Simple Machines Forum (abbreviated as SMF) is a freeware Internet forum application. The software is written in PHP and uses a MySQL database backend, although multi-database support is being developed for version 2.0. SMF is developed by the Simple Machines development team.
SMF was created to replace the forum software YaBB SE, which at the time was gaining a bad reputation because of problems with its Perl-based ancestor software YaBB[citation needed]. At the time, YaBB was attributed to causing resource allocation problems on many systems. YaBB SE was written as a rough PHP port of YaBB, and had many of the same resource and security problems of the older YaBB versions. Joseph Fung and Jeff Lewis of Lewis Media Inc., the owners of YaBB SE and the original owners of SMF, made the decision to convert to a new brand and name.