UseBB Community

People have started expressing their concerns about UseBB, especialy version 2 or lack thereof. As written previously, UseBB 2 development has been in an inactive state for a large period of time.

Since the first inception of the project in October 2003, quite a lot has changed on the web and in my personal life, work and interests. The project started as a small experiment and PHP practice and took a long time to get to the first stable release (1.0.0). Since then ideas have existed to write a second version of the forum, solving the many issues and mistakes made in the period I wrote UseBB 1 as a teenager.

Nowadays, I'm nearly 22, completed college and going to university to complete a bridging programme and gain a Master's degree in Computer Science. Next to this, I have got a few new hobbies and not to forget a beautiful girlfriend. Programming in my free time has been at a very low level during the previous years. The Last.fm Simple Stats module for Drupal has been taken over and its development is now continued thanks to a few people, though UseBB has mostly remained a single person project and thus inactive during the past years.

While my free time is quite limited nowadays and my interest in PHP went down, I still have the idea to complete UseBB 2 in PHP, but can not give any date when this will be the case. It is certainly true to state that at this day there are dozens different free forum packages offering the same. And while UseBB 2 was planned with a different feature set and possibilities, plans might change to adapt UseBB better to what the web has become today, with YouTube and Facebook in many people's daily life, and what people expect from today's web applications.

The future after UseBB 2 is uncertain and depends on what interest it will gain with the current and future users and developers. Quite likely, if it depends on me, UseBB 3 (if any) will not be written in PHP and thus will leave behind more than seven years of PHP development experience to develop a new package in a different programming language, taking the existing project (or a new one, eventually) out of the PHP forum package forest.

So, what about UseBB for now? UseBB 1 is still there and 1.0.10 will be released later on. UseBB 2 is in an alpha state and the development will be picked up again, maybe next summer. UseBB 1 cannot give the right solution to all forum software questions nowadays and as of this day should be considered legacy software.

Sad to see that it is not going as originally planned.
Best of luck.

Well, legacy or not. I'll be using UseBB1 the foreseeable future.

As far as I can tell it's the only simple, single forum capable, message board software that allows guest posting without spam (Random maths question.). That makes it irreplaceable for me.

Thank for all the hard work you've put into it. Dietrich!

Must admit though, it leaves me worried about being caught in a dead end with no way to migrate to another solution.

usebb is very very good . sadly to hear this.

Hello

I´ve been using phpbb for a long time. Fed up with tons of features, constant updates and fixes, long page loading times and high server requirements, I started looking for a new solution some weeks ago.

I´ve locally tested a few "minimalist" forum packages (like punbb), but I must say that UseBB is the best one by now. Simple, fast and with a very nice appareance.

Although I´ve just arrived to UseBB Community, I´m sad after reading this post.

UseBB 1 is a nice package if you require something simple, but it has its limitations and design faults. As long as you don't start modding the package (especially changing database data) or use Unicode there should be no problem upgrading to UseBB 2.0 later.

With UseBB 1, the focus was to create something simple. With UseBB 2, the focus is to create a framework and a simple base forum app (similar to v1) but allow customization without changing code.

Dietrich wrote

UseBB 1 is a nice package if you require something simple, but it has its limitations and design faults. As long as you don't start modding the package (especially changing database data) or use Unicode there should be no problem upgrading to UseBB 2.0 later.

With UseBB 1, the focus was to create something simple. With UseBB 2, the focus is to create a framework and a simple base forum app (similar to v1) but allow customization without changing code.

So why not continue development with help from others? I'm sure therey are plenty PhP ppl out there that would love to spearhead a project like this.

Create a team, while stil being lead, but rather oversee the development.

I wish my PHP skills were what they used to be or I myself would offer my help.

Anyways, just a thought, simple is great, and much needed still for personal sites. No need to jump into a framework type forum just yet.

This has been discussed before. UseBB 1 has a lot of design flaws summarized in a document that was once posted on the development mailing list. There is no good reason to keep v1 development active. The time that would be spend on 1.1 could come in handy on 2.0.

It's a nice small package and that's about it, it's no rocket science and is running behind on other packages since a long time.

Maybe you really need to make a team with people that know php and like the software, so it will be developed more quickly ?

This has been discussed many times... and my point of view is that I don't add anybody who is not known on the community forums.

Previously people were added (a few years ago) and none really remained active in the project. The truth is that many "talented" developers quickly appear but in reality their knowledge is lacking and some of them are only after the "developer" title.

UseBB 2 has been completely different from 1.0 and I'm not keen on getting it implemented again as UseBB 1 used to be. The coding standards are easily twice as high as UseBB 1's, and less people have the ability to code using these methodologies.

Thus, people might get added after some time and when they have proven their knowledge, but for the time being there is not really an interest in the project or at least not visible and thus nobody to be added.