UBB.threads PHP Forum Software Community Forums General Off Topic 25 yeras ago, Infopop hired me to code UBB 6.0x: AMaA

Happy March 2026. It was in March of 2001 that Infopop hired me to take over coding for UBB6, and March of 2006 that I left.

The NDA is long gone. Ask me anything Infopop or UBB related and I'll answer as I can. I love and respect the Infopop crew despite all of my criticism and criticism there shall be, professionally.

Inside of this quote is personal life stuff you may skip:


Lemme spill some ooey, gooey insider Infopop stuff right off the bat.

A1) I don't know if any of you followed Groupee / Social Strata post-UBB, but their social networking product was the thing that we'd been working on since before I was hired. Ted actually had functional social networking figured out, from integrated privacy controls to selling ads, in 2002. But the ad thing was crucial and the ad market crashed right around then, and by the time we could come to the intended market there was just no way we could ever have gotten actual traction. We weren't VC backed so we couldn't launch and lose money. Our lunch would have been eaten by Facebook anyway. Even if we could have pulled every single UBB and Threads into a controlled OneCommunity single login system so you could all be forced into the social network (only talked about never taken seriously as a plan), it couldn't have made a difference.

A2) Hey, the product they're selling now?

It's
kinda
just
OpenTopic
lol
lmao

B1) In retrospect as a Software Architect / Business Analyst, the UBB6 team was run horribly, by not being run. The OpenTopic team stuck to the Extreme Programming paradigm and was lead by a person that knew how to build software. I wish, I truly wish, in retrospect, that I'd been able to take up mentorship under Peter, Barry, and later members of the team.

The ultimate fate of UBB6 was due to poor leadership, poor management, and poor execution. Oh, and being perl CGI in the age of PHP/MySQL, that was very important.

A3) (Oh by the way, OpenTopic, being Java, was using an ORM. While the product was built for and sold for Oracle, it had "always" been able to run in MySQL. IIRC I was told this in the context of running local dev OT instances. Launching "UBB.x" was shockingly easy. They could have just done it from the start but they knew, correctly, that huge enterprise accounts are where money is, and the support needs for small accounts would make pricing ugly. Remember how Support Units worked? FFS, Ted was some sort of financial analyst or MBA IIRC, he knew what he was doing. Except for naming, Ted is awful at product naming. The market wasn't really ready for low-touch SaaS forums at the time. Anyway.)

B2) It was 100% amateur hour on the UBB6 side and I was only one nut in a nuthouse. I was not a functional human being, Dave had no idea how to manage [censored], I had no idea how to effectively work with Rick, and Ted decided to provide what feels like minimal guidance or vision. But this is just business criticism and reflection after a quarter century. No matter how good the people, together at that time we were doomed.

C) One absolutely burning piece of insider gossip that I don't know if I ever told outside of the private beta site: We were heavily discouraged from using the same feature names as hacks or features from other products. The UBB6 Who's Online feature could not be called Who's Online. Nope, we had to be different. We had absolutely no idea what to call it until very, very late in the dev process. By that time I'd already given it a name in the code: PNTF. Please Name This Feature. It's in every one of the feature URLs.

D) UBB7. The one I built, I mean. It never escaped functional frontend (no control panel) prototype. The killer feature was reworking the main interface so that users would be shown subscribed threads first, driving a news feed style page. Remember, this was new and bleeding edge back in 2004! It had nested forums, threaded and linear view, and all the usual standard features. Dave and I spent a lot of time figuring out how to build a recommendation engine that didn't require us to host it, and decided that search-engine-as-a-service was a thing we'd have to Do Later because PHP on 2004 shared hosting just wasn't up to the task. The OneCommunity SSO feature also got a lot of theoretical attention.

Ted had left himself uninvolved in this, leaving it all to Dave. After ~18 months of our waffling, Ted nixed the prototype and plan. In retrospect he was right. Depriving the user of the act of exploring each forum also deprives them of seeing new content. Feeds are bad for threads and deeper discussion, but this is something we've only really learned through the consequences decades later.

I was seriously "burnt out" throughout the entire process and could never have brought the product to fruition regardless. They had me on a 3-midnight shift to cover support needs and I was done. Dave's last post in the UBB6 news forum sums up what happened next. I quit five years to the day.

----

And that's all for now. I've set up some calendar reminders to come back and check this thread from time to time. I'm on social media on bluesky, @charles.capps.me.

TTFN and take care of yourselves!

I've always wondered why the several company name changes lol... Several got super popular but then switched

I'm going to ramble.

Okay, so it was founded as "Madrona Park," after Ted and Rosemary's favorite Seattle park. They were on the east coast at the time. The move to Seattle, the development of OpenTopic, and the rename to "Infopop Corporation" were one whole thing, and started & finished before my time as an employee.

We were Infopop Corporation in one office before the one I came to, which was on the west coast of Lake Union. Beautiful views, a couple good local restaurants. We'd then move across the street from Fisher Plaza, which if any of you have watched the TV series "Gray's Anatomy", will know as a hospital. It's a big complex adjacent to the Space Needle and also hosts the affiliate TV station for the network. The helipad is real, for their traffic copter. Our building was adjacent to the Chief Seattle statue, along the monorail line. Do you guys remember when we restyled the website and then Control Panel into the yellow pixel border style? The top level background design was part of a larger illustration that we had painted as mural on the front of the building. I'll see if I can find images of it later. I'm sure it was posted at the time, so it may well be in the news forum here!

Did I mention I was going to ramble?

Fisher Plaza also hosts a datacenter, the one we used of course. In 2002 we got a fiber internet connection to the datacenter across the street. It was so amazing, such an upgrade from DSL! If any of you were online for the Seattle datacenter fire that took out Expedia in the early 00s, it was that datacenter btw. They had another, worse fire a few years later. Furtherly aside, the servers we bought were first from Hard Drives Northwest, but a handful of their sales and engineering people left to found a company called Silicon Mechanics, whose servers we then bought. I worked for SiMech for just short of ten years, after leaving Infopop!

Back on topic. Next up was "Groupee, Inc." The switch from Corp to Inc had to do with individual investor buy-in and such, as far as I can tell from executive shuffling and such around the time. The name was the social network product. We tried, we really tried to get Ted to understand that "groupie" has a negative connotation but he was not online enough to understand possible mockery. Super chill dude until he's upset, in which case he's scary-chill. But he shrugged off worries like this one, in the same way he shrugged off the moves of our UBB[56]-class competitors. Oops.

Anyway. All that premiered after rename of the entire product line, with revamp of the OpenTopic frontend called Eve. We'd launch consumer-grade Eve as UBB.x, after UBB6 had been renamed UBB.classic, and WWWThreads/UBBThreads became UBB.threads.

Eve. Okay, look, he (and Rosemary) get really philosophical with their naming, and Eve was a result of that. The evening before the new day, and of course the Biblical reference. That's how we got Eve, according to what I remember of that meeting. It's not a bad name for a software product at all, but... for a community product? Na. Come on man. There has to be something better, something topical.

I was in one of the brainstorming sessions about naming the UBB.x product. Lordy we were so bad at naming. How the hell do you name "forum SaaS with web hosting glued on the side" for your target audience? I get how we got Eve.

You have to remember the Two Hard Problems In Computer Science:

1. Cache invalidation
2. Naming things
3. Off-by-one errors

This is also how we got Social Strata. I wasn't there for the rename (I think?) but I am confident in the naming that it's Rosemary. I love Rosemary. She had a vision of community that was amazing and perfect in theory, but it's one of those things that you can pitch but never, ever works. We got enterprise customers for good reasons and I'm sure she was part of them. Moderation is hard.

Anyway. As far as I can tell they are still Social Strata, but the corporate community product that evolved out of the long-buried remains of OpenTopic is now called Crowdstack. Great name. It'd have been a much greater name ten years ago when it was the private label social network SaaS called "hoop.la".

Look, I'm not in the position to criticize naming. I'm the Please Name This Feature guy. I'm just riffing.

Our next, and my final, office was down the road on 4th between Wall and Battery. It was way too much space for a company our size and it confused the hell out of me. As I said, I was on the 3-midnight shift and man that place was lit super creepily at night in some spaces. Lovely in the daytime. It'd have been lovlier if we were all together instead of continuing to split the teams. I think we encountered a huge bunch of categories of problems because of the physical siloing of the teams by putting them on entirely different sides of the building. This happened in all three offices, though at least I was just around the corner from the Eve team, and Ted, in the second one.

I think that's all I've got on naming.