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chovy

Posted on Originally published at chovy.bl0ggers.com

Come post on our forums: the tsbb network is open

#community #showdev #typescript

We build a forum package called tsbb, a bulletin board written in TypeScript. It looks like the vBulletin boards a lot of us grew up on, and under the hood it is a modern web app with no build step. We run a handful of boards on it, and right now they have more topics than members. That is backwards, so this is an invitation.

The boards

All of them are listed, with live topic and post counts, at tsbb.dev/boards:

  • tsbb.dev: the project's own board. Help, plugins, skins and what ships next.
  • bbs.hqtui.com: terminal UI talk, for people who build terminal UIs.
  • c0upons.com/bbs: deals, coupon codes and freebies, posted by whoever found them.
  • w3bs.org/bbs: the W3BS community board.

Joining takes one field. Type your email, click the link we send, and you are in. There is no password to choose, and you can add a passkey afterwards.

Why a forum, in 2026

Chat scrolls away. A thread on a board stays where you left it, has a URL, shows up in search and can be read by someone who arrives a year later. Every list on a tsbb board also has an RSS feed (each forum, each thread, each member, even a saved search), so you can follow a board from a feed reader without ever signing in.

What is in tsbb

  • No build step. The whole thing runs as plain TypeScript on Node 24, which is what makes runtime plugins possible: drop a directory in and it loads.
  • Plugins with filters, actions and slots, so a broken plugin cannot blank a page.
  • No client script. The board's CSP forbids inline script entirely; every page is complete as HTML.
  • Four ways in: the web, a terminal client (curl -fsSL https://tsbb.dev/install.sh | sh gets tsbb, tsbb-tui and tsbb-mcp), a REST API and an MCP server for agents.
  • Skins, from a 2000s vBulletin look to a paper skin that sits inside an editorial site.
  • MIT licensed, one Node process and a SQLite file (or Postgres).

Run your own, and get listed

Every tsbb board now has a /boards page listing every other board in the network, so each one sends readers to the rest. If you run a board, open a pull request adding it to apps/server/src/boards.json and it shows up on all of them. The list is also JSON at tsbb.dev/api/v1/boards.

Source: github.com/profullstack/tsbb

Come say hello. The first reply in any thread is yours.

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