[SOLVED] Can someone ID the software that's running this forum?

[britechguy]

Australian RR Forums

I have had zero success trying to find the actual software identification via any conventional means, and the moderator I know, who came on board long after the start of that forum, cannot seem to find that information either.

I figure there's got to be someone who sees something we're missing, or who simply recognizes it "on sight" because they worked with it in the distant past. I know it has been out of support for a very long time. They would like to move to something currently supported, but need to be able to convert their archives over to whatever that would be, and without knowing what the actual software is it's hard to determine how to proceed.

 

[britechguy]

Just wanted to report back that additional research and assistance from someone elsewhere has confirmed, without a shadow of a doubt for me, that it's DiscusWare.

https://web.archive.org/web/20031207....com/demos.php
https://web.archive.org/web/20050308...s/example.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20050308...s/compare.html

 

[Tekno Venus]

Wow that's pretty ancient as far as forum software goes, amazed it's still running!

Looking over those wayback machine links, seems it's built on Perl and, in the professional version at least, a MySQL database. If they are using MySQL, that might mean there is some hope for migrating it to a new platform as the vast majority of forum software still uses MySQL as their database. That said, they're going to need to write a custom importer and/or a variety of scripts to move that data over. Even more so if they want to keep accounts and user data. That said, since it looks like DiscusWare doesn't actually have that many features compared to modern software, it certainly won't be an impossible task.

I'm sure they've already got options in mind, but here we've been very happy with XenForo 2 since we moved away from vBulletin at the start of last year. It's been very stable and regularly updated (and updates are easy to install). It does come at a cost (initial purchase and then yearly update fee), but for us at least it's well worth it. For free options, PHPBB and MyBB are the two big options in the open-source world, and they're both very good (especially for free!).