Interview - Matt Mecham of Ibforums

Matthew Mecham is one of the most famous people in the world of online communities, and a popular person among Webmasters who use the famous Ikonboard -- and now the popular Ibforums -- scripts to power their communities.

Matt has worked on products like YaBB SE and, with YaBB founder Zef Hemel, started "Ikonboard", one of the most popular community scripts on the Internet. Now, Matt's making a splash with his own group of services, Invision, which has rolled out Ibforums. We asked Matthew to dedicate some of his time to answering a few questions which have been on our minds...

Or, jump straight to Part 2...

Hi Matt. Thanks for giving us an opportunity to talk to you. First up: what does your average day involve, besides work? Do you sit at the computer all the time, or do you have other interests too?

As most of my work is computer-based, I tend to spend what must be an unhealthy amount of time in front of one. I do make sure that I keep my weekends as free as possible to spend time with my fiancee; as much as I enjoy my work, it's refreshing to get away from it all and do something else. It definitely helps maintain balance and perspective.

Ikonboard - A Little History

What made you start writing your own forums script, Ikonboard? What did you do before you ventured into that direction?

In the latter part of 1999 I ran a Website for the graphic and Web design audience (at www.ikondiscussion.com). The site was centered around tutorials and tips on good design. I found myself, as have many Webmasters, looking for a forum script that I could use to build an online community, and, like many other Webmasters, I ran the site as a hobby and the budget was on the proverbial shoestring.

I stumbled across a decent free forum script (it literally was just 1 script) called "BoardMaster" (now defunct). It was a fairly basic but solid little script in a similar vein to UBB (this was before the days of YaBB, vBulletin, etc). It didn't have any of the "must have" features boards come with in these modern times (such as private messaging, complex profiles, etc.), but it was enough to run a small community.

My site required some custom scripting and the scripting language of choice at the time was Perl. I learnt Perl the wrong way (as the experts will tell you) by looking at other Perl scripts and figuring out how it all worked. I picked it up pretty quickly as I used to program AMOS on the Amiga (but that's another story). After I had the site ready to run, I set about making small modifications to the forum script -- little things like improving the navigation (such as a forum drop down box at the bottom of the page), and allowing different images to be used in different forums. I released these "hacks" into the BoardMaster community and eventually was asked to moderate the "hacks" forum.

As any Webmaster will tell you, a Website is never really finished, it's just constantly evolving. I was always looking for ways to improve this site and this desire led me to another forum script called "Board Power". Compared to BoardMaster, Board Power was feature-filled and fun to use, and offered what was (at the time) a complex and powerful administration center. I downloaded a copy and toyed with it for a few weeks before deciding to replace the existing live BoardMaster with Board Power, much to the delight of my community. It wasn't long before I had released a few hacks and set up a little mini-site dedicated to modifying Board Power.

The biggest hack I authored was a pre-runner to Ikonboards "User Control Panel". It allowed you to modify your profile, add buddies to a contact list and send and receive private messages (this was long before private messaging was popular and included as a default feature in today's bulletin boards). Unfortunately for Board Power, the developer never really seemed to take Board Power seriously -- a string of disagreements and shady business practices forced me to abandon the Board Power community. During my time at Board Power, I'd developed a review script (labeled Ikon Review) that allowed the public to submit Websites, tutorials, etc., and give the administrator the ability to rate and submit them. The internal wrangling at Board Power and the lack of good alternatives made me think seriously about writing my own forum script.

As development of Ikonboard started, I noticed a new kid on the block going by the name of "YaBB". Never one to resist a new script, I downloaded a copy and played with it, and it wasn't long before I had a few little hacks for it. And I paused the Ikonboard development for a short while, figuring that if this script shaped up, I could use it instead of writing my own. I joined the YaBB development team and contributed to its early development (such as the search engine, topic views and thread review when posting). Although YaBB was beginning to gain momentum, I still yearned to complete Ikonboard, and felt that I couldn't be involved with both YaBB and Ikonboard, so I resigned from the YaBB team in the summer of 2000.

The feature list for Ikonboard was driven by suggestions from the Ikondiscussion community. I wanted to add the personal messenger and control panel into the base script, and enhance many other standard features, such as announcements, moderation tools, and more. I figured that if these features were standard, people wouldn't need to modify the code to add in such functionality; I wanted Ikonboard to be a complete solution and act as a solid base for more functionality. I put up a "coming soon" page in early August 2000 with a section to subscribe to the mailing list, and within a few weeks I had over 200 email addresses. A month later, in September 2000, Ikonboard v0.9 BETA was finished and ready to download.