phpBB
phpBB is what the old version of the MFGG Forums ran on, which had numerous improvements over the previous Invision software. Due to enormous backlogs on the Invision Forums, previous bans were considered void. The Casual Conversation Castle was removed after being supplanted by a less restrictive General Chat for a while, before The Lounge opened on July 13th, 2010.
For a few days after the opening, both forums were in use simultaneously to ensure there were no problems with the move. Afterward the Invision forum was archived. For a period of one week after the opening, usernames were "protected" by administrators, meaning an attempt to claim a username already being used by an existing member could be contested by that member; after that week, that no longer took effect. Badges were reassigned, and some features such as the custom filters were temporarily absent (although those never returned).
The original phpBB board was frequently referred to as "MFGG 3.0", even though this term is inaccurate for many reasons.
This iteration of the forums began November 9th, 2009. It was closed on November 15th, 2010 while the MFGG staff made drastic changes to the forum's structure. Minus World opened on the same day. The original phpBB forum was archived at http://www.archive.forums.mfgg.net, but the archive was deleted during a server change, and it was believed that the first phpBB archive had been lost forever (other than the Wayback Machine and any threads that members saved to their own hard drives). Curiously, The Lounge remained open for several months after The Split.
MFGG 5.5
The new phpBB MFGG Forums opened on November 26th, 2010, with a new fangame-centric focus and all non-fangaming boards including theGeneral Chat being removed. The General Chat and Gaming boards later returned.
The new phpBB boards were installed directly over the old phpBB boards, so the current boards had contained traces of the old boards (including staff forum topics, warn logs, and old skins like MFGGreece).
The Future
PhpBB ran on version 3.0.12 of phpBB. This was a very old version of the software that is no longer officially supported, and because most modern mods and plugins were incompatible with version 3.0.x, it was extremely difficult to add new functionality to the forums. While it was possible to upgrade to version 3.2.x, this would break current themes and mods, so the MFGG administration had worked to advance to a superior alternative, MyBB. The phpBB boards closed on November 26th, 2017. The MyBB forums opened a day later.
