How did vBulletin/phpBB came to dominate the forum space in the English internet? To me, that seem like the source of a lot of problems for the forum culture and centralization into Reddit.
I used to run a few forums. Did some work for SMF 1.x back in the day too.
The thing that got vBulletin to succeed over UBB was themes and customizations/hooks.
The thing that made phpBB popular was it didn’t require a license like vBulletin.
Honorable mention is SMF. It replaced YaBB SE, was also free, but had an amazing mod system that didn’t require any manual file editing. And [Unknown] and his team did a great job on the database keeping it way more performant than phpBB was in the free space.
vBulletin Did a better job with security. PHPbb kept getting trashed by spammers but they were the primary tools at the time for self hosting. The ease of customization and the availability of skins made it a big selling point
The thing that got vBulletin to succeed over UBB was themes and customizations/hooks.
The thing that made phpBB popular was it didn’t require a license like vBulletin.
Honorable mention is SMF. It replaced YaBB SE, was also free, but had an amazing mod system that didn’t require any manual file editing. And [Unknown] and his team did a great job on the database keeping it way more performant than phpBB was in the free space.