Community | Forum Insider: Community | Forum Insider -> Interview with Henry Sudhof - phpBB Developer

Keeping up the pace with our run of forum developer interviews, it's time to throw another forum software into the mix. Here's our interview with phpBB developer, Henry Sudhof:

Can you tell us a little about yourself, and what you're interested in outside work?

Well, the funny thing here is that programming phpBB is one of my interests outside work. But oh well, I am a programmer specialized in web application security. Currently, I am wrapping up the work on my PhD about formal methods and type safety. That aside, I am working on various web projects and am in the warm-up phase for writing a book.

Privately, I enjoy reading, cycling, rowing and many more things.

How did you first get involved with forum software?

I inherited a small forum hosted on some free forum plan. To get out of there, I had to write a spider and a converter, which made me intimately familiar with the inner workings of phpBB.

What in particular interests you about forum software?

I love the concept of having people communicate, forming communities. Even more, I am intrigued by the various security and scalability issues that are particularly present in forums -- the domain is quite different from blogs, as users are generally allowed far more ways of interacting with the software.

What would you say is the most commonly requested feature by your users in 2009? and what do you expect it might be in 2010?

Feature requests are frequent and affect almost all areas evenly. I am a bit skeptical about the feature-centric approach. Features can mean bloat, it is important to maintain a feature set that is compatible with the developers and the community. This also entails relying on the MOD community for the more specialized features. The thing is, features usually mean an increase in code size, which is a problem for maintainability - adding the kitchen sink makes it very hard to move on.
For me, the important factors are: security, stability, scalability. A nice, tableless default style is great too.

What feature or features added in your most recent release are you most excited by?

We added a lot of things to make matters harder for spammers. This includes the ability to restrict the feature set for new users and a flexible API for anti-bot plugins. I can't wait for the outside-the-box plugins the community is almost guaranteed to come up with.

Can you tell us about any upcoming features? Anything you think will particularly interest your users?

Personally, I think that forum software will move in the direction of popular CMS's, insofar as that we'll move to a smaller core with a stable API - frameworks, if you want to call it that. For phpBB in particular, we will announce phpBB 3.1 shortly, which will offer a modernized feature set. Even more importantly, phpBB4 has just entered its RFC phase - everybody is invited to help us shape that future version.

Who do you consider to be your biggest competitors at the moment? and is there anything they are doing at the moment that interests you?

Competitors is a very strong word, I prefer to think of niches. phpBB fills the niche for boards with fully-fledged feature set, offered under an open and free license. It is certainly the right choice for people interested in a secure, scaling board published under an open source license. But tastes differ - I strongly believe that any prospective board administrator should pick the solution best fitting her/his needs.

As to the real competition: it is an obvious development that many communities use social networks these days, when two years ago they would have used a forum. Especially for the smaller and non-profit part of the userbase, social networks offer a lot.

If you could go back change one thing about forum software before it became the de-facto standard, what would it be?

Less monolithic code.


Thank you to Henry for taking the time to participate. It's great to hear from someone from the free forum software side of the fence, and even better to know that a professional security expert is helping push phpBB forward.

Invitations are still open for other forum software developers, or forum administrators, to participate in interviews for the site. Please get in touch here, on Twitter or by email to dan@foruminsider.com if you're interested.