Ikonboard
| Original author(s) | Matt Mecham |
|---|---|
| Developer(s) | Ikonboard |
| Initial release | September 1999 |
| Stable release |
3.1.5a
|
| Written in | Perl,php |
| Type | Discussion forum |
| License | Proprietary |
| Website | web |
Ikonboard was a free online forum or Bulletin Board System developed in Perl, php for use on MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, as well as flat file databases.
Ikonboard was originally developed by Matt Mecham, with the first release being Ikonboard 0.9 beta in September 1999. Originally much of the development took place on ikondiscussion.com (no longer active) until it suffered a server crash in March 2001 and it was initially thought everything might have been lost, including early work on version 3. As a result, they switched to Ikonboard.com, and by April 2001 the majority had been recovered.
In late April 2001 Ikonboard officially joined the Jarvis Network. At this point the latest available release was 2.1.8, with 3.0 in beta development. Matt Mecham sold Ikonboard to the Jarvis Entertainment Group for 50,000 shares of common stock in the publicly traded company, but said in a 2002 interview that he was unable to sell any of the shares. Soon after the release of 3.0 Mecham stopped developing Ikonboard, and departed to work on Invision Power Board. It is believed that Mecham had been paying for the domain during the time JEG owned Ikonboard. A year after his departure the DNS was altered to point to a holding page which redirected users to other software, during this time there was a legal dispute over the domain ownership.
After the departure of Matt Mecham, owner of JEG made a public request for individuals to staff and develop Ikonboard. As a result, a group of individuals emerged with separate development and support teams formed. Amongst the others to later emerge were Sly, Camil, Quasi and these along with the others were seen as the 'second set' of coders. On June 12, 2002 Ikonboard 3.1 was made with plans for PHP versions being announced at the same time. Initially the release represented small bug fixes to Mechams' 3.0.x series. In October 2003 chairman (and CEO) of JEG John Jarvis was forced out of JEG.
In February 2004 the company changed its name to Westlin Corporation. The departure of the second set of coders was fairly low profile, with many of them departing to work on their own project Infinite Core Technology.
In summer 2005 it emerged that former JEG chairman John Jarvis was taking legal action against Westlin, to regain ownership of Ikonboard amongst other things. During much of September that year the sites' server was down. Westlin declined to comment on the outage, prompting several staff members to quit. In October 2005, with Westlin still declining to talk to the support staff and developers, Ikonboard releases were no longer available for download.
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