Quote: "Wasn't the dark one an XMB forum?"
If there was a dark RGT then perhaps, but I've never used XMB here.
Code-wise it went like this:
UBB license. Perl version. Created static HTML files each time someone posted. Once we had a reasonable number of users the posts kept vanishing, the files would lock and basically it was one giant turd.
We moved to Phorum (www.phorum.org). I coded a UBB to Phorum convertor (which you can still download from the Phorum web site) to port over the users and posts. Phorum was superb. Fast and rock solid. Never missed a trick. This was the "grey/black" colour days.
Then with a new site launch we tried YaBBse. I wrote a Phorum to YaBBse convertor to port over all users and posts (quite some work). Sadly the piss poor YaBBse PHP code and SQL structure couldn't cope with the volume of users so we closed it down totally after less than a week and redirected people to RGT instead.
I spent the next six months or so learning everything there was to know about the insides of MySQL and table optimisations, indexing, caches, etc and released Apollo. For the sake of sanity, no old posts were kept, but user accounts were. I still actually have the old posts in a massive 1.2GB database ZIP file somewhere, would be amusing to merge them back into Apollo again at some stage, I know it could cope with it.
Apollo went through various internal updates, but nothing overly major. Moved to its own dedicated server earlier this year, will move to PHP5/MySQL4 with the next release some time in 2005.
Cheers,
Rich
"I am not young enough to know everything."
- Oscar Wilde