Threads that don't expire

IchigoBBS started in 2003 as one hobbyist's answer to a simple problem: forum software kept dying — abandoned projects, license paywalls, and communities evicted when a host shut down. Twenty-one years later, the answer has become the platform 38,000+ self-hosted communities across 92 countries call home, with a development history we're proud of: continuous releases, no acquired-and-enshittified detours, and a free core that stays free.

IchigoBBS is self-hostable by design. Your community's data lives on your server, exports are complete, and the platform runs on modest hardware — page-load median of 184 ms on the reference stack, verified by WebPageTest community benchmarks. Modern threading, reactions, search, and mobile-first theming ship in the core; nothing essential is held hostage behind a license tier.

What admins get

• One-command install and upgrade paths, with LTS releases for admins who value sleep.
• A migration toolkit that imports vBulletin, phpBB, XenForo, and MyBB — threads, users, attachments, and reputations intact.
• A vetted plugin library with 21 years of community review behind every entry.

Our admins range from modders and builders running technical communities to hobby groups, classrooms, and indie game guilds. What they share is a refusal to hand their community's archive to a platform that can fold, sell, or change its terms — the threads that don't expire are the ones you host yourself.

The philosophy

Forums built the social web, and they still do community better than any feed: searchable, permanent, owned. IchigoBBS is the open BBS platform for builders, modders, and forum culture — free-core, self-hostable, and twenty-one years of uptime behind every thread.