Interview with Zef Hemel

Zef Hemel was 16 when he founded YaBB in 2000. He collaborated with Jeff Lewis and Corey Chapman, and for a time Matt Mecham, to develop it using PERL. What's he been up to since then?

Read it here: Interview with Zef Hemel.

 

Wasn't yabb discontiuned because of poor coding?

I like vBulletin forum software myself, they seem to be on top of the security and delivering new code when necessary in a timely manner.

 

Doesn't look like it nop... Lastest stable version was released Nov 2004, but last weekly build was this past Monday.

 

I'll let Zef answer that one:

So, YaBB -> YaBB SE -> SMF. SMF (Simple Machines Forums) is alive and well, and in fact is fairly a popular free software alternative to, say, phpBB.

 

Well the folks at SMF had some things to say about the code in the past that told me to avoid that forum software.

Good for them, I guess. I still Like vBulletin.

 

My favorite part of the interview was the bioresonance discovery... I want to find out more about that for my allergies.

 

No need, he makes my point very clear in the interview. I like an honest guy.

 

I vote for vBulletin any day and cannot see anything getting close to its quality. Being visually pleasing, user friendly, easy to admin as well as well spiderable by the search engines. I'd love to see some other software give vb some serious competition, competition causes improvements. But so far it looks like vbulletin has a monopoly quality and performance wise.

 

I run VB and SMF. I like both.

 

I tried SMF and kinda liked it. If the need comes up for a free forum, I'd consider it first.

 

Stop being a peace-maker

 

I do what I can.. lol

 

I like peace. I, also, like war. I like them equally.

 

Guys, I hate to see improper information, so let me clear things up for you. By the way, I'm the YaBB Project Leader, Corey Chapman.

"Wasn't yabb discontiuned because of poor coding?"

No, YaBB was not discontinued. The project just started slacking off a bit for a few years, but it was always around and pumping out new versions. The coding in the original versions was not great, but I wouldn't call it poor. The total package functionality was good. We've improved upon the code with YaBB 2. While still not great, it will be much better in the upcoming YaBB 3, which is OOP.

"YaBB -> YaBB SE -> SMF"

Again, wrong. YaBB was ported by some past developers into PHP and named YaBB SE. Because they chose to keep the YaBB name, it caused problems for both projects, especially since they took all of YaBB functionality, templates, and even graphics. Although it still looks much like YaBB, they rewrote the code and now call it SMF.

YaBB 2 is the newest version, almost out of beta. It brings YaBB back up to snuff with the rest of the world. It improves performance greatly and adds a lot of needed features.

http://www.yabbforum.com