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Interview by: Allen Ayres Interviewee: Rick "Scream" Baker - UBBThreads Developer
UBBDev: Recently we caught up with Rick in between coding v5.5 and v6 with a bowling ball in one hand, golf clubs in the other, and php code on his mind. Rick gives us a little history behind the madness that is his personal obsession when not relaxing with his family or working his day job.
UBBDev: Welcome Rick To start off, can you tell us a little about your background and how you got started in web development?
Rick "Scream" Baker: Actually, I worked in a shakemill for about 10 years after high school. Started doing web page design on the side and luckily a high school friend of mine worked at a local ISP and after much begging/pleading he convinced the owners to hire me. This was about 6 years ago.
For the first year or two I was doing primarily static HTML development with some dynamic scripts sprinkled in here and there. After getting my feet wet I redid all of our internal apps and made them web-based to automate many of the daily routines of managing ISP users.
UBBDev: What kind of things do you like doing in your spare time? Any other hobbies not internet/computer related?
Rick: Because I spend so much time on the computer I try to spend my free time away from it. Golfing, bowling, working out and playing the XBox are my favorite hobbies.
UBBDev: How do you work development time in and around your day job and still manage to have a personal life and do all those fun activities?
Rick: With very little sleep. Basically my day job usually runs from about 8 AM to 5-6 PM. I'm up at 5 AM, workout for about an hour or two and then go to work. Spend an hour or two with the family and then work on UBBThreads until about midnight or so. From there it's basically rinse, lather, repeat.
Weekends are a little better. I'll usually put in about 8 hours or so on Saturday/Sunday working on UBBThreads and then just try to relax the rest of the time. Sneak in a round of golf here and there, bowl on Sunday nights with my wife, etc.
UBBDev: What defines a "successful" online community, in your view?
Rick: A successful community feels alive. Users get to know each other and visit on a routine basis. A good test to see if you have a successful community is to break it for a few hours. If, during that time, you receive a ton of email from people that can't get to your community then you know you're doing pretty good.
A lot of people judge their community success by the number of users they have. But it's really the content that makes the community. You can have a million users but if you have a bad signal to noise ratio then it's not that great. Nothing worse than going to a site and needing to read through 20 flames before you see something that actually addresses the original topic.
UBBDev: How do you feel threads can be a part of that?
Rick: A forum is probably one of the quickest and easiest ways to build a community. If you have the tools to manage your users/discussions and keep the community thriving then you are doing great. Threads gives you a lot these to make managing your community fairly easy.
UBBDev: Yes, it does... the addon scripts themselves add a lot of interactivity for non-forum pages. Can you give us some information on wwwthreads' history?
Rick: Well, let's see. It's about 5 years old now. I wrote the original version because we couldn't find anything to use for our ISP customers. Version 1 was a flatfile board that looked somewhat like WWWBoard. Version 2 was somewhat better as it used PERL's DBM files which made it somewhat more stable. Then I went on to some other projects.
About 3 years ago I decided to rewrite the whole thing on my own time and use a database. Spent a month or 2 working with msql when I realized it wasn't going to cut it and so I switched to mysql. Started to get some people visiting the development site and things just started to roll along.
UBBDev: Whoa! You have come a long ways Name your favorite moment in the development history of threads...
Rick: That would have to be when I decided to go commercial and not everyone jumped ship. That was a real turning point. I knew the software was decent, but was it good enough to survive in a commercial environment. Still have a copy of the very first order I received
UBBDev: Very cool, it would seem you have put a great deal of effort into the development. What are your central goals for developing UBBThreads now?
Rick: Not particularly in any order, that would be: Ease of use, stability, speed and feature-set. A big focus right now is optimizing all of the queries. As I'm working through all of the scripts for 6.0 I'm examining the queries and trying to cut down wherever possible. Here are a few examples:
First, on a typical search page with 25 results it normally did an average of 28 database queries to generate the page. This has been reduced to 4.
Threaded mode is another big one. If you had a thread with say 30 replies, this would end up generating about 80 database queries to create the page. This has been reduced to about 16.
Same with postlist in expanded mode. This one could really add up. Before the changes a typical page might generate 160 queries afterwards this was dropped to 29.
UBBDev: Major improvements Are there any other sneak-peeks you can give us into the future of threads? What should users be most excited about?
Rick: To answer both of those. Templates. Templates can be a pain for several reasons. First you might end up having a lot of templates to generate one page due to code loops and things of that nature. Second they can slow things down a bit because normally you have to loop through the template and run a regular expression on it to replace all of the variables.
I think I've come up with a system that I think everyone will enjoy working with and will be speedy as well. First, the number of templates required for a page is fairly minimal. You've got a header and navigation template first, then the actual page template and then the footer template. Secondly there are no regular expressions used. It's a normal PHP file that is included but when you edit it through the admin editor it's just HTML. The few PHP tags that are used are commented with HTML style comments so they won't interfere when editing the template in an HTML editor. It's a bit hard to explain but once everyone sees it I think they will be pleased.
Oh, and all HTML in the front end will be XHTML 1.0 compliant
UBBDev: Can't wait for v6 to get here Thank you for your time and for letting us get to know a little more of the "man behind the code".
To start off, can you tell us a little about your background and how you got started in web development?
Are there any other sneak-peeks you can give us into the future of threads? What should users be most excited about?
Thank you for your time and for letting us get to know a little more of the "man behind the code".
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