There’s an undeniable similarity in style between InfoPop’s UBB and Jelsoft’s vB; there are a number of other BBs out there too that are very similar.
Is this convergent evolution? form following function? Plagiarism/flattery? Evidence of common ancestry?
How similar is the actual code and database structure of, say, vB and UBB? - anyone?
I’ve never looked at the code for these specific applications so I’m not the most qualified to respond, but I hate to see this slip to the third page with no reply…
Bulletin boards are like most software: there’s only so many ways to do the same thing, so they all tend to look alike. In the case of BBs, you have a few design decisions like whether to display top-level messages only or fully-threaded links to all responses. Over the years, people have gotten used to using a certain interface, and most of the BBs have moved toward that. Back in the day when Usenet was king and web-based BBs were a novelty, most sites adopted a Usenet-like interface with threaded design. This design has changed as sites were modified to take advantage of the web interface.
In many cases, code probably is shared. Many large BB codes are open source (e.g. Slash, created by slashdot.org and Scoop from kuro5hin.org). Commercial systems may or may not borrow code from these sources (or vice versa) but they certainly share an “arms race” development mentality where each system keeps up with the others on a feature-by-feature basis. If you’re going to implement things like quoting in replies, email notification, etc. then all the systems are going to end up looking alike regardless of their heritage.
The same is true of the database structure. If you were creating a new BB, you might look at some of the open source systems to see how they structured their data, but even if you start from scratch you’re likely to end up with a similar design. Unless you’re really stupid or really smart, you’ll probably end up making the same kind of design decisions others have made when it comes to basic architecture.
I think the arms race analogy might be more useful than plagiarism or common ancestry. You see this pretty much everywhere in software. Most word processors look alike (except for emacs, 'nuff said about that) because they tend to implement the same functionality. The same could be said about pretty much any application. The same could even be said about most non-software products. Most toasters look alike. Same with hammers, pens, etc. You see true innovation now and then, like a radically new corkscrew design, but in most cases the new products are variations on a theme. In most designs, this is a good thing. Radically new interfaces require users to learn rather than just use. How many new dopers would stick around if they had an enormous learning curve to figure out the board’s interface instead of seeing something that looked pretty much like every other board they’d seen? Even if the different interface was better/faster/stronger, the very fact that it was different would weed out a lot of users.
UBB was one of the first of this genre and was written in Perl. The data wasn’t stored in a database, just in files, which meant it had issues with scaling. Perl itself has some issues with scaling as well. vBulletin was written in response to these issues. It’s pretty much a straight copy of the interface, but with the guts rewritten in PHP and backed by a database. I imagine similar reasons for the creation of any other clones out there.
I’m just so proud of my new BB that I have to mention phpBB – http://www.phpbb.org[/url – an open-source, multi-database (I/my-host use mySQL), php-based BB.
And I chose it for being very similar to the good old vBulletin BB that The Straight Dope uses! Well, that an free.