Things not looking good for UBB

Those who are using the Ultimate Bulletin Board forum script from Infopop may have some tough times ahead, especially if you have a high number of simultaneous users and a high number of forum pages being accessed daily.

It seems that some webhosts have started formally disallowing UBB and YaBB forums from their shared servers. They cited that intense resource usage was the main reason for this decision. With the flat file architecture of UBB, YaBB and other similar scripts (which seem to utilize more server resources), they have deemed it necessary to discourage their clients from using these scripts.

And some have even gone as far as recommending forum scripts that utilize databases instead of flat files. VenturesOnline.Com, for example, has even suggested in their CGI abuse page that their clients should use vBulletin or phpBB as alternatives to UBB and YaBB. OTS.Net's own host is also actually considering this move, and I kinda agree with them.

Infopop is a little mum about the subject, and it seems everytime this particular topic is brought up at their support forums, or even at UBBDEV (their script-hacking community), it gets deleted! Granted Infopop has been known for deleting posts from their forums if it's anything detrimental or negative about UBB, but this is still a valid issue that needed to be addressed. Talk about being close-minded, eh?

Infopop has "implied" that the upcoming version 6.1 of their UBB software is going to be less resource-intensive and "better" ... but the point still remains that they have obviously made a product they cannot provide support for on the first sign of trouble.

This may border on being a rant, but I can relate from experience how many times people have to "upgrade" and "patch" their UBB software every frickin week just to incorporate the "fixes". Even though they are on the pursuit of continually "improving" their product, it's a bit absurd to issue minute updates at such a frequency that people were already four versions behind in a span of six weeks!

Anyway, going back to the topic, this is just a friendly warning to all UBB users to re-think and re-analyze their community software solutions. I'm not telling people to use vBulletin - I'm just telling you what the current situation is in the community software arena

I heard this also. Over at ikonboard.com, who was recentaly hosted by venture's online (moved because of bandwidth problem). And I think that josh, a memeber thier, says that ikonboard will still be allowed on thier servers. Becuase of the upcomeing release of IBv3 that uses MySQL databse. Which allows the script to run faster and use less resources.

This may be the final straw - most of the big sites have moved to vB and rightfully so. Cheaper, easier on the server, more and better features, etc. I think Infopop will do away with their small UBB product and only develop OpenTopic, their "big" package for large sites and corporations. I'm a big vB mark and love watching this all unfold!

Tsk, Tsk. Clasic symptom of releasing a product before it's done.