Comment by bartman
11 hours ago
For a real trip down memory lane, here's how "mods" were installed for phpBB: https://github.com/MapBBCode/mapbb-phpbb2/blob/master/1_0_to...
You'd download a mod that contained installation instructions like the above, fire up your code editor of choice and then would manually change the source code of phpBB.
Later on, automated mod installers started being somewhat reliable, but especially if you had multiple mods touching similar parts of the codebase you had to learn how to adjust the instructions.
I don't really miss these times, but I did learn a lot about PHP through it.
That's sort of similar to how modding in the Witcher 3 works. The scripting is distributed with the game itself and compiled during launch, which is great in terms of how much stuff is easily moddable, but a complete nightmare in terms of how the mods have to deal with conflicts. I had a double take when I saw that one of the common tools people use to deal with it literally bundles in kdiff3 and opens it up with merge conflicts to solve.
Don't pick the wrong side of the merge or your save game might be completely broken 40 hours from now!
This was literally my first experience of programming. Applying phpBB mods. We have lost the ancient texts.
While not my technical first, it was the first of real consequence for me as well.
And then I got so frustrated that I went to write my own forum software! And showed it to my friend, who promptly showed me how badly I understood security by posting as me.
I used to spend hours just adding mods to random boards that i would just delete later on.
No no, not "mods". The phpbb people were always weirdly militant about calling them them MODS, uppercase.
Why, I'm not sure, because it's not an acronym. Eventually they decided to start calling them Extensions, which is probably a more apt term. Or maybe a more APT term.