Free corp/alliance forum with real EVE SSO — usernames, portraits and member groups straight from the game

EVE Technology and Research Center Third Party Developers
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o7 pilots,

I run forums, and like most of you I’ve watched corp forums die the same death over and over: someone registers as “xXDarkReaperXx”, nobody knows who anyone is, the member list fills with people who left the corp a year ago, and the CEO gives up and moves everything to a Discord where all knowledge goes to die after 3,000 messages.

So I built a plugin that makes a forum behave the way an EVE corp actually works. It’s free and open source, and I’ve just finished testing it end-to-end with my own character.

What it does

Registration and login run through the official EVE Online SSO — the same “Log in with EVE Online” button you know from other third-party tools. When a pilot signs in:

  • Their username is their character name, verified by CCP. No spoofing, no “who is this?”
  • Their avatar is their character portrait, pulled from the game automatically.
  • Their corporation shows under every post with the corp logo, and their profile gets an EVE panel with portrait, corp and alliance.
  • You configure one corporation or alliance (matched exactly against ESI, logo pulled automatically). Members of it land in a full-member group; everyone else lands in a guest group with whatever limited permissions you give it.

And the part that keeps the member list honest: corp membership is public data, so the forum quietly re-checks everyone (batched, every few hours, plus at every login). Leave the corp in game and the forum demotes you to the guest group automatically. Rejoin and you’re restored. Nobody ever prunes the member list again, because there’s no list to prune.

Scopes: none

The application this uses is Authentication Only — it requests zero ESI scopes. Identity comes from the sign-in itself; affiliation, portraits and logos are all public endpoints. Your members aren’t granting your forum access to anything, and the forum stores no tokens. If CCP’s API has a bad day, the forum keeps working and just re-checks later.

What it runs on

The plugin is built for eveBB — a free, GPL-licensed forum engine I maintain (a modernised continuation of FluxBB, for those who remember it). I’ll be upfront: I maintain both, which is exactly why the plugin exists. eveBB is deliberately old-school in the good ways — fast, lightweight, runs on any cheap PHP host with MySQL/PostgreSQL/SQLite, no ads, no tracking, your data on your server — and modern where it counts: one-click updates with checksum verification, a WordPress-style plugin manager, dark and light themes. A corp forum on a €3/month host is entirely realistic.

Setup is about fifteen minutes total: install eveBB (a normal five-minute web installer), upload the plugin, create a (free) application at developers.eveonline.com with the callback URL the plugin shows you and no scopes, paste in the client ID and secret, type your corp’s name. Done — your registration page is now a “Log in with EVE Online” button.

Links

Complies with the EVE Developer License Agreement; not affiliated with CCP. EVE Online and all related logos are the property of CCP hf.

Questions, feature ideas and bug reports welcome — here or on the eveBB board. Fly safe. o7