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Joined: Jun 2006
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Now with the sale of UBB.threads to Mindraven, I think we should talk about what UBB.threads has gone through during the Infopop/Groupee days.

WWWThreads was acquired by Infopop during a time when Infopop's original Perl-based Ultimate Bulletin Board (UBB) slowly began losing customers to PHP-based, database-driven competitors, chiefly vBulletin.

By acquiring WWWThreads, Infopop gained their own database-driven PHP forum solution. However, rather than keeping one solution, Infopop chose to keep and maintain two downloadable forum software packages: the Perl/flat file-based UBB.classic and the PHP/MySQL-based UBB.threads. This is where Infopop made their big mistake, as both products began to stagnate and continue to lose customers to the competition. Eventually, it became clear to Infopop that this strategy was unsuccessful. Had Infopop combined the two forum software packages into one PHP/MySQL forum software package right after the WWWThreads acquisition, we could have perhaps still have one of the leading forum software packages on the Web today.

Initially, Infopop planned on replacing both UBB.classic and UBB.threads with an all-new PHP/MySQL-based forum software package, however, UBB.classic developer Charles Capps left the company, thus snagging development of the new product. Eventually, it was decided that the planned product would end up being a new version of UBB.threads, Version 7.0.

With the sale of UBB.threads to Mindraven and plans to hire new developers, I think this was a great decision made. With vBulletin 4.0's higher prices, I think that UBB.threads 8.0 is the perfect chance for reviving a once thriving forum software package.

Anyone have their own opinions?

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v8 rollout needs to be smooth.. THAT will be the #1 key, imho.. i believe a lot of customers will watch these forums for the v8 rollout and especially the support forums for bugs.. they might even wait for 8.1 for fear of 'bleeding edge' syndrome...

if all goes 'smooth' then bam!!

'smooth' is defined (for me) as:

1. documented well! (user, admin manuals, howto's.. something that has always been lacking)
2. minimal clicks to upgrade
3. importers all working properly
4. no 'gotcha' bugs..

v7.3 was an example of a ton of stuff put into one release and that hurt...

sooo, assuming all goes well on v8 rollout.. the sky's the limit! wink

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Read the second post on this thread in vBulletin's forums:
http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/show...658e4a967aff8b&p=1892878#post1892878

Could we really see former vBulletin developers on our side?

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Only time will tell and I don't think it will be very long until we see some solid production here.

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Originally Posted by Pink Jazz
Read the second post on this thread in vBulletin's forums:
http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/show...658e4a967aff8b&p=1892878#post1892878

Could we really see former vBulletin developers on our side?


lmao.. good one Pink Jazz! i've been watching the discord that was created with their rushing v4.0 out the door... should be interesting wink

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I have a vB license and after running it for awhile, guess what I converted to? Yup, UBB 7.x. Had to renew my license for it, but it not only was easier to install and cofigure, it stopped all spamming...hehhee. vB, in my opinion has really shot themselves in the foot when it comes to the 'hobby' forum. It looks like they have positioned themselves to go after the corporate market and put those small guys who really helped build them on the back burner. The dissent among vB owners in the license holder only forum is unreal. But, getting back to UBB and Infopop. When they were acquired by Groupee and decided to dump .threads was when I started looking for another solution. I can't see any downside to Rick taking full control back. From what I've seen of the back end screen shots UBB v8 is going to be huge.


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suggestions continued laugh

5. no inline css'ing in any templates -- makes creating skins much easier and that just snowballs into product desire as skins are easily created.. a new aftermarket?
6. no inline javascript either.. load em up as separate files. also it's cheaper to load single larger files than a ton of small files..
7. allow for minified versions of css/js..
8. serve YUI api from google.load (optional)
9. load css up front, js at the bottom
10. get less table heavy.. add more css classes.. but still no need to replace table happy with div happy like vBull did.. just be reasonable..
11. where you DO use tables, DON'T do things like 'width="30%' in there.. allow the css to do what it's intended to do
12. replace all popups with either on the fly js generated stuff or pre-generated stuff that is list based instead
13. forget IE6 even exists!
14. put in hooks for memcached, where available..
15. add mysqlI.. it's a no brainer
16. consider using innoDB on a coupla heavy write tables.. ubbt_ONLINE.. myISAM is great for 95% of the tables, but innoDB has it's place... i've done this on my board and the speed is noticeable..
17. ADD hooks to the ubbthreads.php engine where _gpc, _run are called to allow something like _mods array(...,xxx,yyy) to hook in, if installed.. this makes it so mods don't INVADE any code...
18. Get compatible with php 5.3 deprecated functions. this also affects the phpmailer class that is currently used in stock..

</end>

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Former Developer
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Originally Posted by Pink Jazz
Charles Capps left the company, thus snagging development of the new product.
This isn't exactly what happened. Let me clear some things up, now that I feel comfortable doing so.

"UBB7" was killed before I left Groupee, not after. It's death was the fault of a multitude of people, not just me. Except for Rick, he didn't do anything wrong. tongue

The first failure was mine. Switching from bad Perl to adequate PHP (PHP4!) was a bad mistake. Since then, I've learned from additional experience to never attempt to make a major project in a new language as your first experience with that language. I had no real concept of how to build a proper modern web application, and no idea how to work as anything other than a single cowboy coder.

The second failure was the vision given by management. Or rather, the lack of vision. Did you know we actually built two entirely functional prototypes? The first was killed because it was an overengineered coding disaster. That was my fault, I didn't use the resources available to me to make it not suck. Also, yes, that's one of only a handful of screencaps that survived. This is the other, gaze upon it and be in awe.

The second prototype was killed because the central (AWESOME!) focusing feature would have been unused by the majority of users. The thing you now know as Watch Lists is a close approximation of the feature, only not quite. Rick did the majority of the coding on that one, but the result was the same: the prototype was rejected because it would have been a failure in the marketplace.

And thus UBB7 died. I decided to leave Groupee. After I left, they reconsidered and commissioned UBB.threads 7.0.

Last edited by Charles Capps; 01/02/2010 7:42 PM.

Charles Capps
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So what are you trying to say Charles? Are you now with Rick's company?

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UBB.threads Developer
UBB.threads Developer
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Originally Posted by JAISP
So what are you trying to say Charles? Are you now with Rick's company?
We could only hope to have some one with such dedication to join Rick's team...


I am a Web Development Contractor, I do not work for UBBCentral. I have provided free User to User Support since the beginning of these support forums.
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ANY chance of Joshua getting involved? I see very little action on his site these days.


http://clubadventist.com/forums

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UBB.threads Developer
UBB.threads Developer
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Originally Posted by Stan
ANY chance of Joshua getting involved? I see very little action on his site these days.
Pettit? If so, he runs fusion, I doubt he'd be involved in threads...


I am a Web Development Contractor, I do not work for UBBCentral. I have provided free User to User Support since the beginning of these support forums.
Do you need Forum Install or Upgrade Services?
Forums: A Gardeners Forum, Scouters World
UBB.threads: UBBWiki, UBB Styles, UBB.Sitemaps
Longtime Supporter & Resident Post-A-Holic
VNC Web Services: Code Modifications, Upgrades, Styling, Coding Services, Disaster Recovery, and more!
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His fulltime job is working in a doctors office.

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Hey Charles, do you plan on eventually upgrading your forums (once UBB 8 is released)?

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I currently work for Silicon Mechanics, a hardware provider for thousands of popular companies (Groupee included). I recently became the lead dev, and we're working on some awesome stuff. The world of commercial software is a very, very different place than the world of business-specific solutions. Being able to say "Thou Shalt Not Use Internet Explorer On The Intranet App" is delicious. On the other hand, running Vista in a VM in order to do compat testing on the website, not so delicious.

I'm going to be switching my own forums to a custom solution some time in the near future. I've written custom forum solutions before, but the code's never been good enough to release or has been too specific to the site. The iteration I'll be putting up on Flare is likely to be based on Plack and Moose, as an entertaining experiment. Tomorrow I'm going to be working with Solr to finally add searchability to the LO site. (MySQL full text indexing sucks and isn't available on InnoDB, as most of you should be aware.)

Site-specificness is one of the things I've become passionate about in the past four years. Too many site owners are satisfied simply taking some commercial off-the-shelf solution and sticking it on their site. If you're serious about your site, you're going to spend time making sure that every bit of it is properly integrated and flows well together. For example, the Leftovers site is actually composed of two entirely different pieces of software, the portal/forums/mini-CMS and the calendar/points/slotting app. The other developer and I worked together to make each app mesh together. I wish that more site owners would make that kind of effort.

(On the other hand, custom software sometimes can be a bad thing. I recently spent an inordinate amount of time updating the LO codebase. I originally wrote it on top of Zend Framework 0.something, and there have been so many changes since the 0.x series that upgrading to the latest 1.x versions was a horrible challenge in places. Never write serious code in something you're new with!)

Last edited by Charles Capps; 01/03/2010 3:21 AM.

Charles Capps
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Sounds like the same old Charles I knew way back when.


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