History
SMF was created to replace the forum software YaBB SE, which at the time was gaining a bad reputation because of problems with its Perl-based ancestor software YaBB. At the time, YaBB was attributed to causing resource allocation problems on many systems. YaBB SE was written as a rough PHP port of YaBB, and had many of the same resource and security problems of the older YaBB versions. Joseph Fung and Jeff Lewis of Lewis Media Inc., the owners of YaBB SE and the original owners of SMF, made the decision to convert to a new brand and name.
SMF started as a small project by username "" (one of the YaBB SE developers) and its main intent was to add more advanced templating to YaBB SE. The project then slowly grew to address common feature requests, efficiency problems, and security concerns. A rehaul of YaBB SE had been in development for several years, but was superseded by this then competing project. Popular interest in the new YaBB SE fork sparked a complete rewrite of the code, with security and performance in mind. This eventually became today's Simple Machines Forum. The first SMF release was SMF 1.0 Beta 1a, released on 30 September 2003 to Charter Members only.
On the 23 October 2006, Simple Machines LLC was registered in the state of Arizona, and the transfer of copyrights from Lewis Media to Simple Machines LLC was completed on the 24 November 2006 during a three-day retreat in Tucson, AZ. This was done for the " the team’s commitment to continuously providing free software, without the perceived risks of corporate influence".
Simple Machines won forum-software.org's best free forum software award of 2009.
On the 24th of September 2010, the Simple Machines team announced the dissolving of the Simple Machines LLC and all assets moved to the new NPO (Simple Machines) set up for the project.
Read more about this topic: Simple Machines Forum
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