Interview - Matt Mecham of Ibforums

What were the strong points of Ikonboard over its free competitors?

When Ikonboard was first released, its strongest point was the speed of development, the quick support, and the interactivity of the community that drove the product forwards. Ikonboard 3 was heavily influenced by the wants and needs of the community at the time. I was very open about its development and kept a public log of ideas and code snippets for the community to review and discuss. Zeff Hemel (YaBB founder) was inspired by my notes about "iDatabase" (a database abstraction layer) and worked the ideas and structure into his own DBA when he was working on YaBB 2 Perl (development stopped on this product a long time ago). I also laid down the foundation for user selectable skins and templates in these coding notes long before any other board had such a feature. And it was no surprise that other boards copied this idea shortly after the first Ikonboard alpha was unveiled. Not that I mind -- to have contributed to the "feature pool" that modern day bulletin boards draw from is an achievement in itself.

Can you tell us more about Aurora? What was its status, in terms of development and completion, when you left Ikonboard and JEG?

Aurora was about 35% complete when I left JEG and Ikonboard. There was no moderator control panel or administration control panel, and very few moderation tools other than the basic close, open, and delete topic. Aurora's database structure was exactly the same as the Ikonboard database structure, so the demo version we had available was still using the Perl administration center to create categories and forums, etc. There was a lot of bridging code to get it to run -- it was far from an alpha product, let alone a full release product. Its main goal was to show development progress, and it was used as a tool to show how fast the new PHP version would be.

Earlier this year, you left JEG and stopped working on Ikonboard altogether. What were the reasons for that?

It is worth mentioning at this point that JEG is a company that trades on the OTC/NASDAQ and is regulated by the SEC; this means that I'm unable to put them in an adversely negative light that might affect their business -- but I'll try to be as open as the law allows me to be.

I was growing steadily disillusioned with the direction in which Ikonboard was being taken by JEG as early as the end of the last quarter of 2001. I felt that I was totally mislead and that certain details had been exaggerated or omitted to persuade me to sign the contract. However, I'd committed myself to finishing Ikonboard 3 and I decided I'd see the project through before deciding what to do.

In the very late part of 2001 and early art of 2002, I was under a huge amount of pressure from JEG to release the final version of Ikonboard 3 and write a totally new hosted version of Ikonboard, to be called MyIkonboard. I knew that Ikonboard 3 was not ready for a final release, yet the pressure continued. I'd often read press releases stating a release date I'd never given, and be told to "make sure that it's done". I was still working full time, and worked on Ikonboard in the evenings, often until 5.00am to get it finished -- considering I had to be at work for 9.00 this didn't leave much time for sleep. I was told on several occasions that JEG couldn't afford to pay me anything and therefore couldn't employ me -- so I had little choice but to continue doing both.

The demands grew and grew daily until I felt mentally exhausted -- I was trying to work full time and maintain Ikonboard 3, develop MyIkonboard and write "Aurora" (Ikonboard PHP). Charles Warner, at the time another JEG "employee" and shareholder felt he was in exactly the same position. He was assigned to dealing with all the business Ikonboard generated and taking care of the JEG network -- not an easy task, and a very time consuming one. The final straw came in February when Charles and I were issued with a directive from the CEO of JEG informing us that he wanted to charge for Ikonboard, which would make me break my promise to the Ikonboard community. Charles and I discussed our options and decided that we would rather start over than continue working with JEG. It wasn't an easy decision to walk away from 2 years of work but I felt it was the right thing to do.

Were you legally required to turn over all development of Aurora to JEG, even though they had only acquired Ikonboard? Was Aurora in plans before JEG acquired Ikonboard?

When I left Ikonboard, I returned all the Ikonboard, MyIkonboard and Aurora files as a matter of course. All of these files were being developed live on JEG's servers -- but as a gesture of goodwill, I returned the copies on my hard drive even though JEG did not have a direct legal claim to all future work that I developed. JEG acquired Ikonboard, not all code that I develop, however, as I was developing Aurora as Ikonboard PHP I felt that a clean break was in all of our best interests.