Your First Forum Script

What was the first forum script you ever used? Why did you use it? How long did it take you to switch to what you use now, if you don't still use it?

 

Embarrassingly, it was Simple Machines Forum - enough said.

 

Mine was phpBB from a free forum host, Free Forums for you.

 

Interestingly enough, Tyler, I had set up a test board with them shortly after using SMF.

 

The first forum I ever administrated was not mine and it was on vBulletin. I enjoyed it but when I created my first forum, I used IP.Board - it's what I learned on. Then my subsequent communities were created on MyBB - some failed and closed down, one was switched to vBulletin a month later due to the immediate success.

My roots are with IPB but I have used vBulletin for a much longer period of time. Now I'm interested in getting back into IPB.

 

Excellent. Come on over to the dark side.

 

I don't plan on abandoning vB though. :p

 

With the DJ board, my first self run forum I started with phpBB, then went to myBB and finally to vBulletin this was all within 6 months.

 

MyBB...

Well, at the time, I did not want to jump right into vBulletin. I figured if I started out using a free forum software, if the site flopped, I would not have to worry about what more I could do with the license. MyBB was also closest to vBulletin and it met my standards and had everything I needed in a software. Not only because of those reasons, but because they had many skins, modifications and other add-ons/plug ins to go with their software. Once I began knowing the software, I grown to like it- now I am fluent in designing and coding MyBB skins and designs...

I am currently still using MyBB, for both of my websites. However, I do plan to create a vBulletin site sooner than later.

 

I made my first forum at InvisionFree back in January of '05, so technically IPB. At some point I saw MyBB being used at another forum, and I had never heard of it, but I tried it out and it was fantastic. And so that September, I completely restarted the forum with MyBB.

 

Suddenlaunch at first....I think it's still up.

That's because we only started it as a joke.

Then it got serious after lots of members came over from the ISP forum that was "mistreating" us. So we bought some hosting and started afresh on XMB.

After two years we took the plunge and migrated from XMB to vB 2.3.4, and then less than two months later onto vB 3.0.0. Back then there was no Impex, it was a manual import script of some sort.

 

Mark, I don't know about you, but I was quite fond of the vB 2.x.x series - there was something about its "classic" look that caught my attention.

 

phpBB was my first. ugh. Purchased vB a couple of months later, and have never looked back.

But now my attention is wandering...

 

Same here...I'll never forget seeing my test site running it in my then-famous bright red and yellow colour scheme and feeling rather proud.

I never got that with vB3. The style is technically much better but there really was something about the vb2 look.

Same here...I just cannot make my mind up. I worry about the huge learning curve to get onto IPB though. I know so many little tricks and cheats in vB that have taken years to learn.

 

The first "forum" script that I used was a BBS system called Wildcat. That was back online in 1984. It allowed a group of friends to share notes about different classes. Later moved to a system called DLX because it could support up to 32 modems. Here we not only had forums but chat rooms as well. Finally before the web took off, it was Worldgroup.

First web based bulletin board was Ultimate Bulletin Board 4.7 back in 1998. Its called UBB.Classic now and I don't think its being developed anymore. It was Perl based and stored its data in indexed html files. You were roughly limited to about 50,000 posts before weird things started happening. Was using UBB 5.47 when we switched the site to vBulletin in 2000 and no longer had to delete 10K posts every week.

 

Ah yes, isn't UBB.classic now UBB.threads, one that is PHP powered (and additionally, managed by Groupee, Inc.)?

 

yeah me too. But I'm hesitant to purchase another vB license.

Even tho it doesn't have the wide range of mods, and support, that vB does, MyBB is looking pretty good.

 

Peggy, if you haven't already, I highly recommend taking a look at MyBB's current administrative interface - it's very nice.

 

Is there a demo Chris? Or would I have to d/l it?