IceBB

From IceBB Wiki

This page is incomplete. You can help by expanding it.

IceBB began on October 4, 2004, designed to be a free alternative to expensive forum software like Invision Power Board and vBulletin. Since then, it has evolved into a powerful, stable, and easy-to-use forum system - and it's still free.

IceBB is currently available in English, but our community is working hard to provide language packs for our final version.

IceBB is currently in a late beta stage, with a final release planned in Q1 this year. Although IceBB is still in beta, it is very stable and is suitable for production sites.

History

For a complete list of versions, see the version list

Original IceBB skin

When Invision Power Services revoked their free trial for good on September 27, 2004, lead developer MutantMonkey decided that there needed to be something similar. Many of the free forum systems at the time were lacking in features, and some were even very insecure. So, on October 4, 2004, development began.

The original code was based on the now defunct restart of Siteshark project, also by MutantMonkey. This saved about 20 minutes of coding. The first public alpha of IceBB was released on November 13, 2004.

Through those two years, IceBB has undergone many default skin changes. The skin was originally based on a prototype for Siteshark, designed in Photoshop in 2003 by MutantMonkey. However, the Kenka graphics artist began work on the skin, as the original one was "too gray." However, he decided to leave the project, so David took over. He designed a new skin that looked somewhat like vBulletin, but blue instead of purple. Later, he began work on a new skin to replace that one, due to many complaints that it looked too much like vBulletin. However, David decided to take a break for the project, so his prototype was completed by MutantMonkey. When David decided to return, he designed yet another skin, which is the one you see today.

IceBB has also undergone a license change since the original release. We moved from a custom license to the GNU General Public License ("GPL") and submitted the project to SourceForge to reduce the bandwidth usage on our site.