I’ve been working on bulletinbored, a small open-source forum written in PHP.
The main reason I started it is actually quite simple:
I believe anyone should be able to host a community.
You shouldn’t need a dedicated server, Docker, Composer, a build pipeline, or a lot of technical knowledge just to give a group of people a place to talk.
A small community should be able to take a cheap shared hosting account — or even a free PHP hosting service — upload the files, configure it, and have their own forum.
There are already several excellent classic forum projects that make self-hosting relatively easy. What I felt was missing was something that combined that same simplicity with a more contemporary first impression. Many established forum platforms have been around for a long time, and while that maturity is a strength, their default interfaces can sometimes feel visually dated to someone discovering them for the first time.
So bulletinbored is an attempt to keep the simplicity of a traditional PHP forum while giving it a more modern starting point.
It’s intentionally lightweight:
- PHP 8.1+
- SQLite or MySQL
- no Composer
- no Node.js
- no build step
- no external runtime dependencies
- themes and a plugin API
- user accounts, moderation, threads and replies
- image uploads
- permissions, CSRF protection and rate limiting
- package validation and safer updates/rollback
The current version is 0.8.10, and I’m working toward the first stable 1.0 release.
Why BSD Zero Clause?
Part of the code was written with AI assistance, and there isn’t an established community around the project yet.
I don’t want the project to become dependent on a single maintainer, or simply disappear if I stop working on it.
So, at this stage, I chose the BSD Zero Clause license, one of the most permissive licenses available. The goal is to maximize the chances that the code can survive, be reused, modified and carried forward by someone else, even if the original project eventually becomes inactive.
If a real community forms around bulletinbored, I’d like any future decision about changing the license to be made together with that community.
For me, that’s more important than trying to control what people do with the code.
GitHub: https://github.com/bulletinbored/bulletinbored-core
Forum in action: https://www.bulletinbored.net/forum/
It’s not 100% production-ready yet, so I’m mainly looking for feedback from people who actually self-host software.
What do you consider must-have before calling a forum “1.0”?
If you try it, I’d be happy to hear what breaks.
Cheers!