‘Peak’ would have been Invision Power Board 1.3 IMO, but still cool archaeology project :)

And lo:

- https://github.com/ernestbuffington/IPB-1.3.1-LegacyArchive

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invision_Community#Version_1.x...

You'd download a mod that contained installation instructions like the above, fire up your code editor of choice and then would manually change the source code of phpBB.

Later on, automated mod installers started being somewhat reliable, but especially if you had multiple mods touching similar parts of the codebase you had to learn how to adjust the instructions.

I don't really miss these times, but I did learn a lot about PHP through it.