@julian Definately, we will contribute some changes to upstream.
We are a group of student developers who are deliberately not affiliated to the university to fight against censorship. The university have a history of tooking over administration from the student developers and grant censorship privilege to the "youth studies center", and we refuse to become yet another website that does so. We already lost https://bbs.pku.edu.cn and https://treehole.pku.edu.cn, and there's not yet a libre and civilzed forum for the Peking University students, faculties and almuni.
FYI, forum-based approach isn't pretty attractive these days. Although we specially desired and wished a forum-based approach to build an online community, we failed to attract a larger userbase, at least in the short term. Currently, most students are more interested in a "tree hollow"-based pesudo anonymous approach. We have a modest user base of around 150~200 users in 2 months, but compared to the new "tree hollow" https://top2.life (which attracted >2400 users in just 3 days after creation) it's really a tiny fraction. top2.life administrators may are better than us in advocacy and have a larger social circle to attract users, but we think the primary reason is that students get accustomed to "tree hollow" fashion and don't really like traditional forums anymore.
