Version 0.1 / 8th December 2002
Beehive is an online forum/messageboard system with several powerful features:
Beehive has been written by several members of what is now called "Teh Forum", which can be found at http://www.tehforum.co.uk/forum/. A full list of credits appears in readme.txt.
Until mid-2002, we were a (reasonably) happy community on Delphi Forums - the ads were a bit irritating, but the forums themselves were powerful and had some nifty features. Then Delphi decided to change their charging policy, with the result that those users who didn't want to pay would have to use a rather crippled system.
At that point, we wondered if there were any credible alternatives to Delphi. After a lot of searching, we discovered that whilst some other forum software offers similar features, none offered quite what we were after. Particularly, we wanted forum software that was guaranteed to remain free - i.e. released under some type of open-source licence.
Various members of the forum had the required skills to develop our own solution (for some, software development and web design is their day job). So we did, and released it in a way that allows everyone to use it if they so desire. Beehive is the result.
Of course you can (provided your server has PHP and MySQL installed - see readme.txt for more details). Beehive is released under the GNU General Public License (a copy of which is included with this distribution). That means that you may freely use, modify, and even distribute it (we encourage you to do this). However, the conditions of the license require that any work derived from Beehive must be identified as such, and also be released under the GPL - i.e., you cannot sell Beehive commercially. For more information, read the text of the GPL in the file called COPYING.
Installing Beehive is covered in readme.txt. It's a fairly simple process, though it could be made simpler, and doubtless will be in later releases.
We've found that Beehive can easily handle our forum (http://www.tehforum.co.uk/), which is pretty high-traffic. The database layout is designed with efficiency in mind, and we leave it up to MySQL to do all the big data-crunching. In short, don't worry (provided you have enough disk space to store the database, you'll be fine).
Because PHP is the best language ever, ever. It's fast, very powerful, and free. You can run Beehive without paying any software costs (use Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP). The other, more practical reason is that we already knew it.
We're not really sure. The name Beehive was suggested since we wanted something that reflected the forum as a community (which, after all, is what a beehive is). If you're not that keen on bees, you can change the default style to one of the others, and the bees will be gone. The forum owner will still be called the "queen", but tough. No-one has to know that, anyway.
The community which is now Teh Forum has used many different types of online discussion media in its time. And this is our favourite. Sorry.
We welcome feedback, bug reports, and requests for extra features etc. The best place is to ask is probably the forum at http://beehiveforum.net/forum/. But bear in mind that we do this in our spare time.
Of course, since Beehive is open source, you could always implement whatever feature you want yourself. We'd love you to submit patches.