New on LowEndTalk? Please Register and read our Community Rules.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
BoxBilling updated after like 5 years
Do you remember a billing panel called BoxBilling, discontinued after 2015?
Seems that they are back, finally supporting PHP 7.
https://github.com/boxbilling/boxbilling/releases/tag/v4.22-beta.1
Comments
Nice.. Just in time for PHP8
Yes. It's looking nice. About to try it on a local machine. Released September but I didn't notice it until much more recently. It seems the new team is competent and working hard on it. Their own web site is rapidly getting updated now the main work is done.
Suppliers won't get to PHP8 overnight. BB should be able to keep up now they've broken the back of the backlog.
I don't think this sounds good. What was the last time some Turkish guys purchased an extension and added ransomware?
evrifaessa joined the BoxBilling organization on Nov 2.
Who are the people behind this project and who is the owner?
Andrius Putna - Kaunas, Lithuania?
Mr. Timothy G Webb Sr. - South Carolina, USA?
Yağızhan - Istanbul, Turkey?
Who are they are with write access?
There are a lot of junk commits https://github.com/boxbilling/boxbilling/pull/772 and a lot of commits without proper review.
My suggestion would be to avoid this at all. This definitely doesn't look good.
Boxbilling is part of hostinger group, like many other companies. Its a trusted software, but abondened due to the fact not generatin much income to the owners
It is also self-hosted so easy enough to monitor what goes on. Added to that, potentially at least, a basis for a hosting company upon which to build its own in-house billing.
An alternative for those looking for a free solution.
Nope. It's owned by company BOXBILLING, UAB and the owner is Andrius Putna from Kaunas, Lithuania. Found via donation link on Github https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/boxbilling
I don't think you can expect much income for the open-source project in the first place, however, they had probably PRO features that were costing some $$?
It's not easy for Billing software. If you can't trust it and be sure it's clean and managed by people who know at least how to code.
Check that PR and you'll see that is definitely not something you could trust (60 commits testing how to fix?) WTF?
It's not easy once the client has entered the payment gateway from the billing system. But as I'm not collecting card or banking details, at that point it's no longer my responsibility. The designers of the systems collecting those details are very well experienced and, I suggest, competent.
I'm going to take a good look before I pass judgement. I haven't yet decided one way or the other.
@alexvolk Yes, I agree to your point. BoxBilling still needs a lot of improvement (due to the fact that it was unmaintained for like 5 years), and that commits the new maintainer has made might sound unnecessary. But still, I am glad to see that there are at least someone trying to contribute to an abandoned project.
Hello, evrifaessa here. I'm the guy from Istanbul you were talking about.
I just saw this thread while I was making some research about how well or how bad reviews we got after we started our work on BoxBilling after 5 whole years of silence.
I first want to start by giving some information about what's going on in the background.
I first started having my interest in this project somewhere about early-2020. I was looking for a free alternative to WHMCS, to use with MyOwnFreeHost (I was a student then, and still am, so I didn't have much money to spend on these, I was looking at these as a hobby). I was a part of the MyOwnFreeHost community. I wrote some scripts, themes and other stuff for MOFH, and then I wanted to give BoxBilling a try.
Then, I started looking for a way to get BoxBilling working with MOFH. At that moment, I legit thought I still had a way to get a 5-year-old software working with newer stuff just by myself. But then the reality hit me.
I then pushed my first commit on Oct 2, 2020. And as I found out there still was some interest in this project, I continued doing my stuff. Since then, I've been trying to get this big boy to the place it used to be five years ago.
At first, I messed up with some stuff and broke them, but now I guess I'm doing fine. I'm still learning things.
Now, I want to clear up some stuff from your comments.
I know I can't change your thoughts about my nationality in one comment, but I don't know what to say to make you feel relieved anyhow. As we're talking about open source, you should expect to see people from different parts of the world. It's the nature of OSS. I'm not a fan of the current ruling party of Turkey and didn't choose where to be born, but that's not the topic of today.
BoxBilling is open source and we don't obfuscate our code like our paid competitors. I can tell that it's hard to check and verify every line of code with just 3-4 active maintainers, but the source is there. Feel free to go through every line.
We have automatic checks to check if we broke something, and you can't force-push a PR if the required continuous integration checks fail. We also discuss radical changes on Slack and GitHub before pushing them, every platform we discuss stuff on is open to the public. I'd also love to see some new faces helping to achieve a new release of BoxBilling.
That's true. We're working hard though.
Not anymore. Hostinger abandoned BoxBilling 5 years ago. AFAIK, we don't have any ties with Hostinger anymore.
Exactly.
To remove the dependency on a central server, we're making some changes to BoxBilling.
Yes and no. We don't sell stuff anymore, so I don't know what exactly is going on in this company, or what it's being used for. I don't think we need a company for a FOSS project. But yes, the owner is Andrius and it's up to his decision to close this company or not. I don't work for the company and my opinions probably won't change anything about the future of it.
I honestly don't know what the money is being used for.
Agree with the first part. I don't think having paid plans for an open-sourced project is appropriate. But you know, that was Hostinger's choice, not mine. And we removed it.
Completely agree. That's why we decided to label our latest releases as "beta" ones. There probably are tens of unknown vulnerabilities, BoxBilling is unstable. I'd like to see new contributors.
I know this PR is messy, but you can use the "files" tab in pull requests to see what has been changed. Every single commit is saved to the history. It would ultimately be noticed if someone tried to push any kinds of "malware".
Just a quick note: These are my thoughts. Any contributor might think differently about something, and the plans I disclosed here can be changed after discussions.
I'm probably not going to hang around here much, but I'll try checking the replies on this thread. Thank you for sharing your thoughts with people, I hope I got everything cleared up. Have a nice day.
Another thing: I don't have control over boxbilling.com, and it's the version from 5 years ago, we're using boxbilling.org for now. Don't rely on any information from boxbilling.com.
@evrifaessa From what you just wrote and how you reacted to certain replies makes me have faith in this project. I would love to see the updates and how it goes
About the static website I was talking about, I pushed it to boxbilling.org. If you have any suggestions, please let me know.
The simple reality is that BoxBilling was stagnant for half a decade, and the world moved on around it.
A year ago it had several security vulnerabilities, didn't run on any vaguely modern version of PHP, and was just a bit lost.
Today though, it has a handful of active contributors, is PHP 7.4 compatible (and close to PHP 8), the known bugs and potential security risks are being hunted down and closed one by one.
Yes, there is still some confusion and ambiguity about certain things, but there are active discussions about solving those, about the general direction of the project, and the intention of building a real viable open source billing solution.
Would I recommend anyone to use it as a production billing solution right now, no absolutely not, but is it headed in a good direction, yes absolutely.
There is a discussion on Github about the future direction that the project should take, so if you are interested in it, then it would be really nice to get opinions: https://github.com/boxbilling/boxbilling/discussions/933
I'm pretty sure an awesome host here would donate a small VPS to host your Demo in. Seeing your replies, I think BB is going in a great direction. Kudos