Network54 SFXB Forum

The SFXB Discussion Forum started life in 1999 on the Network54 forum-hosting service, shortly after the service was launched.
The forum was clearly very busy and had over 300 threads with 180 having been created between September 2001 and December of the same year.
It seemed to resemble the Zocalo on Babylon 5 where all Star Fleet-related discussion was centred, in the days before big/govt-tech media platforms, while no other Star Fleet sites (of which there were many) had set up a discussion board.
There was discussion of all aspects of the show and it also allowed the co-ordination of the sales of VCD copies of Star Fleet that had been created from VHS rips, since there was no DVD release of the show at that time.

Ikonboard SFXB Forum

On 7^th December 2001, a replacement forum, hosted on SFXB, was launched, running on Ikonboard 3.x, which gave more functionality and control over the forum's appearance.

Ikonboard 3.x had been quite recently-released and was the software's first stable build.  It had been a total re-write of the software, running entirely in PERL with storage abstraction, allowing the use of a MySQL database, rather than flat files, which previous versions had used.

On 9^th December, the Network54 forum was placed in read-only mode so that the content would remain accessible while future discussions would take place on the new forum.

This solution served Star Fleet fans well for over thirteen years.

Shortly after the 3.0 release of Ikonboard in 2001, its original developer moved on to work on Invision Power Board.

New development teams provided a stream of updates to Ikonboard over the years, with version 3.1 adding a 'quick reply' box and 3.1.3 adding human-readable image-based registration to prevent spam sign-ups.

By 2006, the forum was running on version 3.1.1.  By 2007, it was running on 3.1.5 and had received a major design refresh.  In 2008, the site had a further design refresh and by 2013, it was running on 3.1.5A.

2015 - SFXB Forum Move and Conversion

SFXB Forum - Prosilver

The last release of Ikonboard came in 2010 with version 3.1.5a, and so for a few years there were no new patches available for the SFXB forum to help correct any issues that arose.

In Jan 2015, the SFXB forum encountered a software problem that prevented the forum from loading. 
The Ikonboard database was moved to xbomber.co.uk to allow a migration project to be conducted there, from Ikonboard to phpBB3 by ProfProjects.

SMF and Invision Powerboard were seriously considered at the time, but PHPBB is very widely-used and open-source, plus I had some experience of setting it up and using it previously.

I'm very grateful to Andy Thomas for his help on the project, which was completed on 22^nd Feb 2015.

More info is available on the forum.

2015 - 2022

SFXB Forum - Prosilver

Shortly, after the migration, once I had a working solution to play around with, I customised the default Prosilver theme to echo the design of the original forum.
This was done by 27^th Feb.
The 'SFXBsilver' theme underwent some further tweaks, which were done by the end of June, 2015.

Running the board since its migration has been mostly plain sailing.

One problem that we ran into was huge numbers of spam sign-ups, which is why new member ID numbers are in the tens-of-thousands, rather than in the hundreds, as they were prior to the forum migration.
PHBPP has the option to use captcha, but this involves the use of google's services, which for various reasons, I would prefer not to rely on.
I also didn't want to give new users the hurdle of having to check their emails to activate their account, but in the end, a combination of email verification and a simple, Star Fleet-specific question were needed to completely solve the problem.

At one point, the board had trouble using the server's internal email routing but that was corrected.

SFXB Forum - Prolight

In 2022, an upgrade operation via Softaculous removed my customised 'SFXBsilver' theme. 
Since it was the default theme for new users, and the theme was missing from its directory, its absence caused some issues when new users tried to access the forum.
It required a little fiddling around in the PHP database to set that right.
Instead of just restoring the files from the server back to their original location, I took it as an opportunity to create a new theme, based on Prolight, which looked very clean and seemed to be well-received.

Since all the graphical elements were missing from the wayback machine snapshots from that time, I found a full-site backup that was taken in the January of 2022 and consolidated the style file structure with the static copy of the page source.
The undertaking was a bit of a faff because the wayback machine changes the paths of the graphics files and they never lead to where you expect, but I was able to get an accurate representation of what the forum looked like at the time.

Loss of the Network 54 Forum

In 2018, Network 54 'partnered' with Tapatalk.  
The rationale provided for this was that over 50% of traffic to Network54 was from "mobile devices" and since Network54 services had no optimisation for mobile platforms, they were partnering with Tapatalk, which was the developer of an app that improved forum access over these mobile platforms.

In the end, the partnership turned into an acquisition and Network54 closed down.
After this, the Network 54 servers were shut down and any forums that were in read-only or "inactive" mode, or were not migrated manually straight away, were lost in the process.
Tapatalk seems to have form for doing this, as the message board platform: Yuku met a similar demise in 2017.

In 2022, I looked into getting the Network54 forum recovered or restored, so that we could either host a read-only but at that point, recovery was no longer possible.

The Wayback Machine indexed a few threads on the Network 54 forum but only seems to have scraped about one link level deep.

2024 - New Theme

SFXB Forum - Milk v2 theme

Around when SFXBsilver was replaced by SFXBlight, I had a dig around for the best PHPBB theme available and came across PlanetStyles' flagship PHPBB theme: Milk.  At the time, I just needed a quick solution to the theme problem and Milk v2 looked as though it was likely to be more complicated to set up, since it was a commercial product with its own extension to manage the customisation.
In 2024, I felt that, while SFXBlight was a very clean solution, it was a little stark and lacking in graphical charm.
I put Milk v2 on as the default theme to try and bring the forum a little further into the 21^st century and got it looking in-keeping with previous appearances of the forum.
The installation was a complete doddle, incidentally, and with the extension, you could make all customisations that were needed via its GUI in the PHPBB's admin control panel.

X-Bomber Forum (2004 - 2005)

X-Bomber Forum - 2004.12

People may not be aware that, in the early days of xbomber.co.uk, which was registered and set up at the end of 2003, X-Bomber the Game had its own PHPBB forum for people to be able to report issues with the game.  Its theme was made to match that of X-Bomber the Game's GUI and HUD at the time.
It was based on the experience of using that, that I decided to use PHPBB as the basis for the SFXB forum in 2015, because you knew what to expect from it.
We had quite a bit of fun with it but, over a year after the release of the original X-Bomber, there wasn't the need for a dedicated forum for the game, and its functions were subsumed into tagger: a very nice little chatboard that was integrated into the site, CuteNews CMS comments and our school circle of friends' Worlds of Jelly forum, (which also ran on PHPBB).

Gibbering.net Forum - 2008

It wasn't very long after that, that the X-Project was adopted into Gibbering.net: a very charitable undertaking by Peter Lewis to provide free hosting for indie game development projects, which also had a very warm and helpful game development and programming community at forums.gibbering.net.

A lot of development discussion went on there that helped to overcome a lot of issues of all kinds, that the project faced between 2007 and 2010.

Incidentally, Gibbering.net was an offshoot of an earlier project: Illicitdev.net, which was an early social network of a sort, with several-hundred sites. It focussed on giving indie game developers what they needed to publish and share their games in the simplest possible way, allowing them to spend more time on the game.  
It was like a simplified IndieDB.  It gave you a development blog, about page, download page, screenshot gallery and a profile/contact page.
A lot about Xbomber.co.uk was modeled after this from quite an early stage.
X-Bomber the Game had profiles on illicitdev for a while, and later IndieDB, but as of early 2004, illicitdev was no more.