According to Wikipedia, the creators of vBulletin were willing to sell the rights to the product in 1999, but Infopop refused.

I was wondering, do you think this was a big mistake? Today, vBulletin is the most used forum software, unfortunately. Had Infopop purchased vBulletin, we would still have the prestige that we once had. Infopop had refused to rewrite UBB.classic in PHP. In 2001, Infopop bought out WWWThreads, and renamed the product UBB.threads. Prior to Infopop's purchase, there was both a PHP and a Perl version of WWWThreads, but since Infopop already had a forum solution written in Perl, the Perl version of WWWThreads was discontinued. For several years, UBB.classic and UBB.threads co-existed, but soon Infopop (now Groupee) realized that the products were internal competition. Despite UBB.threads being the more robust of the two forum software, sales of UBB.classic continued to cannibalize UBB.threads sales. With the majority of competing forum software now written in PHP and using a MySQL database, it made sense to discontinue UBB.classic rather than UBB.threads.

I am pretty sure that if Infopop had bought out vBulletin, the UBB name would still carry the prestige that it used to.

I for one, have never seen hindsight fail.

So much of that paragraph is factually incorrect.

LOL!

Yes, I understand that UBB.threads 7.x originally began as a project to replace both UBB.classic and UBB.threads, however, it ended up becoming the UBB.threads 7.x series.

Since it's on Wikipedia you can go over and edit the page David

I still find it funny that they admit that they based vb off of UBB.C; so you'd think that'd be enough to see that they're just little money grubbing... :AHEM:'s

"but since Infopop already had a forum solution written in Perl, the Perl version of WWWThreads was discontinued."

This is wrong wrong wrong.

Nav is THE person in the world who knows that... mebbe you can let us in on the reald deal so we can update the wiki? I posted something about it in the admin forum at UBBDev a while back - some wiki "facts" are a bit hazy

We discontinued the perl version because it was far less frequently downloaded, more difficult to maintain and install, and because it was far too much work for Rick to develop and maintain two codebases for the same product. Maintaining duplicate features for both the php and perl version took far too much of his time and stalled new development.

It had nothing to do with competing or not competing with .classic in any way. At the time they were separate and distinct products where decisions made to one did not necessarily have an effect on the other. We dropped the perl version to make life easier for Rick at the time.

"For several years, UBB.classic and UBB.threads co-existed, but soon Infopop (now Groupee) realized that the products were internal competition."

We realized both were old and outdated and needed to be redone, from scratch. Rather than have two developers working on two new products that would have been similar, we opted to put both Rick and Charles to work on one product which would combining the talents of both developers. We never did get to capitalize on having the two of them together as Charles ended up leaving before the realization of a new product, thus Rick is the sole developer of what became a new UBB.threads.

It wasn't competition that forced a rewrite and the end of .classic, it was the age of the two products and the desire to combine the skills of the two developers.

And I believe I've read somewhere, but for an update, where do you fit in to this picture here David? What is / was your role?

Thanks

But Charles is still listed as codeveloper if you look at the sourcecode.

Even though there really is nothing left of Charles' work in UBB.threads 7, I left his name in at the point of the initial release due to the history of everything. At some point, that will be removed.

My role?

I started out doing support for UBB before it was UBB.classic. At one point I was the developer on a few releases just after Michael, and before Charles. I think it was 5.46 and all the 5.47 releases. They were such minor releases that I don't often count them. I then went to Project Manager for UBB.classic and UBB.threads. Now I do Eve customer management and my only rolde with threads is uploading zip files and picking on Rick.

Both are important, you know!

Rick has left Charles in the code for the same reason that a lot of other people were left in after they no longer had any involvement. It's just a nice thing to do.

Did I pretty much cover it all and get it right, Rick?

I do that to you and Rick... And still do it to CC on AIM ... and sometimes Rosemary and company over at Groupee when I get bored lol...

Wow, anyone see the Groupee homepage lately?
http://www.groupee.com/

Is Threads still part of Groupee, or is it now something separate?

Some serious beer drinking gone into that gut!
Nice tunes tho'

Yeh, theres been like 0 mention of threads (or classic, or even eve) at Groupee's site...

Because Groupee is it's own entity, as is threads. That's why threads has ubbcentral.com. Eve also has it's own website as well.

Why do sites still insist on using Flash and not have an alternative page.

soon as i visit a flash site, i'm immediately looking to click off and find another one..

flash ain't my cuppa tea

I say if you're going to have a "high resource" page, you should have a "low resource" one as well ...

Dave, Thats why if you call on the phone no one knows nothin and that's about it?

Sort of. Rick hasn't ever worked out of the office here but he used to come up and visit a lot. Now that he's doing support himself rather than us doing it, most of the people in the office haven't kept up with threads and rally don't know what's going on with it. You know how it goes, out of sight out of mind.

Kinda curious who to report piracy matters to now that InfoGroupeePark isn't "in the know" about threads anymore...

Well, Gizmo, I think you have to wait until September 19th to report a pirate. But I could be wrong on this, arr.