after all that time, must have been sad to part with it
a lot of people think perl is dead too but it's nowhere near dead, just that some lazy or ignorant hosts don't want to do the right thing and install the modules needed, i have no problem with any of my 20+ years old perl scripts

i tried phpbb but was getting too much attack traffic and it's too bloated for me, i like simple and clean

i will continue with yabb, i would have fully supported these guys but it seems no one is interested whatsoever, even after i fixed all the dead links, sad

i do need help though so hopefully people with skills will come along, only so much i can do

sad that even dondello (sorry don't know first name) has no time for it, she did well with it

btw all my websites run only perl scripts, no php, phpbb was really a trial and i didn't like it, oh sorry i do have some php/mysql sadly > mailwatch, neccessary for mailscanner
 

nixnut wrote on Jul 23^rd, 2026 at 6:13pm:

The SMF board that I tested out isn't available to the public. Besides, I'm the only person on it. A far better SMF board to view is the one that George Maschke converted from YaBB, which I linked below.

https://antipolygraph.org/forum/

He published a great article about this titled, "How to Convert a Message Board from YaBB 2.6.x to Simple Machines Forum 2.1.7" at the following address:

https://georgemaschke.net/2026/05/04/how-to-convert-a-message-board-from-yabb-2-...

After testing both SMF, and phpBB, I preferred the latter forum software (https://www.phpbb.com/).

My 1st preference would have been YaBB. For almost 22 years of operation (February 20, 2002 - December 11, 2023), YaBB Gold 1.4 and then YaBB 2.4  worked pretty flawlessly for my needs.

The main reason I installed YaBB Gold 1.4 in 2002 was because it was the leading free forum software package at that time. However, when YaBB's development team broke apart, and subsequently joined the SMF project after shutting down further development of YaBB SE, which they originally developed (a fork of YaBB 1.0 that shut down in March 2004), I should have converted my YaBB 2.4 forum with the converter they developed to switch over to SMF.

Instead, I continued using YaBB 2.4 until December 11, 2023. Of course, by then, forums had been out of favor for quite a while given the explosive growth of social media, so when YaBB finally stopped working after a Perl update, I made the decision to move on from forums altogether.

just took another look, probably the yabb logo
i'll check out adding your code to it
cheers

i have the viewport tag in it
so i will need to find what's making it stay wide then
 

what's the link to your smf board bill?

nixnut wrote on Jul 23^rd, 2026 at 5:44pm:


To be clear, the viewport tag literally makes the text bigger on cells phones. Without it, the text can look very, very small depending on how the HTML5 page is coded.

The fact remains, phpBB and SMF forums have figured it out. So far, YaBB hasn't.

As for having to scroll sideways, that only happens when there's bad HTML5 coding, which of course includes frames, etc., that forums have, and which need to be properly coded.

Whenever I edit a HTML5 page, and I see that scrolling is needed, I go to the part of page where the problem exists by scrolling down until I see what's not fully on the screen.

I do this on my laptop by resizing the page to mimic a cell phone, which makes any errors that I made easy to find.

Bill Myers wrote on Jul 23^rd, 2026 at 5:38pm:


so it's better to have it fit the screen even if it is small?
the problem i have with that is you have to zoom in and scroll sideways anyway 

Actually, the viewport tag makes smaller screens relatively easy to read. That's the purpose of it, which is why it's there.

I edit HTML5 pages all the time, and I make sure that the viewport tag is included so that people can easily read those pages on cell phones.

Besides, zooming in on a cell phone to get a better look can also be done. Or a pair of reading glasses is great as well. 

before i added the viewport tag the forum fitted the screen but was too small to read, at least now you can read it but yeah having to scroll sideways is a problem, i will have to figure out how to change both issues
thank you for mentioning that

nixnut wrote on Jul 23^rd, 2026 at 4:37pm:

If you look at your forum on an iPhone, or any YaBB forum including this one, you'll see that your YaBB forum doesn't fit onto the screen. The right side of your forum can't be seen unless you scroll to the right to see what's missing. But then you can't see what's on the left side of your forum, so you have to scroll to the left.

On phpBB or SMF forums, they fit the screen, and are therefore "mobile responsive".

If you don't already know, mobile devices account for most of the traffic on the Internet, which has been the case for many years now. As such, at the very least, HTML5 language has to account for that, and provide coding to make pages mobile friendly.

Between the <head> and the </head> tags, for instance, you would see the following:

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">

And on images, you would see the following to fit the screen:

<img src="https://yabbforumsoftware.com/yabbfiles/Templates/Forum/default/yabblogo_27.png" style="height:auto; max-width:100%; border:none; display:block;" alt="forum photo">

Beyond proper HTML5 coding, I'm guessing that forum software would need other tweaks as well. But again, however phpBB and SMF forum software does it, their forums are mobile friendly. 

what do you mean by mobile responsive george?
the look of it on a small screen or something else?

@drivetimenz

I wish you all success in resurrecting YaBB. While I am not a programmer, based on my experience vibe coding a working converter for YaBB to SMF, I expect that AI tools like Anthropic's Claude could be very helpful in improving YaBB.

One missing feature of YaBB that I think will be important to address is mobile responsiveness. Lack of it in YaBB was a key reason why I switched to SMF.

since no one here seems to care about yabb and it's many bugs i have decided to resurrect it from it's grave and fix it, if anyone wants to help i'm all ears

to those who may complain about that, think before you speak, the last commit was a long time ago and the public cannot be impressed with what's on offer, and this forum is dead and buggy

https://github.com/nixnutnz/yabb-2.6-legacy

if it's to be kept alive this forum needs more activity from members so search bots crawl new posts, fix the things that don't work on here, fix/kill dead links on here and in the downloadable package, shocking that the forum url's throughout the entire script are obsolete, who wants something that is obviously neglected

i'll still be using it way into the future i'm 68 but got many years of yabb ahead
i still use scripts that me and others have written over 20 years ago, just gotta make little changes and the new robots help with that, make life a bit easier

let us know when/if this site (sadly) goes down and you take over pyragony54

@ George Maschke

It’s not about the switch itself; the issue is that the links from YaBB branch out to multiple galleries. I would have to correct thousands of links to point to a single gallery using an SQL database. The effort involved would be enormous and simply not feasible. That said, your idea is perfect. I’m currently using YaBB 2.6.12, and it works without major issues, so why change it? It’s not going to get any better than this anyway. I had already prepared the German translation for version 2.7, but I’ll adapt it for 2.6.12 as soon as I have the time. If Dandello wants to shut the site down, I’d be happy to keep it running. I haven’t been idle all this time; I’ve actually found someone capable of continuing YaBB’s development. However, version 2.7 will be the final one. We’re all too old for further development. Version 2.7 actually works fine; it’s just the conversion process that’s causing trouble. That might be due to the mods, though—I still need to test that. We’ll see what time brings. YaBB was good, and it still is today.