Invision
The previous version of MFGG's Forums ran on the Invision forum software (an older version before Invision software had to be licensed). The forums opened on October 13th, 2003, shortly after the vBulletin Forums were taken down. On January 26th, 2004, Spitfire (the host) removed MFGG and replaced it with a page that encouraged new members to reconsider joining the forums. From then on, the forums were hosted on Retriever II's website server, Penguinia. All posts from 2003 remain intact, though all posts before September 2004 in the Pointless Post Palace were purged.
The forum software contained a lot of custom modifications by Retriever II, such as badges, HTML ban, warn levels that everyone can see, better topic reporting, and a link to the MFGG IRC Chat, mfggirc. There are also several hand-made security patches, which were made with the help of Techokami, one of which was abused by Nintendogs. The multitude of glitches in the IPB forum software frequently caused major problems, from the need to prune the PPP when its topic list grew too long to the inexplicable deletion of Mrs. Aforcer's account. Some of these glitches, however, became part of various fads and events.
Due to various reasons such as security and stability issues and deterioration of the software itself, the Invision forums were replaced by the phpBB forums on November 9th, 2009. The first iteration of the phpBB forums is generally considered a major disappointment, and while the new phpBB forums have generally offered a satisfactory experience, the Invision era was by far the most active period in the history of the forums.
Archive
After the old phpBB forums were launched in 2009, the IPB boards were moved to a new URL and put in read-only mode (although a couple of staff members made topics in 2010, including one relating to The Murderous MFGGer event). Around fall 2013, the forums became inaccessible when MFGG's server upgraded to PHP 5.4. The old IPB software was incompatible with this new version of PHP, and anyone visiting the archive was faced with PHP's "White Screen of Death". On October 14th, 2017, VinnyVideo fixed the deprecated code in a few board files, and the archive became fully accessible again.