FluxBB was a fork of PunBB created by its developers after Andersson left the project in April 2008. The developers felt that forking was necessary to maintain control over the development process without the influence of commercial interests. As with PunBB, it is released under the GNU General Public License. In July 2008, FluxBB was announced as a finalist in SourceForge.net's 2008 Community Choice Awards in the "Best New Project" category.
Originally a continuation of PunBB's 1.3 branch, it was announced in January 2009 that the then-current 1.3 branch would be discontinued and that FluxBB 1.4 would revert to being based on the 1.2 codebase. For FluxBB 1.4, several features were backported from 1.3, including UTF-8 support, a new default theme, and the ability to split and merge posts. The extension system, however, was not included. FluxBB 1.5 was released in May 2012.
In July 2012, it was announced that FluxBB 2.0, the next major version of the software, would be based on the Laravel PHP framework, with existing work ported to the new framework.
In 2015, FluxBB's lead developer Franz announced they would merge the project with another forum software named "Flarum" alongside esoTalk lead developer Toby Zerner. This caused a brief uproar in the FluxBB community and led to several forks of the FluxBB code. The most recent active continuation of FluxBB was conducted by a community member known as MioVisman, who continued to maintain and update the code throughout the years, publishing unofficial releases of FluxBB with his latest release (February 2021), making FluxBB PHP 8 compatible. On May 31, 2021, it was discovered the official FluxBB dot com (FluxBB.com) website was offline, and as of this writing (June 9, 2021), it remains offline and the domain itself is set to expire, April 26, 2022.
