FluxBB started out as a fork from a previous forum software that the main developers created called PunBB. The story is as follows:

PunBB is a fast and lightweight PHP powered discussion board. It is released under the GNU Public License. Its primary goal is to be a faster, smaller and less graphic alternative to otherwise excellent discussion boards such as phpBB, Invision Power Board or vBulletin. PunBB has fewer features than many other discussion boards, but is generally faster and outputs smaller pages.

The father of PunBB, Rickard Andersson, conceived it for a personal project as an alternative to over-featured or too graphic discussion boards.

PunBB (or just Pun as it was called back then) was designed as a package that

• Would be fast.
• Would have a simple layout and design.
• Would be easy to administrate and moderate.
• Wouldn’t output huge, non-valid, HTML pages.
• Would have source code you could read and understand.

PunBB 1.0 reached what was considered a stable state on 2003-08-07.

A further remarkable step forward was the release of PunBB 1.2 in January of 2005, which could boast improved speed and security as well as the new markup. After that, there weren’t any considerable changes to the project for a long time (only security vulnerabilities were fixed). The reason for that was that developing PunBB became more of a hobby than a professional activity for Rickard and he couldn’t spend much time on it. However, he strived to bring PunBB up to version 1.3. Realizing that it would take too much time and effort to continue steady growth without any support, Rickard decided to begin accepting donations for the project in September of 2005. Financial support alone was not enough, and in November of 2006 some developers were invited by Rickard into the project in an official manner. They were those who had been working on PunBB since its infancy and knew the ins and outs of the project better than anyone else. So, PunBB 1.3 started to be developed more actively.

In the summer of 2007, the rights to PunBB were sold to Informer Technologies, who were interested in supporting the project financially. This didn’t really influence anything but for the fact that donations were no longer accepted. The forum’s engine released under the GPL stayed open source and continued to be available to everyone. Moreover, the PunBB development team remained the same and retained the priorities and aims that Rickard had put at the very beginning.

Now FluxBB is releasing different, easier and more advanced versions of FluxBB.