I need to start somewhere. :d
The interest in forums and forum software originated from a Belgian Internet project that was initially founded by a Belgian foundation (vzw) in early 2002. The project consisted of (and still does) a forum for people with computer problems. To achieve this, it used at that time YaBB Gold, and later on YaBB SE, phpBB and nowadays SMF. When it started in 2002 YaBB really was the most important free bulletin board, but the phpBB2 hype made us convert everything to phpBB. Later on we returned to YaBB/SMF.
When working as a team member on the poject's website, to make it bigger and add additional functionality, I became interested in webdesign and webdevelopment. Because I had a small website with some personal scripts (DOS applications actually), I started looking for a very simple forum script for my website. And I did found one on PHPFreakz.com. I changed some small things on the forum, such as a layout, and put it up on my free Lycos (now Tripod) webspace. You can still see it online right here.
When I became more and more interested in webdesign, I decided to let go my original website and to concentrate more on the webdesign aspect. At that time (still 2002) my ISP Telenet.be used W-Agora as their discussion board needs. Because I liked the forum so much, it had no registration possibility, no search engine, ..., I tried to make my small forum look like the Telenet.be forums (I wrote this here if you can understand Dutch). However, I never completed my work.
When time passed by, I got better in working with PHP and started to write my own small forum script. It was called "SBBS" and finished until version 0.39. You can download it here. Again, it was never finished completely because I wasn't satisfied with how it was written (very dirty in fact). At some time, I rewrote the forum package and made it more look like UBB. There's a screenshot of it here. You will probably note the copyright notice saying "phpApps". phpApps was a project I planned to start to contain all my self written scripts. But because later I decided to only continue working on SBBS, phpApps never saw the sunlight.
We're 3 October 2003 now. I discovered the possibilites of SourceForge.net and registered SBBS. Unfortunately, I found a forum script already called SBBS in some way, and after a small talk with the owner I decided to be safe and rename SBBS to the in my opinion better name "UseBB". UseBB was later registered as a SourceForge.net project on 22 October 2003.
Since then, less fundamental changes have occured. After registering the project I started creating a website to promote my project, although there wasn't anything to download nor see yet. The same website (however often with small changes in layout and content) kept in use until a few months ago.
It was about January 2004 when I really started writing UseBB completely from scratch (my PHP skills had became much better again) and it was 27 February 2004 when UseBB 0.1 was released. You couldn't do much with it, except register yourself and change some personal information in your profile. But the basis was ready. A few months later (4 April 2004), when 0.2 was released, we moved our website to usebb.net.
Until today development continued, although relatively slow. The current version is UseBB 0.2.3a, and 0.3 is in the works, hoping to be released soon. To speed up the development, a team of two or three more developers will soon start working on future versions of our favourite forum software package, and to make it more popular than it now is.
Well, this was the complete history. I might have forgotten some things. I'll post them if I remember them. Also, if you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask.
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« Last edit by Dietrich on Wed Sep 14, 2005 11:42 pm. »
