Hello all,

Some of you may have been wondering about the future of PunBB and the current development team following Rickard's announcement that he will not be actively involved with PunBB, at least for the time being. To cut to the chase, Neal (Smartys), Paul, Kristoffer (Jansson) and I have, with regret, decided that we are unable to continue our involvement with the development of PunBB.

We all became involved with PunBB largely because we shared Rickard's vision of the project. We were all happy to defer to his views on the future development of PunBB, especially since the project was his "baby," so to speak. Now that circumstances have changed with the inevitable shift of power within the project, we all feel that we need a degree of control over future development which is no longer possible. We all share a desire to develop software for the benefit of the community and ourselves, without commercial concerns influencing the final product. This is not a condemnation of PunBB's current owners: we simply feel that this change is necessary so that we as developers can maintain full control over the development process.

Despite this change, we are not abandoning the PunBB community. As we promised in the past, we have started our own fork of PunBB called FluxBB. We are continuing to develop the 1.3 branch of PunBB (re-branded as FluxBB) and have released a new beta version of it along with some extensions. We will also support and continue to provide security updates for the 1.2 branch of PunBB. As a part of that promise, we have released FluxBB 1.2.18, a stability update for 1.2 which fixes several known issues with 1.2.17. We hope that everyone can check out our site and that those who wish to do so will register and become a part of our new community.