Occassionally .htaccess gets corrupted (all versions of YaBB with Guardian saving bad actors to .htaccess)

Fixed, but I never got a notice there was a problem. 

Assuming Setup.pl  (Assuming version 2.6.12) worked AND IF you had no mods, you MAY be able to run the conversion tools to retrieve the old data from your old forum even though it doesn't work.

Dandello wrote on Apr 13^th, 2026 at 12:09pm:

I hope you'll reconsider shuttering your forums, but I can certainly empathize with that sentiment.

After almost 22 years of operation, the busiest, and most popular YaBB 2.4 forum that I operated finally stopped working in December 2023 due to a "500 Internal Server Error" that was generated when it could no longer run on a newly installed, and updated version of Perl. I had been expecting that to happen for some time.

The thing is, I really only created that particular forum to better manage updates to a popular site that's been operating since 1997. The public chat part of that YaBB 2.4 forum was simply a nice benefit that wasn't really needed, so I didn't move on to another forum software.

As I'm guessing you already know quite well, shortly after the release of YaBB 1.0, YaBB's development team broke apart to create a second program called YaBB SE 1, which was released on November 12, 2001.

Subsequently, though, the development and support team for YaBB SE was shut down in March 2004 with hundreds of communities in operation. That's when those YaBB developers joined the SMF project. A converter was also developed to convert YaBB SE to SMF (Simple Machines Forum).

Even though I decided not to move on to another forum software, as an experiment I installed both a SMF forum, and a phpBB forum. I prefer the phpBB forum software.

Like Derek more or less pointed out, Facebook and other social networking services effectively took the place of chat forums like Yabb a long time ago, which is why I decided not to utilize either a SMF or phpBB forum for any of the websites that I still operate. The forums I have online are simply experimental.

In any case, YaBB's development fascinated me, even to its end. Had I the knowledge that you have when it comes to coding, I very likely would have continued YaBB's development in some fashion as its original software (and mission) allowed, and encouraged.

After all, despite what's taken over when it comes to social media, I still believe that the structure of chat forums are superior to the kind of social media that's popular today.

What I'm reminded of is videotape technology of which VHS became the most popular media format for VCRs even though Betamax was superior. Of course, the last remaining VCR manufacturer ceased production in 2016, so even that battle in the history of technology is no longer relevant.

If you do make the final decision to shutter your forums, your legacy of keeping YaBB alive longer than it otherwise would have been kept alive is a legacy of which to be proud. Kudos to all that you did. 

I have an older message board. I am a car guy and not too computer savvy and everything was working fine until it wasn't as they say.

My Message Board location is:

Due to site rules I am unable to supply a link.

I was wondering if someone may be able to help.

Thank you,
Dave

Hi everyone.

I run this forum:

https://www.ozpolitic.com/forum/YaBB.pl

Starting a few days ago, it has been struggling to handle the bot load. The YaBB software is was saying 2500 "visitors" (I have the time period set to 15 minutes). This how now increased to nearly 4000. Rebooting worked briefly to bring the speed back up to normal, but I think the bots figured out that trick and are now back in higher numbers. That tricks does not work any more. The forum has 3,700 users, 117,000 topics and 3,400,000 posts.

I am on a namecheap VPS Quasar hosting plan with 6GB of RAM. Would a "better quality" host deal with this better? I have been with them for nearly two years without issue, so I suspect this is a new advance in bot maliciousness, not a host issue.

Namecheap contacted me and gave me some suggestions for robots.txt, but that made no difference. They made two other suggestions. One is that Perl is outdated and does not handle high traffic well because it "spawns a new perl interpretter for nearly every request." Does not mean that I would get around the problem by migrating to one of the php forums?

They also suggested cloudflare. How painful is that to set up, and will the free version or the $20/month version solve my problems? I don't think I could afford the next one up.

https://tripamillion.com/ProfileCSS.html

Hello

Anyone had issues self hosting with their  own hardware with vsftp and apache?

Anyone got any pointers or a favourite config?
cheers,
Tim

I am having a few issues with getting yabb installed. Hosting on an Opensuse powered laptop but using vsftp and apache.

I have double checked permissions but cant get past this error:

Can't locate -default-Other.template at (cgi dir) yabb2-Sources-Subs.pm line 3003.
(Had to replace slash with - to post the message)

Quote:




Permissions are correct, figured it was looking for (slash)default directory from document root so i copied what it was looking for into what should be a discoverable url. Still have no joy 

Obviously i have missed something. Any pointers?
Regards
Tim

The problem below was resolved by my Hosting folks --- it was a Perl issue that they fixed because it was not handled by the migration.

The URL Execution line is this:
https://www.poemtrain2.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/AdminIndex.pl?action=admincheck;usernam...

The error message below it is:
[an error occurred while processing this directive]

I just migrated my forum to KnownHost and they've been terrific. But the only big problem I'm having is the "Admin" function within my form produces the error above.  The techs at Knownhost are looking into it if it is a migration problem but I don't think so? Any ideas how to resolve this? Thanks in advance.