Question about the Forums — Is Migration or an Update on the Roadmap?

[christygruber1247]

Dear SCS team,

Thank you for building such a strong community. As someone who’s mostly blind, I really appreciate being able to enjoy truck sim through your games and the tools you provide — including this forum.

I wanted to ask if there are any plans to update or modernize the forum system. I’ve noticed that the site runs on phpBB, and while it’s served well, performance has been slow lately, and it’s starting to feel outdated. From what I can tell, phpBB’s last major update was in 2020.

If you already have plans in motion, that’s great! If not, I just wanted to raise the concern early before it becomes harder to manage. Platforms like Discourse or Flarum could offer faster performance, better mobile UX, and a more future-proof home for this community.

Thanks again for all your work — I love being part of what you’ve built.

[plykkegaard]

phpBB’s last major update was in 2020.

Latest 3.3.15 build is from Apr 2025

I assume one of the issues is a huge amount of data, not easy to port

Personally I don't like discourse never had
Maybe because I grew up with usenet and the nntp protocal

[pigbrother]

As a former admin and mod for a few forums… the dumbest mistake a forum admin can make is to put the content on someone else’s platform.

[automaton]

The SCS Modding Wiki, which runs on MediaWiki, is slow as well. I don't think the recent sluggishness is related to phpBB being dated.

[Shiva]

Well, it seems this forum and MediaWiki, are both based in the area of Nurnberg?
My guess would be the forum host has those 502 problems.

[plykkegaard]

when NGINX reports 502 error it is caused by the host behind is unresponsive
Not phpbb as such but just maybe the HW is not up to the task

[Some newbie driver]

There are a humongous amount of details one sysadmin has to control in order to have a good performing web application like this forums. You can face problems at the virtualization layer, at the OS layer, with the database, with the web server, with the networking, with the storage...

Most sysadmins are far from experts in all those areas at the same time. The very few ones that are all-rounders use to work on very big companies that pay pretty damn good salaries with lots of zeroes. That's because the stakes in those places when there's a problem are world's apart from a bunch of people complaining about sluggishness on a forum about a video game.

We all want to everything we face everyday to work flawlessly; but the expectations for that to happen have to be in balance with the stakes of that thing not working so well as desired. SCS could do it better? Sure. Would that extra effort be worthy? Meeeeeeeh, only they know.

Regards