YaBB - a forum from the 20th century
YaBB is a free Perl forum engine, the first version of which was released at the very end of the 20th century, on July 4, 2000. Yes, the 21st century, contrary to a common misconception, began only on January 1, 2001.
By time machine, we will be transported to the year 2000 and see how it all began.
→ Demo version of the very first YaBB (login: admin, password: admin).
At the beginning of 2000, a certain Zef Hemel wanted to create his own forum and was looking for a suitable engine. The best of what he found were paid UBB (Ultimate Bulletin Board) for $ 200 and vBulletin, as well as free UltraBoard 1.62 and PowerBoard. However, these forums are tabular, and Zef wanted a tree-like “Usenet” style with blackjack and emoticons.
As a result, Zef Hemel chose the free UltraBoard and used it for a while. However, over time, he began to miss his abilities, but he could not find a forum with the functionality he needed. Zef decides to create his own forum engine.
Since Zef Hemel originally wanted to have a tree forum, he began to modify the existing RobBoard engine. While working on the forum, he received insight: tree-like forums are losing popularity and are outdated, because clicking on each message to read it is very inconvenient. Thus, he abandoned the idea of creating a tree-like forum and rewrote it in a table one, which it still remains.
Initially, he wanted to make the engine paid, but then changed his position. He decided to make a free open source forum for the same poor webmasters as himself. The first version of the forum engine was released on July 4, 2000, on US Independence Day. He named his engine YaBB - Yet another Bulletin Board. Translated from English, this means "Another Notice Board."
Soon several more programmers joined the project: Andy Tomaka (UBB specialist), Remake (UltraBoard specialist), Matt Mecham (creator of Ikonboard, later became the head of Invision Power Services). Zef has published its script in various directories of CGI programs, including the CGI Resource Index.
The new engine was gaining popularity; sites with high traffic began to use it. The forum has been constantly upgraded, a number of new versions have been released over the years - YaBB 1 Final, YaBB 1 Gold, etc. Zef Hemel eventually left the project, new enthusiasts took over his baton. A huge number of various modifications were released, collected on the BoardMod website .
The last of the line was YaBB 1 Gold - SP 1.4, released on November 25, 2004.
Replaced YaBB 2. The first public version in Release Candidate status was released on December 27, 2004. Its main innovations are the ability to attach files to messages and create polls.
The latest version from this thread, 2.6.11, was released on December 17, 2014. Development of YaBB 3 is underway.
Based on YaBB, a similar PHP engine was created using the MySQL DBMS, called YaBB SE . In turn, it became the basis of the now popular engine SMF (Simple Machines Forum) .
So, install the very first version of YaBB. It is worth clarifying that the instructions below are valid for servers running operating systems such as Linux and FreeBSD.
There is no installer, so installation is done by simply copying the files to the cgi-bin folder (in text mode) and to the folder for HTML files (in binary mode). For YaBB.pl , Printpage.pl , Search.pl , Reminder.pl files , the appropriate access rights are set that allow their execution (usually 755). An administrator account has already been created (username: admin, password: admin).
The forum engine is quite simple: you can create topics and write answers, receive notifications, search the forum, edit the profile, and send the forgotten password by e-mail. There is a personal messaging system.
An interesting feature: information about reading sections and topics is recorded not in cookies (as in most forums), but in text files on the server. Such a system works more stably. It is also convenient when access to the forum is carried out from several computers (for example, from home and work). The disadvantage is the fact that this function works only for registered users, while the system that works through cookies is also available to guests.
When writing messages, you can use emoticons and BBCode tags, a list of which is listed in a small help to the forum. There are no buttons for emoticons and tags in the message creation window itself, so you will have to enter them manually.
The moderation functions are quite simple: the message can be edited or deleted. The topic can be moved to another section of the forum, closed or deleted.
User can edit their profile. As in any other forum engine, you can change your password, email address, indicate the name and address of your site (if any), ICQ number and signature.
An interesting feature of YaBB, which is now rarely found on forums, is the ability for any user to delete their account on their own. When editing a profile, you need to be especially careful not to accidentally click on “Delete user” instead of “Change profile”, because there will be no more warnings!
In addition, the administrator can also edit the message counter and assign the user to the group. This can be either a standard YaBB Administrator group or a specially created one.
The possibility of creating groups exists for the implementation of private forum categories, access to which will be available only to specified user groups.
The forum administration panel is quite simple. Nevertheless, it allows you to perform all the basic tasks:
The forum is written in Perl. It stores all data not in the DBMS, but in text files. For that time (the end of the 1990s - the beginning of the 2000s), this was a typical phenomenon - most of the engines (UBB, UltraBoard, etc.) worked exactly on this technology.
The YaBB forum stores data in 4 folders:
The YaBB Forum has never been a leader in functionality. It was initially inferior to such a commercial project as UBB. But among the free forums (UltraBoard, Ikonboard), it looked pretty good. Continuous modernization, a large number of modifications - all this determined the success of the engine.
Many small forums of that time, as well as some large ones, worked on YaBB. The largest Russian-language forum on YaBB was and remains Absolute Games Forums Central .
However, starting from the 2nd half of the 2000s. YaBB began to lose ground. Among the main factors that influenced this, we can name the distribution of free engines running on PHP and MySQL, as well as hosting services supporting these technologies. Many forum owners have switched from YaBB to other engines (usually SMF).
However, unlike other similar engines (UBB, Ikonboard, UltraBoard, etc.), YaBB did not stop developing, but continued to release new versions, which are also written in Perl and store data in text files, but at the same time the functionality is not inferior to the popular free forums in PHP and MySQL.
By time machine, we will be transported to the year 2000 and see how it all began.
A bit of history
At the beginning of 2000, a certain Zef Hemel wanted to create his own forum and was looking for a suitable engine. The best of what he found were paid UBB (Ultimate Bulletin Board) for $ 200 and vBulletin, as well as free UltraBoard 1.62 and PowerBoard. However, these forums are tabular, and Zef wanted a tree-like “Usenet” style with blackjack and emoticons.
As a result, Zef Hemel chose the free UltraBoard and used it for a while. However, over time, he began to miss his abilities, but he could not find a forum with the functionality he needed. Zef decides to create his own forum engine.
Since Zef Hemel originally wanted to have a tree forum, he began to modify the existing RobBoard engine. While working on the forum, he received insight: tree-like forums are losing popularity and are outdated, because clicking on each message to read it is very inconvenient. Thus, he abandoned the idea of creating a tree-like forum and rewrote it in a table one, which it still remains.
Initially, he wanted to make the engine paid, but then changed his position. He decided to make a free open source forum for the same poor webmasters as himself. The first version of the forum engine was released on July 4, 2000, on US Independence Day. He named his engine YaBB - Yet another Bulletin Board. Translated from English, this means "Another Notice Board."
Soon several more programmers joined the project: Andy Tomaka (UBB specialist), Remake (UltraBoard specialist), Matt Mecham (creator of Ikonboard, later became the head of Invision Power Services). Zef has published its script in various directories of CGI programs, including the CGI Resource Index.
The new engine was gaining popularity; sites with high traffic began to use it. The forum has been constantly upgraded, a number of new versions have been released over the years - YaBB 1 Final, YaBB 1 Gold, etc. Zef Hemel eventually left the project, new enthusiasts took over his baton. A huge number of various modifications were released, collected on the BoardMod website .
The last of the line was YaBB 1 Gold - SP 1.4, released on November 25, 2004.
Replaced YaBB 2. The first public version in Release Candidate status was released on December 27, 2004. Its main innovations are the ability to attach files to messages and create polls.
The latest version from this thread, 2.6.11, was released on December 17, 2014. Development of YaBB 3 is underway.
Based on YaBB, a similar PHP engine was created using the MySQL DBMS, called YaBB SE . In turn, it became the basis of the now popular engine SMF (Simple Machines Forum) .
YaBB Original Release
So, install the very first version of YaBB. It is worth clarifying that the instructions below are valid for servers running operating systems such as Linux and FreeBSD.
There is no installer, so installation is done by simply copying the files to the cgi-bin folder (in text mode) and to the folder for HTML files (in binary mode). For YaBB.pl , Printpage.pl , Search.pl , Reminder.pl files , the appropriate access rights are set that allow their execution (usually 755). An administrator account has already been created (username: admin, password: admin).
The forum engine is quite simple: you can create topics and write answers, receive notifications, search the forum, edit the profile, and send the forgotten password by e-mail. There is a personal messaging system.
An interesting feature: information about reading sections and topics is recorded not in cookies (as in most forums), but in text files on the server. Such a system works more stably. It is also convenient when access to the forum is carried out from several computers (for example, from home and work). The disadvantage is the fact that this function works only for registered users, while the system that works through cookies is also available to guests.
When writing messages, you can use emoticons and BBCode tags, a list of which is listed in a small help to the forum. There are no buttons for emoticons and tags in the message creation window itself, so you will have to enter them manually.
The moderation functions are quite simple: the message can be edited or deleted. The topic can be moved to another section of the forum, closed or deleted.
User can edit their profile. As in any other forum engine, you can change your password, email address, indicate the name and address of your site (if any), ICQ number and signature.
An interesting feature of YaBB, which is now rarely found on forums, is the ability for any user to delete their account on their own. When editing a profile, you need to be especially careful not to accidentally click on “Delete user” instead of “Change profile”, because there will be no more warnings!
In addition, the administrator can also edit the message counter and assign the user to the group. This can be either a standard YaBB Administrator group or a specially created one.
The possibility of creating groups exists for the implementation of private forum categories, access to which will be available only to specified user groups.
The forum administration panel is quite simple. Nevertheless, it allows you to perform all the basic tasks:
- create, delete and sort categories and sections;
- display a list of users, as well as a list of their email addresses;
- edit news, user groups and a list of obscene words;
- Delete all messages older than the specified number of days (30 by default).
Technical features
The forum is written in Perl. It stores all data not in the DBMS, but in text files. For that time (the end of the 1990s - the beginning of the 2000s), this was a typical phenomenon - most of the engines (UBB, UltraBoard, etc.) worked exactly on this technology.
The YaBB forum stores data in 4 folders:
- Boards - information about categories (* .cat) and sections (* .dat) , lists of topics in sections (* .txt) ;
- Members - user profiles (* .dat) , information about sections and topics they visited (* .log) , incoming private messages (outgoing messages are not saved) (* .msg) ;
- Messages - files of topics with messages (* .txt) , information about subscribing to notifications of new messages in the topic (* .mail) ;
- Variables - list of categories (cat.txt) , user groups (membergroups.txt) , obscene words (censor.txt) , news (news.txt) , list of online users and guests (log.txt) , default number of days, older which messages will be deleted from the admin panel (oldestmes.txt) , topic ID counter (number.txt) .
Conclusion
The YaBB Forum has never been a leader in functionality. It was initially inferior to such a commercial project as UBB. But among the free forums (UltraBoard, Ikonboard), it looked pretty good. Continuous modernization, a large number of modifications - all this determined the success of the engine.
Many small forums of that time, as well as some large ones, worked on YaBB. The largest Russian-language forum on YaBB was and remains Absolute Games Forums Central .
However, starting from the 2nd half of the 2000s. YaBB began to lose ground. Among the main factors that influenced this, we can name the distribution of free engines running on PHP and MySQL, as well as hosting services supporting these technologies. Many forum owners have switched from YaBB to other engines (usually SMF).
However, unlike other similar engines (UBB, Ikonboard, UltraBoard, etc.), YaBB did not stop developing, but continued to release new versions, which are also written in Perl and store data in text files, but at the same time the functionality is not inferior to the popular free forums in PHP and MySQL.
