ProBoards
The main page of ProBoards Support, the official support forum.
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Type of site
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Remotely Hosted Forum |
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| Owner | Patrick Clinger |
| Created by | Patrick Clinger |
| Website | ProBoards.com |
| Alexa rank |
 1,886 (April 2014[update]) |
| Commercial | Yes |
| Registration | Required for creating forums; admin optional on individual forums. |
| Current status | v.5 |
ProBoards is a free, remotely hosted message board service that facilitates online discussions by allowing people to create their own online communities.
ProBoards was founded and is owned by Patrick Clinger, who wrote the ProBoards software.
The service hosts over 3,000,000 internet forums, which in turn have approximately 22,800,000 users worldwide. Currently, all ProBoards forums combined receive a total of over 600 million pageviews per month, making ProBoards one of the largest websites on the Internet.
Although, according to Techcrunch.com writer Anthony Ha those numbers have seemingly dropped. After interviewing founder/owner Patrick Clinger he (Clinger) stated "ProBoards has been used to create 3.5 million forums", he also stated about 1.2 million of them are still active. Thus, resulting in the occasional pageview.
Proboards is coded in Perl, a popular programming language with web developers. Previously, due to the remotely hosted nature of the service, users cannot modify the software directly as with some forum systems, but some customisation is possible through the use of CSS or JavaScript codes. With the release of v.5, however, ProBoards gives Administrators and certain other members access to the HTML and CSS of the webpage, for easier coding purposes.
The first day of business for ProBoards was January 1, 2000. At first, ProBoards originally used software created by the owner, Patrick Clinger. In late 2001, though, ProBoards switched to the YaBB system. At the same time, other changes to the service made it the first remotely hosted service to offer a subdomain with each forum (e.g. username.proboards[servernumber].com)
On June 11, 2002, ProBoards Version 2 was launched. This was coded by Clinger and was a rewrite of the entire software rather than improvements to the existing YaBB based setup. The main goals of this rewrite were to improve the overall speed of the software and add new features to keep the product competitive.
In February 2003, version 3 of the ProBoards software was released, again making improvements on the overall speed of the software and including over 30 new features.
ProBoards upgraded to version 4 of its software on April 30, 2005. This time, the upgrade added over 100 new features and enhancements to the service. Despite this, bugs of varying levels of severity still existed.
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