Forum software that's lightweight and extensible.

About the project

Our software is based on an earlier incarnation of an unmaintained project named esoTalk headed by Toby Zerner. We started as a small, private forum by the name of "esotalk.ga" in order to test our fork of the software more than five years ago. Since then, esoBB has grown into a considerable forum software with many exclusive features.

Changes are always being made as our users make suggestions on the support forum which is something that we openly encourage. We are not affiliated with the original esoTalk project.

Creating your own forum

It's very easy to create your own forum and requires no command-line experience at all to get started. For an extremely novice tutorial, read the starter's guide. Otherwise, dependencies are listed below.

1. PHP >=5.6 with the following extensions: gd, mysqli, and mbstring
2. MySQL >=5.7 (latest version recommended) or MariaDB.
3. A web server of your choice!

You can download the most recent stable release from the website or by using the releases page. Get support on the esoBB support forum or by sending me a message.

Contributing

I am looking for people to contribute to this project as I do not have much free time and can only push this software forward so much. If you have made a contribution then you are welcome to create a pull request and you will become a contributor. If you make several contributions and show technical prowice I will add you to this project.

One of the most beneficial ways to help those who run forums using this software is by creating a plugin, skin or language pack. If you are interested, learn more here: https://geteso.org/docs