The phpBB Team was recently approached by Microsoft and asked to develop a bulletin board system for their .NET platform. This board will power their MSDN Social network and will be released to the community under a freeware license for smaller boards, with commercial licensing options available for larger communities.

With Microsoft's financial backing, phpBB is proud to announce that development focus is switching to this project, and the phpBB Group is being renamed to ASPbb Incorporated.

phpBB 3.0.7 has already been ported to ASP.NET and phpBB.com has actually been using it for the past several hours (urls are being rewritten to .php files to maintain bookmarks and search engine ranking). Additionally, we are working with web hosts to automatically convert phpBB3 boards to ASPbb 1.0 within the next several days. Boards with greater than 30 users or 100 topics will have ASPbb's licensing fees added to their hosting bill with their next payment. Those refusing this update will be fined, forcefully converted to ASPbb, and sent an angry letter by our law firm of Dewey, Cheetam, and Howe. We will pursue all such cases to the fullest extent of the Internet Regulatory Code 16.8.16.b.b.

As part of the licensing agreement, MOD and Style authors will need to register for an alteration license from Microsoft. A registration form and payment collection page will be available shortly. These styles and modifications will be sent through a thorough approval process, and we anticipate their availability in the ASPbb store approximately six months after submission.

These changes are intended to help stimulate the ASPbb (formerly phpBB) Community. We believe ASP.NET to be the premier web development platform for the future, and hope the community will help during this transition period.

Thank you,
The ASPbb Team