Juvenall Wilson

It’s been a long, long road these these last few years since I began working on what was supposed to be a simple XHTML conversion of the existing YaBB code. All I really wanted at the time was something to keep ahead of the other boards who were still, like us, using very unclean code (not including YaBB SE who was HTML 4.0 valid, I believe). That was in the last few days of 2002, but I didn’t really dive in until Jan. 2003.

I had managed to convert most of the code from YaBB 1 SP1.3 into W3C valid XHTML 1.1 when I finally showed it to my good friend and partner in crime, Shoeb Omar. It was that night we conspired to create a new service pack of YaBB together. We did a lot of working cleaning up the Perl so it ran faster and cut down on the server load by leaps and bounds. Another strong point we wanted to focus on is getting in a few features that had been highly popular mods from our BoardMod community. We wanted things lean and ready to kick some ass again. At that point, the old YaBB 2 hand been in production for the last 3 years with more or less, nothing to show for it. We needed to get something fresh out the door or YaBB wasn’t going to make it.

After a good month or two of work, we showed what we had to the rest of the team. Everyone but Ron, ironically, loved it. He seemed avidly against this because it was really stepping on his “YaBB Platinum” version (a heavily modded and hacked version of YaBB). Several debates over what to do with later, we as a team decided “SP2″ was going to be a full team project. We created a hidden staff board where we worked out whatever we could. It really was amazing how it brought the team so close together.

Now, I said “ironically” above because when Shoeb left YaBB, Ron basically took over as the lead developer on the project. It was around here that I took a step back because I feared that with Ron in charge, it was going to take another year or so of development to get it out the door. That’s not a jab at Ron as he does do great work, but it’s just not as fast as YaBB needed.

Anyhow, here we are today, almost 3 years after it was started with the brand new YaBB 2. It’s really an amazing product with speeds that can even rival some PHP boards. If the response from the beta tests were true, YaBB is going to swing back in a very big way. I’ve already talked to a few old YaBB users who want to switch back from SMF, phpBB, E-Blah and even a UBB (people really still use that?!). That really blows me away because those are all very well built boards and we’ve had our fair share of bad raps (mostly because people simply assume Perl is crap next to PHP..fools..just tell that to Slashdot.).

So if you’re in the market for a board, an old user looking to see what we’ve been up to or simply a huge fan of the Perl language, check out YaBB 2!