Download websites that use phpwind

About phpwind

Forum software carries its history in the open. phpwind was written for Chinese language communities in the early years of self hosted PHP applications, became a common choice for boards, portals and fan sites in that market, and was eventually acquired by Alibaba Group.

Acquisition by a cloud company changed the trajectory rather than the code. The forum kept its Proprietary licence and its self hosted deployment model, which means every installation is a copy somebody downloaded, put on a server of their own and then either maintained or forgot. Version data shows what happened next. Across the sites where a version can be read at all we separate 3 distinct releases, and the one detected most often is 8. A field spread that thinly across releases, on software of this age, describes a population that stopped upgrading rather than one following a release cycle.

Age is the point for most researchers here. An unmaintained PHP forum on a public host is a security question before it is anything else, because vulnerabilities in old community software are catalogued in public and boards accumulate accounts, private messages and uploaded files that make a break in worth somebody's time. Security teams, hosting providers cleaning up their own estates and researchers studying the long tail of abandoned web applications need the same thing, which is the actual list of hosts rather than an estimate of how many there might be.

There is a second audience with the opposite motive. Chinese language community sites are a market in themselves, and a platform whose installed base has been frozen for years is a migration opportunity for newer forum products, for hosted community services and for the agencies that would carry out the move. First shipped around 2003, the software predates almost everything those vendors are selling, which is an argument that writes itself once you know which domains to send it to.

Version detection deserves its own caveat. Not every installation announces what it is running, administrators can strip identifying markers out of templates, and a heavily themed board can look like nothing in particular to a crawler. As of October 2026 we record phpwind on 671 sites in the CMS category, which is what can be confirmed rather than what exists. Checking one domain tells you whether a single board runs the software. The export tells you where the surviving population lives, which releases are still out there and what else is installed beside them, and no per-domain lookup will ever assemble that view.