The APBoard was a very extensive, modular discussion forum system with portal, news, polls, private messages, many plugins and addons and much much more. Back in 1999, when it was built by Christin (aka Alexander Mieland), it was revolutionary.

Christin Löhner was formerly known as Alexander Mieland (dma147). As Alexander, or dma147, she built the first APBoard with PHP3 in 1999 and continued to develop it all by herself until 2002. Then Lacritima, Relict and Funlex joined her and helped her to develop the APBoard further. One of the first APBoard versions later became the very famous Woltlab Burning Board (version wwb1, later versions were completely redeveloped). In a very short time, a huge and great community formed around the APBoard. Many hundreds of thousands of people actively participated in the support forum and the APBoard was downloaded, installed and used millions of times. For some time even the game company Ubisoft used the APBoard for their support forum. Since 2006 the APBoard was not further developed and discontinued. But since 2000 until today there is one APBoard that keeps online quite persistently and successfully: http://www.rcpanzer.de/apboard/.

Christin is a woman with a trans* past. She changed her first name and gender registration in 2016, which explains the name change from Alexander to Christin. In 2018, she had gender reassignment surgery and has since fully arrived as a woman. Since then, she has been fighting for rights, a better life, and less discrimination against trans* people. You can read more about her here: https://r3y.de/ich (german)

The old APBoard lay in the back corner on a backup disk for many, many years. But now Christin has brought it out again. In honor of rcpanzer.de and because she just finds it exciting to get her old software working again under current circumstances, she wants to revive the APBoard and develop it further under uptodate environments.

Christin has now, in 2023, tried for a few weeks to bring this old APBoard to a current state. But she has come to the conclusion that it makes no sense. Instead, she started from scratch and created the APBoard The Next Generation. Start was at 12th June 2023... 

Christin uses Gitlab as her Git server for the development of the APBoard. This Gitlab server is hosted and maintained by Christin herself. Likewise, all developer instances (for example https://christin.apboard.de or also https://main.apboard.de) are hosted by Christin on the same server.

In Git she currently has four branches: main, dev, christin and apboard3.

Each developer who wants to participate in the bug fixing and further development gets his own branch and subdomain, into which his own branch is automatically deployed.

The development flow looks like this:

- the developer has to take care that his branch is always up to date with the branch „dev“.
- the developer fixes bugs or builds a new feature in his own branch.
- on his own developer subdomain he can test himself if the feature he builds works.
- when he is done and has tested everything, the developer may merge into the dev branch.
- then the developer should initiate a review and ask Christin to take a look at it.
- if everything is OK and works, then Christin merge the changes into the main branch.
 

If YOU would like to be a part of this and help us fix bugs or further develop the APBoard, please contact Christin (info@apboard.de). She will then initiate everything else.

Christin uses Visual Studio Code on her Ubuntu machine for development. If you also want to use VSC, she can give you tips on which settings and extensions are useful.

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This forum is not finished yet! It is just in development and in the process of being created! But you can follow the process here and of course participate. Contact Christin Löhner if you want to participate in this ambitious project.

APBoard NG Copyright (c) 2023 by Christin Löhner