XMB was the first bulletin board package I developed with – way back in 2000. Things were great back then and so was XMB.
XMB is what inspired me to learn PHP and MySQL. It was one of the best open source/free forum packages back in its day and I was using it on a few sites. I began creating modifications for XMB, features which you’ll still find in the core package today and eventually moved on to be a part of the team. I met so many new people in the world of web development who taught me so much.
I bought some of the most important features XMB has to the system whilst I was developing code modifications and was on the development team. To name just a few,
- Email notification of new replies
- Pagination for the thread view
- Database stored template system
- “Code buttons” and clickable smilies
- Powerful banning and pruning features
In December 2001 Staff changed and the project was handed over to someone else and I stepped up to one of the lead development roles. From this point on, we released XMB versions 1.1, 1.2 and XMB 1.5. We were actively developing the next release of XMB 1.6.
Eventually the owner at the time then sold out, for some unspecified amount – of which we received nothing and were doing all the work (the owner did not develop the software but left it all to us). AventureMedia were the new owners of XMB and all of the existing developers including myself left the project to work on our spin-off, DevBB whilst we prepared early versions of MyBB for public release.
Now, AventureMedia did a bit of the work, but a lot of the development was done by people who volunteered for the project who had no affiliation with DevBB. AventureMedia turned XMB from a nice looking forum package to something horrible with a small fixed width layout and very small text.
AventureMedia didn’t stop there, they continued with the product and it eventually began to die out. They didn’t seem to be bringing anything new or innovative to the project and people seemed to be switching to other readily available solutions. AventureMedia began using XMB to exclusively promote their hosting company. The Announcements project was cluttered with “special offers” for web and email hosting and the site was littered with ads for AventureHost/AventureMedia.
In March this year, Richard announced that XMB was obtained by iEntry because AventureMedia no longer had time for the project. Finally, he admitted it. iEntry were announced as experts in the field of open source software. After the acquisition, a new plethora of advertising was plastered all over the XMB website and XMB forums for iEntry – general banner ads, nothing specific to their company.
2 months later, iEntry make their official acquisition announcement and state the future of XMB. They left their users in the dark for 2 months and during that two months they did what, nothing?
Jump forward to the present time and they’ve still done nothing with the project but have promised things will get underway soon but have done nothing but ensure the banner ads on the site are still running. Thankfully though, the community has started to catch on to this and aren’t happy that they’re being neglected. I can only hope for their sake that something is done soon.
