PunBB

PunBB (PunBulletinBoard) is a discussion forum software written in PHP, released under the GNU General Public License. This software places a strong emphasis on minimalism, speed, and efficiency, making it a viable alternative for those seeking a lightweight solution for hosting an online community.

History
PunBB was founded by Rickard Andersson as a personal project to create an alternative to either over-featured or too-graphic discussion boards. In August 2003, version 1.0 was released under the GNU General Public License.

PunBB was originally known simply as Pun because "a pun is a play on words and that's basically what happens on a bulletin board". The BB addition stands for the bulletin board. PunBB is available in many languages, including Spanish, Russian, Italian, and many other languages. Languages are created by contributors to the project, languages are not officially made by PunBB. However, they are supported.

In 2007 the project's code and rights were sold to Informer Technologies, Inc. The company did not institute any major changes at first other than removing the ability to donate money to the project. In April 2008, Rickard Andersson decided to leave the project for personal reasons. As a result, some developers followed suit and initiated the development of their fork, known as FluxBB. A few days later the company moved the project from the punbb.org domain to its projects' umbrella domain at punbb.informer.com.

Several open-source and commercial project discussion boards use PunBB. Until September 2011, Facebook's Developers were using PunBB to power the Facebook Developer's Forum, where users participated in discussions and could submit bug reports.

FluxBB
FluxBB is a fork of PunBB created by its developers after Andersson left the project in April 2008. The developers felt that forking was necessary to maintain control over the development process without the influence of commercial interests. As with PunBB, it was released under the GNU General Public License. In July 2008, FluxBB was announced as a finalist in SourceForge.net's 2008 Community Choice Awards in the "Best New Project" category.

Originally a continuation of PunBB's 1.3 branch, it was announced in January 2009 that the then-current 1.3 branch would be discontinued and that FluxBB 1.4 would revert to being based on the 1.2 codebase. For FluxBB 1.4, several features were backported from 1.3, including UTF-8 support, a new default theme, and the ability to split and merge posts. The extension system, however, was not included. FluxBB 1.5 was released in May 2012.

In July 2012 it was announced that FluxBB 2.0, the next major version of the software, would be based on the Laravel web framework, with existing work ported to the new framework.

In 2015, FluxBB's lead developer Franz announced they would merge the project with another forum software named Flarum alongside esoTalk lead developer Toby Zerner. This development caused controversy within the FluxBB community.