BBS software?

[willie]

Yes it can work with old messages.  It could probably be added to IPB but I couldn't see doing it for free given that IPB is proprietary.  If IPB or anyone else wants to hire me to add it to IPB, we can talk .  Main issue with old messages is after encryption, the plaintext might conceivably still be retrievable from the hard drive via data recovery, old backups, etc.  New messages would never be written to the hard drive unencrypted.

 

[raindog308]

Imagine you and I are PMing on an IPB board.  Is your goal

1. You and I can send PMs and no one but us can read them
2. There is one encryption key for all PMs to protect against data breaches

The problem with #1 is communicating the shared secret.  Of course, we can use existing technology to send encrypted messages (GPG works just fine regardless of text transmission medium).  Also, how do I know the admin isn't silently slurping up passwords?  I don't and can't.

I see #2 as a benefit though this means the secret must be entered at some point (i.e., you can't store it on the server, so...apache/nginx module?)  Might be easiest to do in the database (if MySQL, et al. support per-column encryption).

I realize we're getting off track 

 

[willie]

Raindog: the idea is that you and I trust the admin and the board software is operating properly.  In this situation, we can exchange PM's using normal board features and without having to mess with external applications like GPG, and nobody but us can read the messages.  In particular, if someone else gets control of the server at a later date, they can't read the stored messages.  It's true that the admin could potentially modify the software to get access to our messages the next time we log in.  There could even be an admin-level feature to do this in the event of a LE investigation or the like, but it would capture only from specific accounts named in the investigation, rather than from all the pm's on the whole board. 

The encryption protects us from leaving an "exhaust" of readable pm's.  Like there was a board I was on for a while, then moved on from years ago, but my old PM's on it are still potentially retrievable, which doesn't seem good.

 

[Vega]

snippet

Paid: First choice IPB(Community is great).

-IPB 3.X is still great

-IPB 4 is coming as well soon.

I have been using IPB for awhile now. I came from Vbulletin actually to IPB and they are amazing.

Second choice...Burning Board.

(It's Xenforo but with more use/feature basically).

Free:

Check out SMF and Mybb and Elkarte(Which is a SMF fork).

 

[libro22]

I had my own fair share of experience with MyBB. It can handle massive traffic load of 8,000 - 13,000 users, at least 100 active at a given time with fairly low resource usage (even shared can handle it, though to be honest I own that server so I can't compare with the resource limit standards of regular companies). The backend UI is very clean and efficient. I think the latest version is a massive change in comparison to the old 1.6 I used before.

The only problem I had with it was spam. Once it started, you'll have headache cleaning, filtering and preventing it. Plugins did help.. but not so much. But don't take my word for it completely, others might have a more extensive experience on dealing spam with it.

I would have suggested PunBB but their development is no longer existent, I think.

Edit: Oh hey FluxBB is indeed a fork of the old PunBB