Old forum posts available as a read-only archive

[JoselleAstrid]

FZC's old phpBB 2 forum:

• Was very old software and vulnerable to exploits
• Stored post content in HTML, and messy HTML at that, making it very hard to port over to other forum systems which nowadays use Markdown, BBcode, or some other simpler markup

So basically, we need a new forum system, and it may not be worth it to port the old forum data into whatever the new forum system is. But the old forum posts do have a lot of valuable resources among them. Thus the idea of a read-only archive for the old forum posts.

I'm not exactly sure how it'd work yet, but perhaps we could salvage bits of the old forum software which did the job of displaying posts, and then use our own pages/layouts to put it all together (including subforum pages, topic pages, etc).

Ideally, the forum topics would be visitable at the old URLs such as https://www.fzerocentral.org/viewtopic.php?t=13945, so that links to these topics wouldn't have to be changed. Perhaps the forum archive would primarily live in a subdirectory like https://www.fzerocentral.org/old-forum, and then we could set up redirects from viewtopic.php and co. to the new URLs.

EDIT: I'll set this as a Beta launch goal. The rules pages link to old forum posts, so that's somewhat high priority. While I could dig up those specific forum posts, make snapshots of them, and upload them to static pages on the site, we might as redirect that effort toward getting all the forum topics back up. So I'm hoping that at least the topic-view page will be available by Beta, even if there's no topic-list / sub-forum page to link to those topics yet.

EDIT 2: PR #77 is a start on the forum archive. Here's a checklist of things left to do (may be updated if I think of more things to do, or decide some things aren't worth it):

• Set up redirects from the old FZC URLs (as explained a couple paragraphs above)
• Show last-post time and poster, and first-post poster, for each topic on the topic list
• Show reply count, and page-number links, for each topic on the topic list
• Make view-forum pagination and view-topic pagination show more than 1 previous/next page-number link
• When clicking a view-topic URL that specifies a particular post, use a URL fragment to jump to that post
• Properly display quotes in posts
• Display FZC-hosted images in posts
• Show poll results
• Handle post attachments (update: just serving the attachments folder publicly is good enough here)
• Show post edit time
• Show user level, i.e. admin or mod, under username (update: post count field is also available, but maybe it looks OK without)

[JoselleAstrid]

Checklist completed by PR #86 and recent commits to fzerocentral-api / fzerocentral-system.