20 Years Ago, First Website Was Launched
Last Saturday, the 6th of August 2011, 20 years exactly have passed since the first website ever was launched. Many people, including the CERN, in Switzerland, where Internet was born, consider March 1989 the moment when the concept of Internet was introduced. However, it took a bit more than two years to implement everything and launch the first Web site of Internet: http://info.cern.ch.
The funny link with forums is that the Web protocol, that, at the beginning was simply HTTP + an embryo of HTML for formatting the content and define the concept of hyperlinks, is a quite young protocol, since it was invented in 1991, while the Usenet protocol, that we consider as the ancestor of Web Forums we know, was actually older, as it was created 12 years before the other.
It helps us reminding that, even if Internet is now more or less equals to Web for most people, Usenet protocol and communicating using forums on top of Usenet were one of the first brick of what Internet was at the beginning.
Just as a reminder, here are the official dates of creation of Internet protocols:
- 1969: Internet
- 1971: FTP
- 1971/1972: Email (POP)
- 1979: Newsgroups
- 1979: Usenet
- 1988: IRC
- 1991: Web
Surprisingly, even IRC is older than the Web protocol!
Read more »Do you like new Forum Software Reviews look?
Discover FSR with a New Look
I am proud to announce and release this new version of Forum Software Reviews, after 3 months of hard work to get it ready for today.
It includes many changes, that I could not be all listed here, but here are the main improvements:
- Forum Reviews are single page now. Most Internet connections are fast enough today for loading a small bunch of 10 Kb HTML content. Search are now easier in this page.
- Home page has now an inline forum comparator, perfect to quickly look and compare major features of each bulletin board.
- Screenshots Galleries are now really better in terms of ergonomy and ease of use.
- FSR should load faster, as either most images are in sprites or their count was simply reduced. (+ our recent server change)
- Improved ways to share links with your community... Including a Google +1 button on top of the page, so please be kind enough to +1 us if you like FSR.
- ... and many other changes, but I let you find them by yourself
I hope these changes will suit your need and are in the way of improving your experience in finding the best forum software for your community. By the way, if anything goes wrong, or if you see any bug, do not hesitate to report them to us.
Read more »Forum Press Review of August 2011
Here is an excerpt of recent news regarding forum software:
- phpBB supports the famous ColorizeIt service. It will now be really easy to test and customize your phpBB forum theme in few clicks.
- vBulletin 4.1.5 available for download. 4 days later, the first security patches have followed. Remember to regularly upgrade your forum version.
- Advanced Electron Forum goes Open Source. After some thoughts and the fact that contributors were more and more rare, the development team decided to switch to a more permissive license. Note that as it is custom, we do not know yet if it is compatible with the definition of the OSI.
- FreeForums introduces VIP Memberships, that provides additional features and accesses to community members paying $19.95/year for this. Forum owner gets 50% of this amount, the other part going to FreeForums hoster. A really good way to earn revenue as a forum community manager.
- UBB.threads 7.6 planned for 6/8 weeks. Finally, it seems it will be released soon, which is a really good news.
- FUDForum 3.0.3 RC1 is released. Among changes, you will probably notice the usage of HTML 5 templates, supports for DB2, MS-SQL and Firebird databases, and more and more new languages (>50).
Something else did not spot on our radar? Post it in the comments.
Edit: And a news from the past joined the list, as PunBB speaks Icelandic since 2003. My
apologizes...
FUDForum 3.0.2 Reviewed (again)
Again, an old review is updated! This time, it's for FUDForum review to be updated again.
FUDForum is definitely still in the race of pure forum software, that clearly want to demonstrate what a forum is in the spirit of most people. Have a look at the FUDForum Review to discover why!
We also decide to increase its score, reaching 8 out of 10!
Read more »