Project Information Part #1

[Ana]

{ Notes on the Website/Forum System }

Colors of Ana uses phpBB as the basis for the site itself. Aside from being 100% period-authentic (a big factor), the use of phpBB here was motivated by two things: the availability of the awesome retro theme the site uses, and the supposed-ability of an earlier version of phpBB to work with "Usenet", the birthplace of the earliest expressions of what would later be termed "Pro-Ana".

The earliest Pro-Ana community site that is still in existence, Project Shapeshift from 2001, has been using phpBB since 2012. Another long-time Pro-Ana site that is technically still up, but has long since been dormant, that uses phpBB is the Thin Pages (aka the Thinkpages)

The truth is though, NOBODY would ever choose to use phpBB for a new system though in 2021. This would even be questionable as far back as 2014. It's limited, it's awkward, and has (almost) no developer community that makes still plugins or add-ins for it. None-the-less, it still has a small group of developers and enthusiasts and, even in 2021, gets minor (mostly security and bug-fix) updates. Not bad for a 20+ year old system!

In contrast, most actual 1999-era Pro-Ana "community" sites were still happily based on Yahoo/MSN/Excite "Club" pages that provided a forum. Many would pair that with a Geocities/Tripod/Angelfire web page that typically linked to a free-hosted Chat-room as well. In other words, the above-average site would have a separate forum, chat, and main web page running on three different providers.

Pro-Ana sites that were more an individual person's page though would typically be just a free Geocities/Freewebs/etc. type of page, with a link to their Xanga blog or OpenDiary site.

These days, IP.Board/IPS (like MPA uses), MyBB (like EDC uses), or Xenforo (like MyPancakeAddiction) uses, or other choices like Droopal, Joomla, self-hosted WordPress, and many more free systems are available.

But here, it's 1999, so phpBB it is for Colors of Ana!

References:
http://thinkpages.net/phpBB/
https://www.project-shapeshift.net/index.html
https://www.phpbb.com