This is the third incarnation of the Somersoft forums.
Summary:
The first was in August 1999, a hand coded forum written by Ian Somers and hosted on their website. Eventually the traffic grew enough that a new forum solution needed to be found.
The second was a hosted forum service from WebCentral called "WebBoard", which ran from March 2001 to October 2002. By the time we reached 25,000 posts on the forum, this forum software started to have difficulties, it became exceedingly slow and was often offline.
This current version using vBulletin forum software and hosted on the somersoft.com domain has been running since September 2002. We did manage to migrate most of the original forum and the WebBoard forum content to this new site, you can see it in the archives forums.