easy-coding.de – General Developer Forum for PHP, C++, Java, ... (Archive 2003

▸ From High School Desk to Developer Institution (2003 – 2022)

Torben Brodt (userID = 1)

In December 2003, I founded easy-coding.de as a 17-year-old high school student. The motivation was simple: I wanted to help others learn programming, even though I was just learning it myself.

Years before platforms like Stack Overflow (2008) or GitHub (2008) existed, one of the most active German-speaking developer communities grew here. During my studies of Media Informatics at Wiesbaden University of Applied Sciences (2005–2008), I shared all assignments and solutions openly on the forum. We built our own Solr documentation search engine, our own Git & Trac project hosting, and open-source plugins that ran on hundreds of forums worldwide.

In 2022 – after 19 years of active forum history – the platform entered permanent retirement. To permanently protect the privacy of 57,910 former members and leave no legacy forum software as an attack surface on the web, this static memorial site preserves the history, milestones, and people behind easy-coding.de.

Archive Factsheet

Founder & Operator: Torben Brodt

Founded: December 2003

Active Period: 2003 to 2022 (19 years)

Core Philosophy: Socratic Debugging, Self-Empowerment & Open Source

Technical Status: 100% Static • GDPR-Compliant

LinkedIn Profile ↗ GitHub (@torbenbrodt) ↗

57.910

Members

13.217

Resolved Topics

68.563

Forum Posts

8.534

Posts by Torben (#1)

1.222

Technical Articles

194

Wiki Entries

Chronicle of Forum Activity: 19 Years of Post Growth (2003–2022)

Exact post volume per calendar year from the WoltLab statistics table (wcf1_stat_daily, ObjectType 336). All-time peak in 2012 with 12,323 posts.

All-Time Peak: 12,323 Posts/Year

Epoche I (2003–2005)

Die Schüler- & Startjahre

Gründung am 16. December 2003 als 17-jähriger Schüler. Aufnahme in DMOZ & Yahoo! Webkatalog, erstes NoPaste-System und Studienstart Medieninformatik.

Gesamt: 1.024 Posts

Epoch II (2006–2010)

WCF Plugins & Career Launch

University coursework open-sourced, release of map-wcf. October 2007 job thread #4383, foster child sponsorship (2008), Solr & Git hosting.

Total: 41,595 posts

Epoch III (2011–2014)

The Record Years & Peak

All-time record year 2012 with 12,323 posts (May 2012: 2,569 posts/mo). easy-coding.de matures into a central developer institution.

Peak: 12,323 posts (2012)

Epoche IV (2015–2022)

Wissensarchiv & Retired

WCF-Upgrade, Konsolidierung als riesige Nachschlageplattform für Millionen Entwickler. 2022 Übergang in den statischen, wartungsfreien Retired.

Retired: Read-Only Archiv

Reach Champions & The Legendary “BlueBug” Thread

Millions of Google searches landed on these solutions across two decades.

Original data from wbb1_thread

Mobile Security (2004) Thread #120

Bluetooth Attacks & “BlueBugging” (38,553 Views)

On August 7, 2004, Torben analyzed the newly discovered “BluBug” and Bluesnarfing vulnerability by Trifinite (remote phone exploitation over 2 km). On Jan 2, 2006 came the update on “Blooover II – BlueBugging optimized for phones”. The thread attracted tens of thousands of security researchers.

Another security hit: Thread #526: Hacking WEP WiFi with 85,895 views.

All-Time Record: 1.48M Views Thread #5527

Passing variables into system("") in C++ (eriX)

Created on July 7, 2008 in the C/C++ section. Programmers looking for console command execution and string concatenation in C++ landed reliably on this forum answer for over 14 years.

Rank #2: Thread #17277 on welcoming a partner community (632,256 views).

Community Life & Talk 607 Replies

The Legendary “Smalltalk” Thread #15763

Mit 607 Replies und 257.522 Aufrufen der größte Treffpunkt der Community. Dicht gefolgt von Thread #280: Who is who (167 Antworten seit 2004) und dem legendären Rätsel-Thread #1635: Name the Movie (162 Antworten).

Algorithm classics: #2040: C++ Calculator (588k views), #4911: Prime Numbers (563k views).

Stories You Cannot Code

True anecdotes, curiosities, and values lived across 19 years of community leadership.

14. Okt. 2007 & 2008 🖥️

Bachelor Thesis via Forum Thread & The Shoulder Glance

On October 14, 2007, Torben posted on his own forum (Thread #4383: “Seeking internship for Bachelor Thesis - Media Informatics”) and landed his first employer. While working there in 2008, he glanced over a senior colleague's shoulder – and saw him reading a thread on easy-coding.de to solve a corporate bug.

Mindset 🧠

Helping in Languages I Never Coded Myself

From PHP and C++ to Prolog, PAWN, or ActionScript: Torben helped with virtually every language – including ones he had never written a single line of code in. The secret was Socratic Debugging (asking the right guiding questions so the author spotted the logic flaw themselves) combined with superior Google-Fu.

Community-Karma 🎋

Zero Commercialization – But a Bamboo Cutting Board

easy-coding.de was always run without profit motives. Yet its reputation generated valuable client contracts. Sometimes members said thanks directly: An e-commerce merchant whose inventory API was rescued in a late-night forum session mailed a heavy bamboo cutting board from his shop as a heartfelt thank-you.

Responsibility since 2008 🌍

Foster Child Dayana (Plan International)

Starting with his first salary in 2008, easy-coding.de sponsored foster child Dayana through Plan International – a humanitarian tradition Torben has continued privately without interruption.

May 7, 2008 • Mystery 🤖

The Party Mystery: 1,776 Bots Storm the Forum

On May 7, 2008 at 00:05 AM, the online user counter abruptly hit 1,776 simultaneous visitors! For months the community wondered (Thread #6013): “What happened in May? Was there a secret easy-coding party and no one invited me?” Torben resolved the mystery: search engine crawlers had scanned the board simultaneously. The all-time human record was 93 concurrent verified members on April 30, 2012.

Dec 2014 • Community 🎁

Live-SQL Tombola & Comeback After 11 Years

For Christmas 2014, Torben raffled developer subscriptions. Any member mentioning the word “easy” in posts entered the pool, drawn live by SQL (ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT 1). Founding member #7 (maxmoon, registered since Dec 2003) replied touched after 11 years: “I haven't been here in 11 years and was surprised to still receive emails from easy-coding after a decade! Merry Christmas!”

Archival Glance: Original Screenshots from Three Eras

Genuine time travel: How easy-coding.de looked in browsers across 2007, 2011, and 2016.

Wayback Machine Snapshots

July 2007 • WBB 3

Full Screen ↗

2007: The WBB3 Launch Era

The classic bright WBB3 design featuring coder-search, university exercises, and the integrated Live Chat (with native XMPP/Jabber gateway for clients like Pidgin & Adium).

10,918 posts in 2007

Nov 2011 • Peak Activity

Full Screen ↗

2011: The High-Activity Era

Over 7,000 annual posts, Solr documentation search engine, Trac/Git hosting, and vibrant community life.

Just prior to the all-time 2012 peak

March 2016 • WBB 4

Full Screen ↗

2016: The Modern Edition

WoltLab Community Framework 2 featuring blogs, wiki/encyclopedia, and modern responsive design.

WCF 2.x era through final retirement

Pioneer Works & Open Source (“Ahead of its Time”)

In-house innovations where easy-coding.de was years ahead of its era.

Apache Lucene & Solr

coder-search (Doc Search)

Launched in December 2006 (as coder-suche.de) and upgraded to Apache Solr: a blazing-fast documentation search engine indexing all major languages – years ahead of DevDocs.io.

trac.easy-coding.de & Git

Git Hosting & NoPaste

As early as 2008, under the motto “Git'st du schon?”, we provided member project hosting with Trac wiki, issue tracker, auto-deploy, and our own pastebin service (nopaste.easy-coding.de, active since June 2004).

Real-Time Chat & Jabber

Live Chat & XMPP Bridge

Years before Slack or Discord: A fully integrated web chat with a native XMPP/Jabber bridge, allowing members to chat synchronously in browser or via desktop clients like Pidgin.

WoltLab Community Plugins

WoltLab WCF Open Source

Our open-source packages ran on hundreds of third-party forums: The famous Google Maps Plugin (map-wcf) with [map] BBCode, GeSHi syntax highlighting, and early OpenID & Twitter SSO logins.

Open-Source-Crowdsourcing (2009)

Project “contest” (Seasons 1x01–1x06)

Before GitHub collaboration tools existed, Torben and Vince organized crowdsourced community coding structured like TV seasons: ideas, framework selection, DB schema, and a playable prototype with over 257,000 views.

CI/CD & Test Stacks

Builds, Django, Rails & GlassFish

Through builds.easy-coding.de we offered early automated CI builds alongside dedicated subdomains for Python Django, Ruby on Rails, and Java EE GlassFish to test modern stacks live.

Innovation December 2009

easy-coding jobs & The 12-Point Joel Test

Engineering Quality Over Buzzwords

In December 2009, easy-coding.de launched a custom WoltLab job board plugin (page=Jobs). Instead of generic recruiter spam, we pioneered transparency by integrating Joel Spolsky's famous 12-point engineering test:

✓ Do you use source control (Git/SVN)?

✓ Can you make a build in one step?

✓ Do you fix bugs before writing new code?

✓ Do programmers have quiet working conditions?

✓ Do you use the best tools money can buy?

✓ Do you have dedicated testers & hallway tests?

Leading tech employers and recruiting agencies posted hundreds of developer openings with us over the years, including CHECK24, SCHUFA Holding AG, TowerConsult (over 730 postings), Randstad, NorCom, Peakwork, Consileon, EPAG Domains, and ClientHouse.

💼

Genuine Engineering Culture

No recruiter traps – transparent insights into real developer workplaces.

12 out of 12 Joel Test points as benchmark

19 Years of Forum History in Fast-Forward (2003–2022)

Von der Schüler-Idee über zwei Community-Übernahmen bis zum Retired.

December 2003

Founding Just Before Christmas

Launch of the forum at www.easy-coding.de by Torben Brodt as a 17yo student. First registrations (User #2 wulfgang on Dec 16, 2003) and first coding questions.

2004 – 2005

DMOZ & Yahoo! Directory Listing, College Start

Hand-reviewed inclusion into the Open Directory Project (DMOZ) and Yahoo! Directory. Launch of the first NoPaste system. Enrollment in Media Informatics at Wiesbaden University.

2006 – 2008

WCF Plugin Era, Career Start & Foster Sponsorship

Open sharing of university programming coursework. Release of the Google Maps plugin (map-wcf). On Oct 14, 2007 thread #4383 secures Bachelor thesis and 2008 first job – accompanied by foster child Dayana sponsorship.

2009 – 2010

Community Projects (1x01–1x06), Jobs Board & coder-search

Crowdsourced software development in episodic seasons (contest), launch of Solr doc search and the Joel Test job board. Annual interactive advent calendars.

February 2011 & November 2014

Two Major Forum Mergers: coder-forum.eu & easy-scripting.net

Successful technical and human integration of two partner communities and thousands of threads into the database of easy-coding.de.

Mai 2012

All-Time Peak of Community Activity

With 12,323 posts in the full year and 2,569 posts in May 2012, the platform reached its historical activity pinnacle.

2022

Read-Only & Transformation into this Static Memorial

After 68,563 posts, the active forum retired. To preserve member privacy, its memory lives on as a maintenance-free, safe static archive.

Original Forum Structure (Final Live State)

The 32 topic areas with their verified final post counts from the database.

WoltLab Burning Board®

▾ Coding & Web Development /Board/3-Coding/

PHP

Everything about programming with PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor.

2.390 Topics
15.977 Posts

HTML, JavaScript & CSS

Frontend challenges with (X)HTML, CSS, JavaScript, AJAX & web standards.

1.714 Topics
9.940 Posts

C, C++ & Objective-C

C and its object-oriented successors C++, Objective-C, and D.

1.402 Topics
7.508 Posts

Java, Scala & Android

JVM, JEE, Swing, Scala, and Android mobile development.

943 Topics
4.658 Posts

Datenbanken & SQL

MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, SQLite, and relational schema design.

481 Topics
2.308 Posts

• XML & XSLT (376 / 1.197)

• .NET & C# (181 / 632)

• Delphi & Pascal (115 / 531)

• Shellscripting (78 / 340)

• Logische Sprachen (73 / 217)

• Python (52 / 212)

▾ Miscellaneous & Community /Board/46-Diverses/

Off Topic (inkl. Feedback & Fun Area)

The timeless community lounge for conversations outside of code.

1.607 Topics
6.445 Posts

Suchen und Finden (Projekt- & Festarbeit, Ausbildung & Praktikum)

Developer marketplace (where Torben landed his first job via Thread #4383).

858 Topics
1.659 Posts

Webserver, OpenSource & Linux

Apache, Nginx, Linux infrastructure, and server security.

308 Topics
1.908 Posts

Hall of Fame: Moderator Team & Top Members

Honor roll of all co-admins, moderators, and pioneers who shaped easy-coding.de.

Verified from wcf1_user

Co-Administrator

Vincent Petritz / vince

Over 3,389 posts • Lead of community projects & Co-Administrator since 2009.

Moderator Team • Hamburg

SeBa

1,125 posts • Rank “Master”, active since Nov 16, 2006. A pillar of the community.

Moderator Team • Kassel

BennyBunny

953 posts & 3 articles • Active since Jan 18, 2007, tireless problem solver.

Moderator Team • Vienna

phax

763 posts & 6 articles • Supported the community for years from Austria.

Moderator Team • Since 2011

NurPech & Dennis321

522 and 392 posts & 15 articles • Reliable moderation and content stewardship.

Moderator Team • 2006–2010

Hafner, Lemmi & Fipsi

Combined over 1,850 posts • Hafner (650), Lemmi (614, Kiel), Fipsi (586).

Pioneers & Top Posters

Max123 (2004), 70abc (2005), mad (669 Posts), F0kus (581), JFoX (535), Drasko (509), darthdespotism (483), Nebu (458), Checkmateing (436), playerid (PAWN-Experte)

Representing all 57,910 registered developers who shared their expertise here.

Rescued Artifacts: The Historical Web Archive

Original graphics from 2004–2014, rescued from server backups and the Internet Archive.

Local Offline Assets

Juni 2004 • Invision Power Board Ära

The very first archived forum logo from summer 2004 (Wayback snapshot).

20. Juni 2004 • nopaste.easy-coding.de

Created with Adobe Photoshop 7.0 for our first in-house pastebin service.

März 2007 • coder-suche.de

Logo of the Nutch/Lucene-based developer documentation search engine.

November 2014 • easy-scripting.net

Header of the partner community merged entirely into easy-coding.de in 2014.

2007–2012 • WBB3 Epoche

Das klassische WBB3-Logo mit dem berühmten grünen Farbverlauf.

Werbe-Assets & Partner-Buttons

Original 88x31 micro button and 468x60 banner for partner websites.

Explore the entire web archive: Wayback Machine Snapshots (2004–2022)

easy-coding.de ↗ trac.easy-coding.de ↗ nopaste.easy-coding.de ↗

Legal Notice & Privacy Policy

Statutory legal disclosures pursuant to § 5 TMG / § 18 MStV for this non-commercial historical archive.

Service Provider & Controller

Torben Brodt
Kerkowstr. 17 D
13125 Berlin
Germany

Email: t.brodt@gmail.com

Phone: +49 (0) 176 21139955

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/torben-brodt-580a1565/ ↗

GitHub: github.com/torbenbrodt ↗

Notice on operation: This website is a private, purely non-commercial historical memorial archive commemorating the developer community easy-coding.de (2003–2022).

Privacy Policy (GDPR Compliance)

100% static & privacy-first: This website neither collects nor processes any personal data. There is no database, no user accounts, no contact form, no tracking (no Google Analytics or similar), and zero cookies are set.

Protection of former member data: All 68,563 former forum posts and 57,910 user accounts were permanently taken offline in 2022 to strictly preserve privacy.

Hosting: Das Hosting erfolgt auf Webservern in Germany (ALL-INKL.COM). Beim Aufruf der Seite werden durch den Webserver technisch bedingt die üblichen Server-Logfiles (IP-Adresse, Zeitstempel, User-Agent) zur Auslieferung der Dateien und Abwehr von Cyberangriffen temporär verarbeitet.