Annex BB

CONTRIBUTIONS WELCOME

A psuedo-intranet bulletin board with psuedo-internet timeline akin to early social media.

Anyone on the same domain as another user may see their classifieds-style posts. Friends from across domains may see social media content.

Current state

The app would be fully functional, given a database and whatever PHP version this was written for. We can reverse engineer the database from the db/scripts/create.php file.

The application was originally hosted on some shared host on Media Temple and ran for a year with negligible amounts of traffic and no on-going maintainence.

I think our early moves should be to add test coverage for our critical functionality and create documentation, both in and out of code.

Vision

I've been very proud of this project for a long time. It provided me with a sense of accomplishment and confidence very early in my career that it was possible to do anything.

As such, I've thought about it often and what it could become. The main idea underneath the application originally was trusted networks, similar what we're beginning to see with federated networks today such as the Fediverse and the tildeverse. But this was a much more naive approach, that's centralized in nature.

In the short term, I think it'd be interesting to get this code compliant with ActivityPub, so different instances could federate with one another and other networks.

History

This project was originally written from January 16th to February 16th of 2011; my first semester at Liberty University, the culmination of my first four years of web development experience.

It was launched as campusbb.org. Unfortunately for me, someone on my dorm heard about what I was working on and launched a phpBB forum at flameslist.com. My project never took off, but it was mainly because Instagram had launched in October. I mean, this was about two years before I got my first smartphone, but hey, most kids that could afford college had iPhones.

Since getting shut down in 2012 due to a lack of funding (< $100/year), it's sat dormant in an external harddrive. I'm bringing it back now to show how much of a cluserfuck the modern web is, what aspiring web professionals used to create, and share the first project I created that I deemed worthy enough of learning how to use git.

Contributions

The was written for absolutely zero in-code dependencies. I was terrified of accidentally using copyrighted code and getting sued or going to prison over some bogus DMCA claim.

As such, any external dependencies should be like, super justified. Other than this, I'm pretty flexible as long as we're like

Let's figure out how to collaborate: email (at) tychi.me

Code of Conduct

The Three Gates. Community members may be questioned at any gate for suspected misconduct by, or on behalf of, anyone that also abides by The Three Gates.

License

Copyright (c) 2011 - 2020 Tyler Childs

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.