TotalFreedom Forum

The TotalFreedom forums were an integral part of the server. There have been multiple forums, the longest of which being hosted on ProBoards. The forums have been used for announcements, admin applications, ban appeals, griefer reports, and other categories for more general discussion.

ProBoards (2012-2020)

The first forum for TotalFreedom was established on August 8, 2012 by Finest95. With the introduction of Discord, the forums gradually became more inactive as players preferred the instant communication and other features Discord had to offer.

Deletion and Restoration

In October 2020, scripthead deleted the ProBoards forum along with the rest of the server's files. ProBoards made a special exception and restored the ProBoards forum to a state before it was deleted. Unfortunately, this left a significant amount of broken groups and boards with a low interest in restoring the forum to its previous state.

Invision Community

This was a temporary (but failed) project to transition the forums to a self hosted platform. It was under the domain "totalfreedomboards.net", resembling a play on the ProBoards URL of "totalfreedom.boards.net". The forum was clunky, riddled with bugs, and difficult to use. It was unpopular and the community never switched.

MyBB

In August 2020, then-Owner scripthead announced the forums would be hosted on his own dedicated server. There was massive controversy surrounding the transition. Many supported as there were numerous complaints about ProBoards. Others had issues about the long term implications and how it would be passed down and kept secure. The forum was teased in a cryptic post by scripthead. It was decoded in this thread and the URL of the new forum was revealed. It was half baked and received much criticism for the interface. A few weeks were taken to improve the design, but many issues were still present such as the lack of mobile responsiveness. Due to the unpopularity, and short lifespan of the forum, it was binned as it had almost no historical data.

Flarum

After trying MyBB, scripthead switched to using Flarum. The decision was in part due to Telesphoreo having a preference for Flarum and convincing scripthead. However, this forum software was met with much criticism as well. Most of the formatting was down with Markdown and lacked many of the editor features of a traditional forum software. The permissions were difficult to configure on the backend and there was a shortage of moderation tools. The software was also in beta and rapidly changing. Many extensions were incompatible between versions and there were breaking changes every upgrade. This forum lasted for around a month and a half. Due to a database corruption, all of the data had been lost. scripthead started a new Flarum forum, however this issue so early on highlighted the issues of self hosting a forum and the effects on long term preservation. After the October 2020 Server Deletion, that Flarum forum was lost as well. With Wild1145 becoming the new owner, he also started a new Flarum forum for communication. However, he disliked Flarum as well and wanted to migrate nearly immediately after setting up Flarum.

WoltLab

In July 2022, Wild1145 successfully migrated all of the Flarum data to a new forum software, WoltLab Suite. Many of the issues present were eliminated being on a much more complete forum software.

Transition to Read-Only Mode

In August 2023, the forums were put into a read only mode. This was after the August 2023 Server Shutdown with Wild1145 closing the forum and Discord.

Failed WoltLab Upgrade

In late 2023, the WoltLab forum underwent an upgrade. It was unsuccessful and it took months for the forums to come back online again.

Retirement of the Site

On December 2nd, 2024, Wild1145 announced the retirement of the site. This was due to the forums being in read only mode and receiving no activity. The plan was to transition the "totalfreedom.me" domain for the forums to "legacy.totalfreedom.me". The World Download Tool would be replaced by the forum. On February 2nd, 2025, the forums would officially be shutdown and the content would be inaccessible. However, as of January 1st, 2025, none of this plan has been executed and the forums remain accessible at "totalfreedom.me".

XenForo

The TotalFreedom: Rebooted server currently uses XenForo as their forum software. The community in general preferred Discord over forums in general, but it was still used for processing applications and ban appeals. While there was and continues to be general discussion, it is quite inactive. The XenForo forums are typically received positively by the community.

Theme Controversy

There was controversy in February 2024 after a redesign of the forum. There was an enormous amount of technical debt in maintaining all of the themes. There were six entirely different themes built on top of the XenForo default. Some had features such as banners for the ranks, while some were in dark mode and required extensive changes to multiple templates. Telesphoreo unified the themes using a consistent base of UI.X. The reactions were mixed to the redesign. In July 2024, a custom theme called "Old" was developed by Telesphoreo which received praise for the design.