 4:55pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/in-theory-could-you-make-discourse-look-like-phpbb/23652 "2015-01-04T16:55:15Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 11

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**Author:** ![wal](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/d6d6ee/32.png) [@wal](https://meta.discourse.org/u/wal)\
**Post date:** [August 9, 2024, 3:42pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/in-theory-could-you-make-discourse-look-like-phpbb/23652/11 "2024-08-09T15:42:55Z")

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sorry to bump such an old topic, but I am really interested in this, and it seems like this topic has a good starting point for it.

Do we know if there are any good examples of Discourse forums that have been modified to more closely resemble “old school” forums?

full disclosure, I am interested particularly in replicating some of the styling of the old GameFAQs forum. You can see examples of what it used to look like here, along with some CSS that supposedly would make a website resemble it; [Classic GameFAQs Boards: gfaqs8 CSS](https://www.curtisbright.com/gfaqs8/)

example pics from that page;

 ![image](https://global.discourse-cdn.com/meta/original/4X/8/7/e/87e9d2841536e1334e65fee4a8e2a0d74537d46c.png)

 ![image](https://global.discourse-cdn.com/meta/original/4X/3/c/e/3ce00da163d173ff74bb6a9dc379091f583624d2.png)

I think maybe this is not actually “phpBB” however, if you could make Discourse look like this, I think you would have a good foundation for phpBB as well. Some of the particular elements that stand out to me include;

- compact topic list and post lists, as opposed to the large empty gutters that surround many elements on Discourse pages
- users can choose to disable avatars
- few, if any, icons or graphical buttons and elements around the pages
- no floating elements on the pages, a lot more “static” elements with a more simple “rendered HTML” style

if anyone knows of examples of Discourse forums that implement some of these things, it would be great to share, I am no web dev so its a lot of work to figure out where to get started trying to implement something like this myself. Even having the example CSS from that linked website, I am not sure how to adapt it to a Discourse forum without breaking everything

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