phpBB is one of the oldest and popular bulletin board projects on the Internet. It is an open source, fully scalable, very secure and highly customizable discussion board software, also known as forum among connoisseurs. phpBB is a web-based application that is independent of an operating system.
Features at a glance
Key features include a user-friendly interface, a simple and straightforward administration panel, a helpful FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions), support for many popular database servers, support for an unlimited number of topics and posts, support for private or public forums, a private messaging system, a notification system, an anti-spam system, complete customization with templates and support for multiple languages.
In addition, the software includes an advanced caching system, which includes database query caching, template caching and manually refresh cache functionality, the ability to control what users can see and access at all times, built-in search system that indexes everything, so users can easily find topics, posts or other users, as well as a powerful plugin architecture, which extends its default functionality and allows you to connect it with other apps.
Under the hood and availability
Being written in the PHP server-side scripting language, and supporting the MySQL, PostgreSQL, Access/ODBC or MS-SQL database servers, phpBB is the ideal forum solution for all websites that want to please their community. It is available for download as a single archive that contains all the files needed for installing phpBB on a web server of choice (Apache and nginx are supported at the moment).
Not a GNU/Linux app
The fact of the matter is that phpBB is not a GNU/Linux application. It can run on top of a web server that is installed on top of a GNU/Linux distribution, but at its core is a web-based software that can be used from anywhere with a supported web browser.
