Sylphagora

Sylphagora is a free internet forum system implemented in PHP and MySQL. It is a fairly modest, threaded board system that, although it lacks a lot of features found in other board systems, is lightweight and fast.

Etymology

The name Sylphagora is derived from sylph (for "Tree", because of the "tree structure" (branching) organization of posts) and agora (for "Marketplace", or "forum"/meeting place as used here). This name was chosen for its uniqueness, and also to avoid the "FooBBS", "FooBoard", etc naming convention considered cliché by the .

The preferred abbreviation of "Sylphagora" is "SA".

Features

Sylphagora does not have a great repertoire of features, though it is certainly not minimalist. Probably the most notable missing feature is private messaging. Sylphagora does, however, have a feature that is fairly unique among its immediate peers: separate "powerlevel" and "stafflevel" privileges for each user. The "powerlevel" defines what privileges the user has regarding manipulating the board (e.g. "moderator" privileges, which allow the user to edit others' posts and move threads, are granted via the "powerlevel"); the "stafflevel" is an independent rating that determines the access level to private forums and whether a user may create new threads or reply to existing ones. Most other boards simply have a single "powerlevel" rating that does both of these things at once.

Sylphagora is notable for being designed for quick navigation: when viewing a forum, a "new thread" form is available right on the page, and when viewing a post, a "reply" form is right there on the page, and when it is submitted, the user will be taken directly to the new post; when a top-level post (at the start of a new thread) is modified by a moderator or administrator, he/she is, again, taken directly back to the post; when a user marks all forums read, he/she is taken right back to where he/she was.

Sylphagora was designed with some security features in mind, such as binding a timestamp to the login procedure, and refusing to recognize a login cookie if it originates from a different IP address than before (users can disable this for their own accounts if they wish, but it's on by default). Though the implementation of some things is somewhat lacking, these issues are being addressed.

Being such a lightweight board, Sylphagora uses very little disk space and is quick and easy to install (if you don't mind performing a few cursory changes to a text file in the process).

Versions

The latest official version of Sylphagora is 1.2, released February 9, 2005.

v1.0 -
: The original version, which originated as a one-off side project (from Trosectya, a "flat" board system in development at the time but which was never completed) to see how a threaded board system might be implemented. It was completed within one week of commencement. Sylphagora 1.0 was released September 3, 2003.

v1.1 -
: This was a quick modification of the 1.0 base to add the ability to display which forums have new posts; this was impractical in v1.0 because of the way the database structure was designed. v1.1 added another table to make it much more practical to calculate this. Sylphagora 1.1 was released March 25, 2004.

SkwurlThreads -
: SkwurlThreads is the name given to a fork of the SA1.1 codebase. SkwurlThreads adds several features not present in the official versions, including user pictures ("avatars"), the ability to mark individual forums as having been read (instead of only the whole board at once) and the ability to choose stylesheets. Homepage

1.2 -
: A modification of the v1.1 codebase by a friend of the board's creator, this release fixes a number of security vulnerabilities. Shortly thereafter it was adopted as the official version. Sylphagora 1.2 was released February 9, 2005.

Future releases

There are no explicit plans regarding Sylphagora 1.3, though it will likely contain more security fixes like v1.2 did. There are also no explicit plans for any future v1.x releases.

Sylphagora 2.0 is in the planning stages, though, and will be a ground-up rewrite, and will contain many new features (such as private threads and user avatars), cleaner code, a separate "language" layer (which will separate frontend text from the markup generation, which should facilitate translation of the board into other languages), generate considerably-cleaner markup, and be implemented in PHP version 5 with a database backend not tied to any particular database system (such as MySQL). However, work on SA2.0 has not commenced and there are no immediate plans to do so.

External links

Sylphagora homepage

Sylphagora "Meta-board" - A board (using Sylphagora, of course) for discussion of Sylphagora itself. Also allows one to see the board in action.

SkwurlThreads - a fork of the Sylphagora 1.1 codebase, with several new features added.

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