About This Archive
What is this?
This is a read-only archive of the All About Symbian discussion forum, which was active from 2001 to 2013. The forum was powered by vBulletin 3.8 and served as the primary English-language community for Symbian smartphone users — covering Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Samsung, and other manufacturers who built on the Symbian platform.
The archive contains 76,785 threads and 449,030 posts from 39,542 community members, covering everything from technical troubleshooting and app recommendations to phone reviews and general discussion.
Why preserve it?
The Symbian era (roughly 1998–2013) was a pivotal period in mobile computing history. Nokia sold over a billion Symbian devices, and the All About Symbian forum captured the community's knowledge, enthusiasm, and experience throughout that era. Forums like this were the social internet before social media — and All About Symbian was one of the few places where the global Symbian community gathered to share knowledge and solve problems together.
This archive preserves those discussions as a historical record of a community, a platform, and an era that shaped the modern smartphone.
Finding content
There are several ways to explore the archive:
- Browse by forum — the original forum structure is preserved, organised by device and topic
- Search — full-text search across all 449,030 posts, powered by Pagefind. Runs entirely in your browser with no server-side processing.
- Statistics — charts and data showing the community's activity over time
- Symbian app packages — .sis application files shared by community members
The archive is also indexed by search engines. Searching Google for a specific topic with site:allaboutsymbian.com/forum can be an effective way to find specific threads.
What's included
- All public forum posts and threads that were visible when the forum was active
- Thread titles, author usernames, and post dates
- File attachments shared by community members — images, Symbian .sis packages, documents, and more
- The original forum structure and categories
- Community statistics and activity data
What's not included
- Private messages — these were never public and have not been preserved
- Email addresses, IP addresses, and passwords — stripped for privacy
- User profiles, avatars, and signatures
- Content that was hidden or deleted by moderators during the forum's active years
Privacy
Personal data has been minimised in this archive. Email addresses, IP addresses, passwords, dates of birth, and private messages have been excluded entirely. Usernames are retained as they were publicly visible identifiers on the original forum.
This archive is maintained under the UK GDPR archiving exemption (Article 89), which provides specific provisions for archiving in the public interest.
If you were a member of the forum and would like your content removed, please contact [email protected]. Reasonable removal requests will be honoured.
Technical details
This archive was generated from the original vBulletin 3.8 MySQL database using vbulletin-3-static-archive, an open-source static site generator. Forum posts were converted from BBCode to HTML using a custom Python build script, and the result is served as 76,785 static HTML pages — no database or application server runs at request time.
Search is provided by Pagefind, a static search library that runs entirely in the browser using WebAssembly. The search index covers all post content and loads only small chunks as needed, typically under 300 KB per search.
Structured data (schema.org) is included on all pages to support search engine indexing and rich results.
Related archives
- All About Symbian — the main editorial archive with 13,000+ articles (news, reviews, features)
- All About Windows Phone — sister site covering Windows Phone and Windows 10 Mobile
- All About Mobile — cross-platform mobile coverage
- All About Digital Archive — the full archive portal, covering all sites from 1999 to 2022
Archive maintained by Rafe Blandford. Last generated April 2026.