The Misc folder is the drawer for material that belongs on the site but not to any of the themed archives — writing about software that isn't itself hosted here.
ikonboard-2.1.9-teardown.txt — a complete teardown of Ikonboard 2.1.9 Beta, the Perl CGI forum software written by Matthew Mecham and released on 7 June 2001. This is the software that FinalFantasyFanatic.com actually ran, which makes it the machinery behind the IB 2.1.9 forum recreation in the FFF Archive folder.
It documents the whole program from its source: the flat-file architecture (no database — every post, member and setting is a pipe-delimited text file), all 32 CGI scripts and their 48 action endpoints, every on-disk record format field by field, the authorship and the lineage that runs from here to Invision Power Board, and 23 security findings measured against modern standards. Passwords were stored in plaintext and carried in a cookie; that was the entire session model.
The find in it is an accident of a file timestamp. The core library, ikon.lib, carries a modification time of epoch 1000009398 — two hours and thirty-six minutes after Unix time first reached ten digits on 9 September 2001. Its three-line diff against its own backup is the fix for exactly that event, because the software sorted forum topics by comparing timestamps as text. The file that fixes the ten-digit timestamp bug is stamped with the first ten-digit timestamp.
The original 2001 distribution is preserved at archive.org/details/ib219. The document is served as a plain text file and can be read on its own at /misc/ikonboard-2.1.9-teardown.txt.
ikonboard-3.1.1-teardown.txt — the same treatment for the sequel, Ikonboard 3.1.1, released in July 2002 by Jarvis Entertainment Group. ffoncrack.com ran this release, which makes it the machinery behind the FFOC archive.
Version 3 is not a new version of Ikonboard 2 — it is a different program with the same name. Compared line by line the two share seventeen lines of source, all of it boilerplate. Where 2.1.9 was 40 standalone scripts with no database and plaintext passwords, 3.1.1 is a single dispatcher over 179 modules with four interchangeable storage backends (DBM, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle), server-side sessions, hashed passwords, member groups, translatable strings and a skin engine that compiles templates into Perl.
It documents all of it: the three-stage dispatch and its 44 endpoints, every module, the 29-table schema field by field, the security findings including CVE-2003-0770 — a pre-authentication remote code execution bug reported in January 2003 and still unfixed in the successor release eight months later — and a chapter on what converting a 2.1.9 board actually cost you, which included every private message on it.
The find here is also a file timestamp. Development stopped on 15 July 2002. Four months later three of the six tarballs were rebuilt within fourteen minutes of each other, and exactly one file inside them was changed: the admin control panel's navigation menu. The edit is a block of promotional links, and the indentation collapses where it was pasted in by hand. The last change anyone ever made to Ikonboard 3.1.1 was an advertisement.
The 2002 distribution is preserved at archive.org/details/ib311. The teardown itself is not part of that download — it is analysis written in 2026 by running a set of scripts against it. Read it at /misc/ikonboard-3.1.1-teardown.txt.