The name reflects the creator's initial goal of providing a website that could be operated by novice programmers and requires minimal server resources.

[2] Simple Machines Forum is an open-source discussion board software project of volunteers participating in various operating functions including development, customization, documentation, localization/translation, user support, and marketing.

Liroy van Hoewijk is president and CEO of the organization; Aleksi Kilpinen is the current project manager of SMF.

Lewis and Fung did a complete rewrite of the code[7] and changed the brand name to Simple Machines Forum (SMF).

[8][10][11] On October 23, 2006, the Simple Machines Forum project was split off from Lewis Media for the purpose of "[solidification of] the team’s commitment to continuously providing free software, without the perceived risks of corporate influence".

The use of PHP, MySQL and the fact that SMF is freeware, helped spawn the creation of a large and relatively active volunteer development community.

[1] SMF is commonly deployed on basic web hosting packages, usually Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP (LAMP) compliant servers.

Installations on VPS or dedicated servers are usually needed for sites with a large number of concurrent users online at the same time.

SMF itself has virtually no limit of traffic it can process, however: the more users online, the more powerful hardware it will require in order to function.

Many modifications, or "mods" as they are usually called, have been created and distributed free of charge, including an arcade, Help desk, profile additions, gallery, spam filter, various SEO features, and many more.