EsoTalk

The logo of esoTalk.

The default installation of esoTalk beta.

esoTalk is a light-weight forum software written in the PHP scripting language. It is a free software, available under the GNU General Public License. esoTalk is the forum software on which esoBB is based.

Features

The software only contains major functions for discussion if used out of the box. It was designed to be extensible, and so additional features require plugins. Unlike other Internet forums, an esoTalk forum only includes one board and no category, and the only board is also the main page. It uses tags to categorize everything such as private conversations and drafts.

Based on Ajax, an esoTalk forum automatically updates while someone replying, and people can switch to what they want to read by scrolling the blue bar. Skins and plugins can be toggled through the administrator panel and a member's online status is determined by whether or not they are viewing a conversation. A unique feature of the software is that users can "star" conversations by one-clicking on a forum which will enable notifications and let them be more easily sorted.

History

esoTalk has been being developed since early 2008, but it was still in alpha stage until December 2009. esoTalk was originally developed and designed by the Australian brothers, Simon and Toby Zerner, and over a half part of original codes were written by Simon; however, Simon died in mid-2009, and his brother Toby continued the development.

The first public beta version of the software was known as esoTalk lime and included a number of unique features. It came with three skins: Plastic, Dystopia, and Glass. Many features that are now key to the software were written into plugins and so Lime had 5 plugins: Emoticons, Debug, Currently online, Captcha, and Attachments. Most notably, the Attachments plugin was found to possess security flaws in its file uploading routine, thus leading to its exclusion from later versions of the software. esoTalk lime was made available for download near or about May 1 2008.

The second stage of development was marked as esoTalk alpha which brought features such as avatars, language packs, and categorial improvements to posts. During the alpha stage, the plugin Currently online was ingrained into the base software while Attachments were dropped entirely.

esoTalk beta is marked as the last stage of development before the forum's code was entirely re-written by Toby. Beta 1 (1.0.0b1) contained a large number of changes and was perhaps the largest single update made to esoTalk prior to Gamma.

Death of Simon Zerner

On 18 July 2009, Toby made a thread entitled Simon, if you read this, give me a call which asked about Simon's whereabouts. Simon went missing for over a month until Toby found out about his passing on 10 August and made a conversation regarding Simon three days later.

Simon was not only my older brother; he was also a great friend who I spent much of my time with. I will miss him immensely, as I'm sure many others will, both family and friends, and people he knew on the Internet.
esoTalk was our project, and we were both very passionate about it and realized its potential. I'm going to continue work on esoTalk, and I'm going to make it as great as possible in light of this happening. Simon taught me everything I know about web development, and I'm honored to be able to use these skills to finish something he started.
—Toby, esoTalk Support Forum

The entire support forum was deleted during September 2009 as a result of the server having been owned by Simon. After Simon's death, Toby took a break from working on esoTalk. The pace of development became notably sluggish after this period until Gamma, however esoTalk continued to receive another beta release (1.0.0b2) and some progress towards a subsequent one prior to the rewrite. Beta 2 was released on 10 December.

esoTalk beta 3

The final beta release is marked by continual delays and progress updates however never came to fruition. Notable changes made in the experimental release distributed to users include the addition of an administration interface alongside changes to the plugin framework that replaced hooked functions with "event handlers."

esoTalk gamma

esoTalk gamma or "version 2" of esoTalk was first publicized by Toby on 15 June 2010 in which he discussed rethinking every part of the software. This ultimately lead to a complete re-write of the forum software that took over a year and lead to a decline of outside interest in the project. Version 2 was made public on the support forum (the forum itself was redirected to an entirely new forum) sometime around January 10 2012, a transition in which all post history was deleted, now for the second time.