Ikonboard

Infobox Software
name = Ikonboard



caption =
author = Jarvis Inc.
developer = Level 6 Studios Inc.
latest_release_version = 3.1.5
latest_release_date = June 2nd, 2006
latest_preview_version = n/a
latest_preview_date =
operating_system =
platform = Perl
genre = Discussion forum
license = Proprietary readable source
website = [http://www.ikonboard.com Ikonboard.com]

Ikonboard is a free online forum or Bulletin Board System developed in Perl for use on MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, as well as flat file databases.

Ikonboard History

Early years

Ikonboard was originally developed by Matt Mecham, with the first release being Ikonboard 0.9 beta in September 1999. Originally much of the development took place on ikondiscussion.com (no longer active) until it suffered a server crash [ [http://web.archive.org/web/20010322195645/http://www.ikonboard.com/ Ikonboard.com in March 2001 regarding server crash.] ] in March 2001 and it was initially thought everything might have been lost, including early work on version 3. As a result they switched to Ikonboard.com, and by April 2001 the majority had been recovered.

During ownership of Jarvis Entertainment Group (JEG)

In late April 2001 Ikonboard officially joined the Jarvis Network. [ [http://web.archive.org/web/20010507175857/forums.ikonboard.com/cgi-bin/ikonboard.cgi?act=ST&f=1&t=8 Ikonboard joins the Jarvis network] ] [ [http://web.archive.org/web/20010604041156/www.jarvisgroup.net/?pg=news JEG announcement of it acquiring Ikonboard] ] At this point the latest available release was 2.1.8, with 3.0 in beta development. It is believed that Matthew Mecham sold Ikonboard to the Jarvis Entertainment Group for shares. Soon after the release of 3.0 Matthew Mecham stopped developing Ikonboard, and departed to work on Invision Power Board. It is believed that Mecham had been paying for the domain during the time JEG owned Ikonboard. A year after his departure the DNS was altered to point to a holding page which redirected users to other software, [ [http://web.archive.org/web/20030214100721/http://ikonboard.com/ Ikonboard.com Domain under dispute (WayBackMachine February 2003)] ] during this time there was a legal dispute over the domain ownership.

After the departure of Matt Mecham, owner of JEG made a public request for individuals to staff and develop Ikonboard. As a result a group of individuals emerged with separate development and support teams formed. Amongst the others to later emerge were Sly, Camil, Quasi and these along with the others were seen as the 'second set' of coders. On June 12th 2002 Ikonboard 3.1 was made [ [http://web.archive.org/web/20020808043748/www.ikonboard.com/ Ikonboard.com upon releasing 3.1] ] with plans for PHP versions being announced at the same time. Initially the release represented small bug fixes to Mechams' 3.0.x series. In October 2003 chairman (and CEO) of JEG John Jarvis was forced out of JEG. [JEG Management list [http://web.archive.org/web/20030622232251/jarvisgroup.net/team.php prior to departure] and [http://web.archive.org/web/20031024114557/http://www.jarvisgroup.net/team.php post departure] indicating approximate date of change.]

During ownership of Westlin Corporation

In February 2004 the company changed its name to Westlin Corporation. [ [http://web.archive.org/web/20040205105100/http://westlin.com/ The Westlin site] after the company changed name from JEG.] The departure of the second set of coders was fairly low profile, with many of them departing to work on their own project Infinite Core Technology.

In summer 2005 it emerged that former JEG chairman John Jarvis was taking legal action against Westlin, to regain ownership of Ikonboard amongst other things. During much of September that year the sites' server was down. Westlin declined to comment on the outage, prompting several staff members to quit. In October 2005, with Westlin still declining to talk to the support staff and developers, Ikonboard releases were no longer available for download.

During ownership of John Jarvis

On October 28, 2005, after weeks of speculation, ownership of Ikonboard was officially transferred to John Jarvis. However with the change of ownership the site became unavailable as it was no longer hosted by Westlin. It wasn't until December that Ikonboard.com was online again, with a new parent company 'Pitboss Entertainment' which was owned by John Jarvis. [ [http://web.archive.org/web/20051208000128/http://ikonboard.com/ Ikonboard.com in December 2005] finally accessible after ownership change.] Though John Jarvis officially owned Ikonboard he had no visible presence on the site, with Joshua Johnson (owner of Level 6 Studios) running Ikonboard on his behalf. The site initially suffered numerous problems ranging from problems with the server to the domain being suspended. Soon after the site returning work on 3.1.3 continued, this time developed by 'The Ikonboard Team'. This team consisted of unpaid volunteers who additionally provide support, though some opted to be in the former support user group. Ikonboard 3.1.3 was publicly released on January 30 2006, and later went on to release 3.1.4.

In March 22, 2006, it was announced to staff by the admin of Ikonboard that Pitboss as such no longer existed, and all its assets (including Ikonboard) now came under "Level 6 Studios". This appeared to be confirmed as company trading details revealed that Pitboss Entertainment was as such renamed 'US Energy Holdings Inc.' with the latter changing its trading symbol from OTCBB:PBSS to OTCBB:USEH. The domain record contact details were changed to those of Level 6 Studios, and the Pitboss Entertainment site was changed to mirror 'Top Site Lists'. Work on Ikonboard continued with 3.1.5 being released on May 30th 2006. Additionally the Ikonboard team started development on '3.2' though their work was never publicly released under the Ikonboard name. On September 10th 2006 development on this release was discontinued as the Ikonboard team departed to work on IkonForums 1.0.0, [ [http://forums.ikonforums.com/index.cgi?act=ST;f=6;t=83 Ikonboard team departure (September 2006)] ] their own independent project.

In January 2007 it was noticed that the domain record contacts had been revised to those of John Jarvis. [ [http://who.godaddy.com/WhoIs.aspx?domain=ikonboard.com&prog_id=godaddy Ikonboard.com domain record, regarding ownership.] ] Therefore it is believed that since October 2005 John Jarvis has remained the owner of Ikonboard (and MyIkonboard), though allows 'Level 6 Studios' to manage it on his behalf. During most of June 2007 Ikonboard was offline. The reason given by the owner of Level 6 Studios (whom it is hosted with) was that the problem was due to 'DNS issues'. [ [http://swarf.net/forums/cgi-bin/ikonboard.cgi?act=ST;f=13;t=7401;st=0; June 2007 downtime explanation] ] During the downtime the website reappeared for a few days on 29th June with the forums using a backup from November 2006. Within a couple days of the site reappearing it became unavailable again before returning on 3rd July, using a more recent backup of the forums.

On 8th January 2008 the (former) official German support site 'ikonboard.de - Reloaded' completed its transition in converting to IkonForums. While still providing (German) Ikonboard support its main focuses is now with IkonForums. [ [http://www.ikonforums.de/cgi-bin/index.cgi?act=ST;f=7;t=1705;st=0#entry8946 IkonForums.de announcement] on its transition from 'Ikonboard.de - Reloaded' (post written in German).]

Ikonboard Site Design

It was discovered in mid-December, 2007 that [http://www.ikonboard.com Ikonboard.com] 's site was reportedly copied from one of Level 6's previous hosts, San Diego-based Implux LLC at [http://www.implux.net Implux.net] .

According to [http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.ikonboard.com Archive.Org] , Ikonboard's site had been re-designed by Level 6 after June, 2007. Implux LLC has maintained the same site design since first quarter 2006.

After an individual repeatedly reverted this portion of the article, the site has been updated with a non-freeware template, thus no longer using Implux's design. However, after this article, they have added a robots.txt file to prevent Archive.Org from displaying any previous versions of the site.

Version History

Ikonboard 0.9

The first released version of Ikonboard was 0.9 beta, in September 1999. It was written by Matthew Mecham in Perl and stored all data in flat text files. Compared to present-day message board software, such as Mecham's own Invision Power Board, it contained only basic features.

Ikonboard 1.x

Releases in the 1.x series of Ikonboard built on the original 0.9 beta code. It was still authored entirely by Mecham, and stored data in text files.

Ikonboard 2.1.x

Ikonboard's 2.1.x series incorporated some of the ideas and developments from the 1.x series, but started with a new codebase.

It was with the 2.1.x series releases that Ikonboard really became popular on the web, perhaps due to its status as a free alternative to UBB. The 2.1.x releases of Ikonboard contained many of the features found in today's forum software.

As with previous releases, Ikonboard 2.1.x releases were written in Perl and used a flat file storage system. While the actual code for the software continued to be written exclusively by Mecham, other members from the "Ikonboard community" assisted in providing things like images and documentation.

Ikonboard 2.2

Ikonboard 2.2 was an effort to continue improving the 2.x series after Mecham shifted his efforts to Ikonboard 3.0, and development occurred alongside that of Ikonboard 3.0. Most of the development, promotion, and support efforts were focused on the 3.0 series, however, and there has never been a stable release of Ikonboard 2.2. Since late December 2005 the download for the 2.2 development was removed from the site, and effectively discontinued as the team work on the 3.x series.

Ikonboard 3.0

Ikonboard 3.0 represented a "total rewrite" for Ikonboard. The board was still coded entirely in Perl; however, Mecham adopted an object-oriented style of coding, and did away with flat files in favor of storage abstraction, allowing data storage in a relational database such as MySQL or Oracle.

After the release of Ikonboard 3.0, Mecham stopped developing Ikonboard. Further releases in the 3.0.x series represented small fixes and improvements on Mecham's 3.0.0 code.

Ikonboard 3.1

As the new developers gained familiarity with the code, larger changes were made in the 3.1.x series releases. For a long time the stable version was 3.1.2a. Noticeable additions included the addition of a 'quick reply' box below topics.

The next release was due to be 3.2 and was originally started in 2003. However for various reasons work of this version stalled, this resulting in the next release of Ikonboard becoming 3.1.3 and was developed mainly by 2 coders. With the change of ownership around August 2005 the two coders departed leaving development on 3.1.3 at beta 09 stage. When Ikonboard returned online work on 3.1.3 continued, and Ikonboard 3.1.3 was publicly released on January 30 2006. It contained many new features as well as fixing bugs and a couple security issues. The most significant new additions in this release was Humain Readable Image (HRI) on registration which keeps malicious users from mass registering, and an update centre in the adminCP.

Within a few weeks 3.1.4 was released, this release fixed bugs found since the previous release. On 2nd June 2006 another release was made, like the previous release 3.1.5 fixed bugs that had been found.

Ikonboard 3.2

Ikonboard 3.2 is yet to be publicly released, though already has a notable history. Originally development began in late April 2003, however work on this release stalled, and development made later became part of iB 3.1.3. Then development on this release was restarted on February 10th 2006 by 'The Ikonboard Team', however they departed on September 10th 2006 taking their work with them to IkonForums.

Since their departure Ikonboards' developer has said that he'll be working on a 3.2 release [ [http://forums.ikonboard.com/cgi-bin/ikonboard.cgi?act=ST;f=38;t=1772 Development on iB 3.2 by Level 6 Studios] ] . The release is believed to be similar to the previous development, with additional features similar to those found on Netgimmicks.com and Swarf.net. In January 2008 it was announced via mass email that '3.2 would be released in February 2008', and a topic in the support forums also announced its forums would be upgraded on 14th February to this release. However to date no release has been made and the topic has been removed. It has also been noticed that users enquiring about the 3.2 release via the forums have had their posting rights removed and the threads have been removed within a few days.

Related products

myIkonboard

myIkonboard is a separate product originally created by Ikonboards' parent company. While not directly connected to Ikonboard, it was originally powered by a PHP development version of Ikonboard. This version was relatively short lived, with myIkonboard going down about a year prior to the change of ownership. In March 2006 it was announced by Ikonboards' new owners that myIkonboard would return, powered by the Ikonboard software. Support has never been officially provided by Ikonboard staff due to the buggy nature of the myIkonboard software, being never fully finished and development halted, as well as the fact that myIkonboard was a separate product to Ikonboard. In June 2007 the website became unavailable, initially due to the domain expiring, though this was renewed after a few days. Since June 2007 to date myIkonboard has been unavailable, with the a 'server not found' error message appearing when attempting to connect to the site.

PHP versions

In 2003 work began on creating a PHP version. Under the name 'project mongoose' 2 versions were developed entitled 'Ikonboard PHP' and 'iBPLite'. However neither product made it to a public release, though a version of Ikonboard PHP was used in the original myIkonboard. Until 11th September 2006 no further work has been done in developing a PHP version, however it has been announced that work on a PHP version is to resume.

References

* [http://www.opentechsupport.net/forums/archive/topic/2079-1.html Open Tech Support interview with Mecham (July 2001)]
* [http://www.sitepoint.com/article/matt-mecham-ibforums Sitepoint interview with Mecham (September 2002)]
* [http://foruminsider.com/index.php?act=articles&id=3 The Forum Insider interview with Ron Witmer (March 2004)]
* [http://www.theadminzone.com/forums/showthread.php?t=16015 The Admin Zone interview with David Munn (December 2005)]

External links

* [http://www.ikonboard.com/ Ikonboard Website]
* [http://www.ikonboard.de/ Ikonboard Support Site (German)]
* [http://www.myikonboard.com/ myIkonboard] myIkonboard
* [http://swarf.net/ Swarf.net] (also known as iBSupported, a site of iB hacks and more)
* [http://www.netgimmicks.com/ NetGimmicks] Support site for Ikonboard and a portal for IB