Ikonboard was a freeware online forum or Bulletin Board System developed in Perl, PHP for use on MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, as well as flat file databases.
Originally much of the development took place on ikondiscussion.com (no longer active) until it suffered a server crash[1] in March 2001 and it was initially thought everything might have been lost, including early work on version 3.
A year after his departure the DNS was altered to point to a holding page which redirected users to other software,[6] 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.
[9] 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.
In October 2005, with Westlin still declining to talk to the support staff and developers, Ikonboard releases were no longer available for download.
On March 22, 2006, it was announced that the parent company Pitboss Entertainment no longer existed, and that all its assets (including Ikonboard) now came under 'Level 6 Studios', and subsequently related contact details were amended.
On September 10, 2006 development on this release was discontinued as the Ikonboard team departed to work on IkonForums 1.0.0,[12] their own independent project.
This change implied that John Jarvis was still the owner of at least the domain, which appeared to contradict announcements made by those managing the site.
While the actual code for the software continued to be written exclusively by Mecham, other members from the "Ikonboard community" assisted in providing things like images and documentation.
Since late December 2005 the download for the 2.2 development was removed from the site, and effectively discontinued as the team work on the 3.x series.
The most significant new additions in this release was Humain Readable Image (HRI) on registration which keeps malicious users from mass registering, and an update centre in the adminCP.
Then development on this release was restarted on February 10, 2006 by 'The Ikonboard Team', however they departed on September 10, 2006 taking their work with them to IkonForums.
From June 2007 to February 2010 myIkonboard has been unavailable, with the a 'server not found' error message appearing when attempting to connect to the site.
Once 'Project Mongoose' reached a release candidate stage the core functionality which included an advanced session-handler and template system, then owners (Jarvis Entertainment Group, Inc.) requested that the existing MyIkonboard service - which was based on the Perl-Based Ikonboard product and running on over a dozen Windows-based servers.
Ikonboard PHP was adapted to a multi-user system that allowed thousands of individual forums to be created and hosted through a completely PHP-based service and a converter was created to automate the process of transferring forums that were hosted on the old Perl-based MyIkonboard service.
The only involvement the Project Mongoose developers had with this product was building a rudimentary installer at the request of Jarvis Entertainment Group.)