the project's
story ends
Twenty-one years of work — done. The archive remains.
Something new — already on the horizon.
§ 01 · what matters
On May 13, 2026, TorrentPier 3.0 shipped — the project's final release. The forum archive and modifications stay online permanently. Further development on the current codebase ends here.
§ 02 · the reasons
3.0 is one last parting gift to the audience. It packs in everything we'd been holding back for a major release:
- Bull CLI — a single management console
- two-factor authentication (TOTP) with re-check on auto-login
- CSRF protection for public methods
- built-in anti-spam with a multi-provider architecture
- anonymous post submission
- a new attachment system
- migration to Eloquent ORM
- Twig as the primary template engine
- routing and canonical URLs
- API controllers for the tracker, AJAX, and the admin panel
- Nette Tracy — debug panel
- vulnerability audit and security fixes
Twenty-one years in, keeping the engine in its current shape has become unbearable. The old phpBB2-based forum core stopped being fit for purpose long ago: holding on to backward compatibility meant dragging along an architecture that has no place on today's web. The internet has changed, too — almost nobody is launching their own tracker with a forum core anymore, and those who do are mostly scraping releases from other sites. The rise of AI only widened the gap: while modern development has accelerated many times over, maintaining ancient code has only gotten more expensive.
While we were shipping everything you see in the list above, that gap became impossible to ignore. Once again, we spent months on what would have shipped out of the box on any modern framework — backed by a massive development team. Here, instead, we have roughly a developer and a half, from whom what's left of the community kept expecting the impossible. It feels like time to break the wheel. Earlier attempts had all fallen short.
We thought hard about how to preserve the legacy — and we think we've found a way. Every forum thread and every modification will turn into a static archive — permanent, in an open repository. Nothing is lost: links survive, search works, the text will still be readable twenty years from now. The source stays open too — on PHP 8.5, you'll be able to stand up TorrentPier until 2030, in line with the language's official EOL.
§ 03 · thanks
For twenty-one years, this project ran on people, not on code. On its authors and maintainers, on the moderators, on the tracker owners and the people running independent support forums. On those who wrote mods, drew themes, fixed bugs. On those who answered every question on the forum — daytime, nighttime, weekends. On the translators, the testers, on everyone who stood TorrentPier up on their own server. Thank you.
for the code@exileum · @belomaxorka · @kovalensky · @GTDarkNightmare · @diolektor · @pherum · @dlarchikov · @yukoff · @xeddmc · @advancedalloy · _Xz_ · Meithar · Pandora · and many others
for the forumDr_Brown · vitalix · Virtuoz · ExPlayer · Sprinx · Basilevs · Wertos · Protektor · Zenden · Varius · dredd · Lion18 · Lynx · sergey67 · diden05 · and many others
And to everyone else — some for the ideas, some for the bug reports, and some just for the constant whining on the forum 😉
§ 04 · where to find the legacy
§ 05 · the horizon
But nothing passes without a trace — we've drawn our conclusions too. The next project, from day one, will do what we never could: update itself and install modifications in a single click, the way WordPress does. Details soon. In the meantime — you could re-watch the Dexter Morgan series. After all, he came back too.
code nameDexter/2027