TromboneChat

Happy 4th everyone!

Apologies for the lengthy delay in this. Had a crazy gig schedule in Feb followed by… a relocation to South Florida!

I’ve been working on a phpBB replacement in a language / framework im familiar in. It’s largely in the completed-but-prototype phase, and has significant vibe coded elements as a POC and I would prefer to hand write everything now that it’s proven out. I have significant reservations about the current state of social media… and would like to come up with something with fewer compromises but, that’s a discussion for another time. I will open that up soon for feedback more broadly but not yet.

Therefore, since that is a big undertaking - I’ve made a few improvements, including a few I meant to make last year but didn’t have time.

You can find a staging server with these improvements at stg.trombonechat.com

The main differences, for those curious, are:

[*] fix a nasty security flaw by upgrading to the most recent point release; fortunately, we appear to not have been affected by this bug
[*] ~75% reduction in cost due to a few custom extensions that offload some of the least efficient architectural choices of phpBB, among them:
[*] offloading image and asset storage to s3 style buckets; pseudo CDN by storing some hot assets in memory rather than disk, with a medium tier cache with reasonable eviction policies
[*] complete parallel, offsite reimplementation of search; offloads things like “your posts”, “new posts”, etc. - falls back to primary search when. It available. <- this one is enormous as that was maybe 20% the problem and also phpBB search isn’t awesome to begin with
[*] migration from MySQL to PostgreSQL (also big as MySQL is a big resource hog)
[*] aggressive caching / static generation / load balancing of content for unauthenticated users

The last one is by far the biggest change. The problem with phpBB architecture is that every unauthenticated request generates a database connection. This means that if a scraper is scraping 30 pages in parallel, it “reserves” 30 database connections that otherwise actual users could be using. On resource constrained environments, this effectively means that without cloudflare protections - indexers consume ALL available resources so actual interaction is basically cut off.

That’s why I had to make the aggressive cloudflare changes last year. With this change, all human users are given exclusive access to the database and a read replica serves all cached content, including page views, search, and topics. The synchronization is approximately 5-10 seconds delayed. Net effect is I can probably allow indexers so the site is visible again.

There are also some anti scamming things I can do with this in place, but I’ll refrain from enumerating how that works with much detail because it would be not so difficult to circumvent if one knows the approach. Though it should enable less avoidable strategies too.


So, with all that said, if I can get some testers on the site to kick the tires, make sure that it works as you currently use it, and report any bugs here - I can get this deployed to this site sometime this week!

For easy access, you can also follow this link:
https://stg.trombonechat.com

Should I register as a user, or not? Or both?

Oh also, in order to access the new searching features, you'll want to use the "lightning" menus: The top right one is the "super-search" - which, while the aesthetics could be improved, offers a meilisearch (similar to elasticsearch but for smaller sites like ours) backend, rather than the built-in searching primitives offered by phpBB.

The one on the bottom left of the image offers a menu that utilizes the meilisearch and specialized and indexed Postgres tables offsite (currently sitting next to me) - if this is offline, it simply falls back to the primary phpbb search.

In other words, the more you use these instead of the "built-in" phpBB tools, the better your experience will be and the less load you'll put on the primary server.

Each of the super-search results link to the first post in the thread, not the one that matched in search.

Also, mine looks different. Is it because I don't have an account yet?

Good catch!

And yes, the reason the search doesn't show up is that it's disabled for unauthenticated users. You should be able to login with your account with the same username and password as this site.

Fixed!

Not a huge priority, but it looks like the hexagon and flat board styles are missing. Latte and prosilver work ok.

muschem wrote: Sat Jul 04, 2026 10:52 am Not a huge priority, but it looks like the hexagon and flat board styles are missing. Latte and prosilver work ok.

I'm so used to the Latte theme I forgot we even have the others. Adding that to do to-do list.

I can't login, no error message but I'm still logged out after logging in.

Hexagon and flat should be fixed now.

I'm able to reproduce the login failure. Looking into that now. A private window fixes it, for what it's worth, but I"d like a more permanently solution.

Found it, stale issue in the caching layer, should be resolved now.

Tested briefly. Signed in, did a search and used the Active Topics menu selection. Worked fine.

Matt K wrote: Sat Jul 04, 2026 4:05 pm Found it, stale issue in the caching layer, should be resolved now.

Works like a charm, thanks.

"New posts" does not seem to work on my side.

Edit: is it a database copy you run on it?
That might explain why there is actually no "New posts" and that I don't see this topic.

claf wrote: Sun Jul 05, 2026 2:28 am "New posts" does not seem to work on my side.

Edit: is it a database copy you run on it?
That might explain why there is actually no "New posts" and that I don't see this topic.

That's correct; that one might be tricky to test by hand. But if it doesn't work for one reason or another should be easy to fix when I migrate. The only "new posts" that have happened in the last week have been my test ones.

Things are mostly looking good/working well.
I ran into a couple of search issues:
1) The "Use built-in Search from the lightning menu drop-down takes me to a "The requested page could not be found" page
2) Searching for new posts using the same menu worked great. I responded to your new post, but the "Your posts" search didn't find my response to that post when I searched again right away. Once I waited a minute or two, it found them.

Got a SQL error when sending a private message.

The loosening of the character limitation for search works. I believe the current minimum is 3 characters, so if I wanted to look up info on "XO" horns it was difficult to do. The test site lets me do that. Much appreciated.

I'll do this upgrade sometime this week. Trying to nail down a time now. If you want to do any last minute testing nows the time!