In early 2000, Zef Hemel needed a bulletin board script. Searching for one, the best he found were UBB (Ultimate Bulletin Board) at $199, vBulletin for a price, UB (UltraBoard) 1.62 which was free, and the free BoardPower. He really wanted a threaded, usenet-style bulletin board with smilies and other markup. He chose to use the now discontinued UB. However, Zef soon needed more features because he couldn't find a board that functioned like he wanted. As an experienced webmaster, Zef knew there was only one solution: to write his own BBS script!

At first he decided to make a threaded board, so he expanded the existing RobBoard. He then realized why threaded boards were losing popularity - you have to click on each individual message to read it! He soon completely rewrote YaBB into a linear board, as it is now. He also wanted to make it a commercial script, but then realized this wouldn't be a solution for the poor webmaster community, including himself. "OK," he thought, "We'll make it open source then." YaBB's first version was released on the US Independence Day, July 4, 2000.

Soon Zef found Andy Tomaka, an experienced UBB "hacker", Remake, an UltraBoard "hacker," and Matt Mecham, the creator of iB ( Ikonboard) and now the CEO of Invision Power Services. YaBB became the first free AND open-source system. Zef added YaBB to the CGI-Resource Index and some other major CGI indexes, where it remains today as the #1 Perl program.

The popularity slowly grew and grew, and some high traffic sites started to use YaBB. This is when the developers discovered the first release was by far not ready to be used on high traffic sites. Together, with a new developer, Peter Crouch, the entire script was rewritten. Some others joined the crew, including Jeff "the Finance Man" Lewis and Joseph "Comesutra" Fung, now developers of Simple Machines Forum (formerly YaBB SE). It took a few weeks before the new version was released. A little after Jeff joined Zef's side, Christian Land joined the development team to improve YaBB's stability and features.

In early September of 2000, Corey Chapman (a.ka. Ze0|ntrus or Crackers8), at the time the leader of an underground group, volunteered his "modded" code as the base for YaBB 1 Final. It had a lot of bug fixes and new features. Thus was born YaBB 1 Final. After this release, he took on his own project, originally known as YaBB 1 - Ze0's Release, to fix the very buggy YaBB 1 Final. A separate website was established, and the project grew in popularity. The YaBB team wanted to move onto YaBB 2, but Corey disagreed. Eventually, Corey joined the development team, recruited the great NewsPro "hacker," Darya Misse, and gained acceptance for the project as an official release. This version became YaBB 1 Gold.

By this time, Zef had moved onto other projects such as Key Bulletin. His legacy would live on forever. Jeff Lewis was named the new Project Leader of YaBB. He helped YaBB grow throughout the YaBB 1 Gold phases. Corey and Jeff started what was known as the "Xnull Network," a web business and network of web resource sites, staffed by members of the underground group. Unfortunately, YaBB lost its yabb.org domain due to registrar mistakes, and obscene material was placed on the domain. YaBB was moved to a subdomain of Xnull and completely sponsored by the company. Jeff eventually decided to move other directions with things and left the team. He helped Joseph Fung start a php-clone of YaBB named YaBB SE (for "Splinter Edition"). Corey was named the next successor of the YaBB Project Leader position. Eventually the project was moved to the current yabbforum.com and Xnull changed it's name to XIMinc. YaBB then progressed even further with the addition of XIMinc's 2 other staff members at the time, Tim Ceuppens and Jeffrey Gelens, as well as Juvenall Wilson from BetaCube.

In January 2003, Juvenall, along with mod developer, Shoeb Omar, began a rewrite of the existing code base to address several known speed, load, and display issues with YaBB 1. Within six months, developer Ron A.J. Hartendorp and the rest of the team had taken a major roll in the development. It wasn't long before what was to be a major service pack became so impressive, the team decided it would be the next major release, YaBB 2. New developers Carsten Dalgaard and Andrew Aitken eventually took the reigns of the project and brought it to the next level. The original YaBB 2 rewrite project, which had been restarted several times, has been pushed to become the YaBB 3 line.

While UBB has grown into a $300 product, and several other fancy Perl and PHP boards have sprung up (like Ikonboard, BlazeBoard, Invision Board, phpBB, eBlah, and SMF), YaBB has continued to develop as completely open source, increasing it's popularity and stability. Although you may see Zef online at the YaBB Community from time to time to check in, he no longer participates in the project. YaBB has grown into one of the favorite forum systems for people to "hack" and create ports to their own liking!