phpBB

php BB! Let’s talk about porn forums, my dudes. Today, we’re covering phpBB. Many site engines boast that they’re the best or the most popular within a category, but PhPBB is actually telling the truth. I can’t really prove that they’re the most popular forum engine, but they have been absolute legends in the industry since the year 2000. PhPBB was the brainchild of just one guy who went out of his way to create a fully PHP powered forum website. Back then, forums were a lot more important than they are today. Social media kind of cut into their demand, since the average person now posts personal information on their socials and not on specific forums.

Still, forums remain a staple, for most kinds of professional interaction, especially when the people involved want to stay anonymous, but build a localized popularity under a nickname. Porn webmasters and porn consumers, in particular, are notorious for being regulars on all kinds of forums. There are many reasons why forums are so friendly to porn content, none the least of which is the element of anonymity. People want to keep their identities a secret when they talk about porn on the internet. The world still hasn’t come around to seeing porn as a mainstream part of life. Oh well. We make do with what we’ve got.

Now, let’s talk about you, the webmaster. If you’re going to be running your own porn forum, you’re going to need a web engine that’s built for that purpose. You can’t get by just adapting something like WordPress. You also shouldn’t even consider building your own forum software. That’s a monumentally terrible idea and I’ll explain why. Your smartest bet is either going with PhPBB or finding the next best thing. Either way, you want to go for the professional option.

Why Use an Engine?

I’ve always had a complicated relationship with site engines. On the one hand, they do 99% of the work for you; on the other, they limit you to their original design and planned implementation. WordPress has always been the best way to run a blog. You can get WooCommerce for WordPress if you want to convert it to a store. But, WordPress was initially perfected for blogs, so there’s always going to be some PHP bullshit that’s going to hold you back. Shopify is, from what I’ve heard, a better alternative to WordPress, because Shopify was built from the ground up for nothing more or less than digital stores.

In the same way, you can run into problems with web engines when you adapt or alter them long after your initial launch. In porn circles, I’ve seen this come up as an issue more than once with porn tubes. A porn tube engine is a godsend… if you want to run a porn tube. The second you want to do anything else with the same site, you’re fucked. Simple things like one-line ad API integrations can be a nightmare, depending on how the site engine was constructed. That’s exactly why you have to opt for an engine that is both perfectly optimized for the specific task that you are trying to fill and at the same time has pre-tested extensibility for external integrations, in case you need to scale in the future.

To put it simply – only consider PhPBB if you want to run a site-wide forum. If you want to run videos with extensive comments, then a porn tube would be a better choice. If you want a multimedia center with purchases and subscriptions, well, you need to have a long hard think about some alternative options.

Why PhPBB Specifically?

It’s old, it’s robust, it’s carefully crafted and it’s gone through a million iterations over the years. At this point, the code behind PhPBB is so airtight that there’s no way of it crapping out on you. We’ve gone through more than two decades of possible website bugs and security risks. Every single time a new risk came up, PhPBB was patched to be impervious to these kinds of issues. With this particular site engine, you’re getting your hands on two decades of wisdom and improvement. Besides, the engine’s original design has remained consistent. So, throughout the years, they’ve just been perfecting a formula that was already brilliant to begin with.

The beauty of PhPBB lies in its simplicity. It’s just a forum engine. You’ve seen web forums before. You know what they look like. They have boards, threads, comments, images and different types of users. Usually, there are admins, mods and casual users. It’s a simple system that just works out of the box. There’s nothing you’ll ever need to tweak or add, provided you genuinely need a basic forum. As for style, I’ll get into that a bit later, but suffice it to say; it’s not going to be an issue.

PhPBB is a collection of a wealth of information of countless individuals working around the clock to perfect their system. Not to mention, the whole damn thing is completely open-source and it’s free to use. That’s right. You never get charged, since PhPBB is released under the GNU general public license. You’re free to modify it and profit off of it any way you want. That’s the kind of high quality I can get behind.

Popular, Extensible, Tweakable

Thanks largely to the fact that PhPBB is open source, you benefit from a ridiculous amount of handcrafted mods and plugins from the community. That’s the beauty of open-source software, after all. You get tens of thousands of people’s worth of work, for free and they want you to use it. That’s what these plugins were built for. It’s all about the community working together. Who knows, you might even be able to contribute if you have some original ideas.

Also, a group of people who are actively working on a forum engine are also likely to frequent forums themselves. It’s a bit of a loop. You can reach out to them directly and ask any questions you might have regarding PhPBB integration or even some added functionality that you’re curious about.

Integrating ads for affiliate deals is probably going to be painfully easy. They’re one-line snippets that you embed onto images. It’s simple stuff. But, the more advanced automated affiliate setups might be a problem and that’s where the community comes in. Well, I’m sure you’ll find something out of the box to help you integrate even the most complicated affiliate setups. You just have to look around. That’s the appeal of using the most popular open-source engine. Support is practically free. Hell, you could hit them up on Stack Overflow.

Why Not the Alternatives?

I’ve got a bunch of options listed here under the adult forum software section for a reason. All of these are really good engines that have years of improvement under their belt. PhpBB doesn’t tower over them or anything. It’s just the best by a small margin, because it’s older and entirely open source. You’re more than welcome to go with one of these other forum engines, especially if one of them has a specific feature you’re after. The thing is, I can’t really think of a feature that they have that PhPBB doesn’t. It’s likely you’ll just pick whatever looks best. This also doesn’t make a lot of sense, since PhPBB can be modded for damn near any kind of visual design you might have in mind.

I see a lot of mainstream publications listing Wix as a recommended top dog in forum spaces and I do not know what they’re smoking. I mean, Wix is cool and all, but calling them top dog among forum engines is like praising Facebook for visual design. Nothing could be further from the truth. If you want a professional solution, you look at PhPBB and some of these alternatives like XenForo.

Unfortunately, most of these forum engines are built in PHP and that makes me kind of sad because the average web developer these days has completely migrated to using JavaScript for damn near everything. You can blame Node JS’s popularity for that.

JavaScript is lighter and simpler. PHP is a nightmare. That being said, a properly written PHP site is robust, powerful and impossible to penetrate. That’s exactly what you get with PhPBB. It’s kind of like getting your hands on a Rolls Royce. You can’t make repairs on it yourself, but the chances of it breaking down are so low that you genuinely don’t care.