Interview - Jeff Lewis of YaBB SE

Jeff Lewis is the lead developer at YaBB SE, and was previously the lead admin and programmer for the original YaBB team.

YaBB -- an acronym for "Yet Another Bulletin Board" -- was developed in July, 2000 by a programmer named Zef Hemel, and was one of the first free Perl based BB scripts. The original YaBB team benefited from the skills of several experienced programmers, including Christian Land and Matt Mecham. Matt later went on to write his own script, Ikonboard, and now leads the team for Ibforums.

While Jeff began on the YaBB team, he later started a project to convert YaBB to PHP and MySQL. The project was named YaBB SE (the "SE" standing for "Splinter Edition") and was released to the public in the Fall of 2001. The product was released under Open Source agreement, as had the original YaBB.

While helping one of my clients customize YaBBSE, I happened to talk with Jeff about a few things, and what he told me about the current progress of YaBBSE seemed really promising. The interview with Jeff covers:

• The background of YaBB
• The birth of YaBB SE
• The development team and resources
• The challenges they faced in developing the product
• Development plans and support for new languages
• Buy-outs and take-overs
• Competitor products and the market direction

A Brief History of YaBB SE

How did you get into software development? What areas did you work in before you started with the YaBB project?

I really got into software development when I began to create applications in Visual Basic for my online fantasy baseball league: developing tools to create online drafts, team management and more. Before that, I'd programmed in BASIC on my old C64, and in Pascal during my high school years.

So, prior to YaBB, I worked on my baseball project in my spare time, and worked full time as a System Administrator for a pharmaceutical company. I wrote login scripts to allow guys to update team news, trading blocks etc -- and this was all done with Perl. I was also writing freelance projects (including the creation of an application for a retail store in the area).

Then I began to look for a new forum for my league and came across YaBB (which was originally started by Zef Hemel). I got involved in it, did some work, and eventually took over for Zef when he decided it was time to move on. At that time, YaBB was only Perl and flat files.

But most hosts began to cease allowing the use of forum scripts that used the Perl/flat file combination. At the same time I was really into PHP, so the natural progression was to go to YaBB SE. The actual idea was brought up by a programmer named Joseph Fung. He mentioned that he'd thought of this, and I said "Yes, let's do it". So one weekend he came over and we converted most of the Perl version to PHP.

The original YaBB is one of the most widely used scripts on the Internet, and the YaBB community forums are a testament to that, having one of the biggest multi-language user base memberships of any bulletin board community. When you joined YaBB as Administrator and Project Leader, what changes did you bring to the then-current development of the script? And what were the biggest challenges that you had to face in moving the script forward at that time?

YaBB was facing some tough times. There was some internal bickering and a few disputes, as well as a general lack of direction, which was understandable, as Zef was trying to back off to concentrate on other things. YaBB was also in need of a bit of a financial injection to pay for hosting costs.

One of the first things I did was to have some hosted space dedicated to us. This saved us money, and helped ease the team members' minds. I then wanted to focus on spreading the YaBB name. In doing so, we managed to sell site license to a couple of large pharmaceutical companies, and a couple of board hosts who used YaBB as their base system.

We also needed to attract more developers, as some of the original members had left, and the development for YaBB had begun to slow. The biggest challenge was in getting some good coders, and then keeping them -- one pet peeve of mine is when people join up and then vanish, or just have too many projects on the go to really focus.

So once a few good coders had been involved, we started to develop the next set of YaBB scripts, attempting to lighten the loads on servers and add more useful features.

YaBB SE Today - the Team and Resources

How many people are working on YaBB SE? What are their specialties?

The majority of the first SE release was written by two people: myself and Joseph Fung. Also contributing were other long time YaBB guys like Zef Hemel and Christian Land.

It continued mostly with Joseph and myself as SE moved on, Joseph taking on the brunt of the work until we added a few others. Currently, Greg Robson is stepping up to take the lead role as Joseph and I step back a bit. He's done some extensive database schema work to ensure that the performance of SE 2 will be the best it can be.

We also have two other fantastic coders from the Netherlands: Francis specializes in security, and Compuart is just a great coder. Of course, everyone is a volunteer, as this is an open source project.

Does the YaBB SE team work in parallel to the YaBB team with regards to development protocols? Do both teams follow the same set of targets/guidelines?

No, the two teams don't work in parallel. "SE" stands for Splinter Edition, and there were various reasons why we "splintered" off in the first place. While there have been group discussions on future development of the products (including their YaBB 2, which has been in progress for the last year or so), nothing solid has come up.