My respect for Cas for writing his own forum software, but... erm... (I am Dutch) I cannot believe that there was absolutely no decent third part forum software available that could be used. Now much time has been spent on creating completely forum software, while the magazines are so much delayed. Plus what happens when Cas is not around anymore to support his own software.....
We evaluated multiple forum software solutions in the last two years. We've settled with Discourse, which seems to be the "tool of the decade" when it comes to discussion forums, everybody seem to migrate to Discourse these days.
Setting up Discourse is not a simple task, the Docker container is a beast of Postgres, Ruby, Redis and tons of hot glue scripts that hold everything together ... a nightmare to maintain.
The phpBB import scripts are currently broken.
It was very uncertain of we could bring up Discourse or any other software before my summer vacation.
So as a stop gap measure I decided to hack a "quick-and-easy" forum, just to be able to have something before my summer vacation. It took three days to create this forum, and one week of internal beta testing with selected ABBUC members.
We can still move to discourse or other forum software if we like, but at least we now have something that kind-of-works. It's not perfect, a lot of features are missing or are not finished (like the dates and the sorting). But it is much better than nothing.
From all the possible Forum software solutions that I've seen so far, this one has the best security design, as it is all just static HTML pages served by a NGINX webserver.
The only dynamic code that is executed is the approx. 300 lines of editor, written in Python Flask. 300 lines of python code is possible to reason about and to secure. In addition, the editor module is sandboxed inside a namespace (container), separated from the rest of the system.
Having just markdown files makes backups and restore simple.
https://mastodon.social/@cstrotm https://abbuc.social