Some TUGBBS history, near as I can construct it (adapted and updated from a post from several years ago):
Unfortunately, I lost a lot of my records in a hard disk crash several years ago so I don't have a lot of good reference dates for the early stuff.
Brian Rogers' father Bill started TUG in 1993. I joined back when TUG only existed as a printed newsletter and the internet had not yet taken the world by storm. I'm not sure if this was before or after things got going on the old dial-up Prodigy system, which I never used. When we got our own first website, people submitted advice articles and resort reviews via email and/or online forms that then had to be transcoded into individual HTML pages by a handful of volunteers.
Laurence Chan was a very active early volunteer who helped Bill with lots of the early page writing. Laurence took a primitive available open source bulletin board script and massaged it into our first message board. I think I started helping Laurence out as co-moderator of the Hawaii section of the bbs and Hawaii review co-manager around 1995, taking these over completely in 1997.
Laurence put together a new version of his bbs several years later, as more advanced scripts became available. This was the "indented post" version some of you long-timers recall. Then at some point he convinced Bill Rogers to spring for commercial bulletin board software that was available by then, going with Universal Bulletin Board (UBB). I believe this was around 1999 or 2000. Laurence sort of faded away after that, leaving me the main bbs administrator. We were still running UBB in 2003 when the "no politics" policy went into effect, after a very painful contentious period that almost tore the entire TUG community apart and caused us to lose several active and valuable volunteers.
We became a victim of our own success as our UBB became hopelessly out of date and just could not handle the volume of messages we were generating. Messages and user records were stored as individual files taking up much too much then-expensive disk space, and exceeded UBB's ability to keep track of all those files, which resulted in a need to keep the board purged of older messages. This caused us to lose a lot of valuable history. We purchased vBulletin software in 2004 that efficiently stored its data in compact database files, but it took us (i.e. me) about a year to learn the system and get it customized to meet our needs. We spend several of those months trying to find ways to convert the existing UBB user information and existing posts into vBulletin, but finally threw in the towel and just went live with vBulletin software in June 2005. Everybody had to re-register as a new user. That's why you see so many people with June 2005 registration dates. Only a few volunteers who helped test the system before going live have registration dates a few months before this. Old messages could not be carried over and only a few that were deemed essential were manually copy/pasted from the old board to the new -- any of them that still exist are probably in the archive files.
We outgrew the shared server space we were renting almost immediately and moved the hosting of the bbs several times, attempting to find a host that could handle our high volume of traffic, bandwidth needs, and increasingly large database of posts. We still had to purge older messages once in a while until, in August 2006 we bit the bullet and went to our own dedicated server which runs nothing but TUG and we have not been forced to purge older posts since then. We're still using the same host, through several hardware updates.
Our heavy customization of vBulletin made it increasingly hard to update as new vB versions came out, and it too became hopelessly out of date. We transitioned to XenForo bulletin board software just before Thanksgiving 2016 and we're still there now. Fortunately, we didn't lose any user information or messages in this transition.
