Unmaintained project which pays tribute to Pistachio: the old forum engine which powered the Google Forums. It tries to mimic its original styles but uses modern CSS.
Caution
DO NOT HOST THIS PUBLICLY. This project is unmaintained and has known security vulnerabilities. It was originally created in 2015 and contains legacy code that in no way reflects my current coding standards and best practices (fortunately, this lets me see that I've come a long way since 2015 in terms of designing software with security in mind! (also in terms of just designing software)).
Unmaintained. Please DO NOT run this in production or anywhere. You may run it locally if you want to experience the good old Pistachio though :)
Many modern websites are sloooooow and bloated with unnecessary things. As a Google Product Expert, I have been able to experience this with the engine that powered Pistachio's successor: a custom version of Google Groups. This project was a way of building the engine that I missed so much, and to show the world that fast loading forums are possible :)
It has been a long time since I hacked this project (it's 2024 as I'm writing this!) so I don't remember exactly why, but at some point I left the project unfinished in the state that it is in right now.
During the Covid-19 pandemic and online university classes I decided to host a forum using this software to help my classmates share doubts and answer them (as a Q&A platform, which is what it was meant to be, just like the Google Forums). Unfortunately it didn't take off... except for the fact that in 2021, a random stranger called iq posted the following message in the test forum:
تقوم بعمل رائع استمر في ذالك
Which translates as (thanks Google Translate):
You're doing a great job, keep it up
That's so heartwarming, thanks iq! :)
The story of this piece of software still lives on as of January 2024. Someone contacted me on Jan 17 to report a reflected XSS vulnerability in the sign in page (thank you so much!!!). When I went to try to fix it, I saw that in fact the entire website didn't sanitize any user input, so it was plagued with XSSs everywhere. 🙃 That's when I decided to write this README file.
I had fun writing the story, even if it is a short one (but I feel that short and sweet is much better than long and boring! :)). If you came all the way here, maybe you're also up to hire me? ;)