How could IB fix/restore faith in vBulletin?

Many of us here (myself included) have left vBulletin for other software like IPB and XenForo, likely because it didn't offer what we needed, was too slow in development and was too buggy/poorly coded. But what could Internet Brands really do if they wanted to get customers back? Here's what I'd suggest:

1. Emphasise the things vB did well and start building from that

Basically, advertise the features IPB and XenForo don't have, like say avatar galleries and what not, and then draw in the hobbyist forum owners who don't want Facebook 2.0. Make the forum software really easy to style and modify and emphasise the hundreds of free add ons and things, something neither of their competitors have been able to match. Basically, build it as a forum first, social network type software last.

2. Maybe get rid of the whole license deal?

I don't mean make it free, I mean treat it as a product rather than licensing deal.

That way, Internet Brands can both get their upgrade money and get a decent deal for the consumers. Do people expect a free computer or TV when their old one breaks down? No, but they do expect to be able to do whatever the hell they want with their current one.

So here's how it should work. You pay whatever the cost is for vBulletin version whatever.

That's it. There's no terms, you can modify anything, change the copyright information and code, sell it to whoever you want without vB getting a penny. Basically, like what happens when you buy a PC at a computer store. It helps IB (they get to charge extra for each 'version' because it's a product and not a service), and it helps the consumers (no hassle since they can do anything they want bar making illegal copies and selling them).

It'd aso be a pretty big blow to the competition, because let's face it, what would people really want more?

A: Something which you don't really 'own' and that is controlled by a license and contract.

B: Or something you own and can do whatever you want with

Not to mention, if they didn't want to give much support, there's no legal reason to do so under this type of system, and it'd put pressure on their competition to scrap the license system themselves.

3. Get a real expert to design a good style

Seriously, the styles of the last two main versions really do look pretty terrible, and it seems like all would be fixed if IB found a great web designer online somewhere and let them do whatever the hell they needed to do.

Maybe go ask someone who made a good style on CSS Zen Garden or something instead of a programmer with no artistic skill whatsoever.

Again, this would help dramatically simply because their competition don't really have that much better styles than vB currently does. Forums currently look kind of ugly and bare bones, too much like an array of boxes and mismatched elements. If vB fixed this, they'd get a significant amount more customers than the competition.

And valid HTML/CSS would be nice too. Think about it, imagine how neat a selling point it'd be if vBulletin 6 or so could say 'beautifully designed and meets web standards'. It might even encourage the other scripts to up their game a bit.

4. Don't use early beta tests/release buggy versions

I know open beta testing has become some kind of 'coo' thing now, but it only really works if the basic product is still extremely good even in beta form. Not an unfinished mess like early vBulletin 4 and 5 versions have been.

Google releases betas, and you get something that for most extents and purposes is a finished product.

VB does so and you get something better described as an early alpha version.

Which one makes the releasing company look better?

What do you think vBulletin should do to win back the market and get people buying into their forum software again.

 

Isn't that what vBSI was trying to do since vB4 was released? However, I think this isn't really the problem... In fact, it hurt them more often than not. Internet Brands is focusing too much on the competition that they forgot where to focus.

The product.

They've taken the Microsoft "version" pathway with regards to licensing. The licensing thing isn't the problem.. In fact, it's what made vBulletin so popular in the first place. The problem is that they should have just kept to the old licensing style, not the way they're going. They copied Microsoft's strategy with version-class style.

The design of vB5 isn't really the problem. I think vBulletin's problem is that they try to mimic other forum software. I mean, I like the color choice, the design atheistics, but in other places, the software looks ugly. Like the activity stream - ugly. Hard to navigate. Thread display? Ewww.... not much to see here. Postbits is the only thing visually pleasing for the eye. Forumhome looks ugly in some places that makes everything else look soo good. The problem with vBSI is the focus on what they want to be the 'hero' of the software. Newsflash: It's not forums. Its trying to be the new Facebook in shape, form or way.

The better tip is to get a better coder to do exactly what the screenshots shows. A lot of the things in the screenshots are missing at this point.

Beta can be fun, as it has been shown through xenForo. Of any company in the forum software industry; xenForo did beta like a #@^&ing champ.

 

I think the only thing IB can do to restore faith in company is release great software that's stable and production ready. That's really all they need to do and people will take great software at just about any price. That and Oh, stop releasing half baked upsells like the mobile apps.

I'm over the whole licensing structure change. Would I still rather pay $40/yr for continuous upgrades? You bet. However I recognize it's just not feasible for a public company to operate like that. You're talking hundreds of developer hours only for a certain percentage of your customer base to cough up $40 the upgrades. While it's great for us as customers, it gives the developers that much more motivation to develop and implement great features to entice people to renew it's just not the most profitable way to do business. I'd love to see the numbers on how many people renewed their subscriptions to get access to 3.7 or 3.8. My guess would be not a whole lot.

 

Actually, it is feasible. To begin with, Internet Brands makes money from ads, and premium services provided on half of their forums. Going out and buying vBulletin wouldn't have changed anything for them. This move was just a money grab for them. They made a new company separate from Internet Brands; vBulletin Solutions, Inc.

So, going by this creation of the new company. They could keep the old licensing system. But they chose not to, because they think it requires a lot of money to develop vBulletin. They should've used the same financial information from their acquisition of Jelsoft, but again, they chose not to. I don't know what the thought process was for not using the old information, and using the old licensing structure. Especially if the whole #@^&ing point of acquiring Jelsoft/vBulletin brand is to make even more money.

Keeping customers happy would have been a brilliant marketing move in the vB4 round of launch. But no, not only did they launch it, they changed the licensing structure, and INCREASED all prices. This is the case of... One step forward, two steps backward. Not to be outdone.... the horrible development of vB4.

Marketing to new customers would require happy current customers in the first place. But as time has shown; they haven't done that, they keep pushing customers away, and this lawsuit towards xenForo doesn't help matters, either.

 

Okay it is feasible but wouldn't be very wise for a public company not to maxiumize profits. If I recall correctly vBSI is a wholely owned subsidiary of IB Inc --Forget where I read that though.

+1 on your points about bungling the 4 release. History is repeating itself with 5. It almost makes me regret switching back to vB but XF is mum and at least I know I'm going to get something out of vBulletin. I can stick with 4.2, which suits my communities needs just fine, for quite a while.

I don't think the development is vB is all that expensive. If IB wasn't so hell bent on releasing half baked and expensive add-ons (Facebook App, Mobile Apps {that are now supposedly holding up the release of 4.2.1}, etc) they're development costs would go down. You don't need more than a few competent developers and a few QA people to make sure things are going well. IB obviously doesn't listen to QA so why even bother having them on payroll? Farm out security auditing to people who know what the hell they're doing.

Clearly their biggest expense is customer support as evidenced by the upsell price of ticket support. Didn't they change the structure of support with the release of 4? I know they further restricted with 5's licensing scheme.

 

But see, that's my point. In the first place, iB wanted to acquire the vBulletin brand to put them past the Initial Public Offering "requirement." They wanted to be a publically traded company. The problem with this is that their planning sucks - It's never a good idea to buy a company at the time you're trying to apply to be a publically traded company. You're more likely to trip at this time.

A wholly owned subsidiary a company can be separate from the parent company's IPO book. But like I said, they wanted to push their actual ledger into a specific number so that they can apply to be a public company. A newly formed company under a parent company can be separate from the actual public company. And therefore, Jelsoft or vBulletin Solutions can be treated as a small business - with this in mind - vBSI doesn't have to adhere to IPO standards or even corporate standards. This in turn would mean that iB wouldn't have to charge it's customers the way that they did during vB4 - from $285 to $485. But it seems as though the IPO period has calmed down and they've reverted back to the single license structure that vBulletin originally had.

However, this change came with it's own set of drawbacks. vBSI raised prices of support, mobile, and whatnot.

I know, right? And the worst part is, we didn't even want these features. Facebook app? I didn't want that abomination!

Yes, on all fronts. Support used to be free with every vBulletin purchase or renewal. They've recently raised the price of support to $199 a year.... $49 a month.

$49 x 12 = $588 a year.

In contrast, vB3 support was $300 every 12 month, $180 every 6 months, $60 a month.

 

They should make support free, which their new plan is outrageous and listen to customer's opinions more often such as lowering the upgrade costs.

 

• Create a better product. Both 4 and 5 are crap products that are also overpriced.
• Put a better deal in place for the license owners. I mean I paid them hundreds of dollars since 2005 and I still get a 'deal' of few bucks of a new license. Well, they can keep it.
• Better their support. It's bad, they ignore you and are usually ignorant with your issues. That's not how you keep a customer satisfied.

 

Bottom line, all they need to do is create a great product. Unfortunately, I don't think they have the ability to do so (for many reasons).

 

It really depends on the site using it. vB3 is fine... and I was one of the few that actually liked vB4 even in it's early days (I upgraded a fairly large board to use it with version 4.0.2). vB5 is most certainly not the best product by value for my site though. For technical reasons, I couldn't even run it if I wanted to (I'd need a DB server able to handle ~20,000 queries per second, and hold open thousands of concurrent MySQL connections). It may be the best option for some, but a large site it's not even an option.

 

Ummmm.....It's not just a couple of people, it's a fleet of customers. All of this negativity is coming from former vBulletin customers such as myself. I used to be a huge fan of vBulletin, I even praised vBulletin over the last 10 years. It was a high quality software. But with vB4/5, all that went out of the door. I even stayed with vBulletin 6 months after I thought the software "sucks." The one version that broke the camel's back was 4.1.4.

I do believe that xenForo can challenge vBulletin. They've already done it, even though their intention wasn't to compete against vBulletin in the first place.

 

You should give 4.2.0 a try. IMO it is pretty stable and feature rich. Disregard this if you already have and don't like it at all.

 

If I was IB.

I would bury Xenforo if there is legal merit to do so, offer only paid migration support or let vBorg user figure it out. Try to make the reversion to the users platform as painless as possible (see below)
** if no legal merit then see next comment below....
Purchase other forum platforms, IPB, SMF etc. Whatever is available. Non-compete everyone involved out the yin-yang. Cut out some of the red tape which I believe currently strangles production / development.
Focus on ForumRunner, expand to all platforms. Kill off TapaTalk.
Replicate & replace vBseo if there is any value in doing so.
Price fix across the board. LOL


Now, I am speaking loosely and quickly on the subject. Sure there are holes or issues with some of what I am saying. I don't know the market for the mobile stuff or who or what is happening with other platforms. I am just speaking in general terms.

 

What do you think vBulletin has to do - in order to make things easier for us webmaster - especially since vBulletin 5 is such a resource hog.
@WEfail That sounds like a good idea, and bringing those developers onto the team as well. But, wouldn't that wreak of a monopoly on the forum game? Can't honestly say I've used forum runner yet, but I know Tapatalk doesn't usually notify user's of new visitor messages, or private messages because a few of my users use it, and it takes them a long time to answer back because they never received an alert of their being anything new.

Could of sworn vBSEO died down a bit when vBulletin 4 introduced the new URLS. I haven't used vBSEO ever.

Yes, the prices could be changed - so it isn't so expensive. Like, if you're already running vB4, why don't they charge like $50-$100 just to upgrade as well? Of course, they'll generate more money in the long run - because cheap prices = more buyers = usually more money in the long time. It's all about grabbing the market, and handling it well.


So, TapaTalk needs to fix those issues - I'm not sure how wide-spread it is, but we do keep our mod up-to-date from vBulletin.org @Iconic

@Carlos

Only because its not as resource-heavy as vBulletin is. How many queries does XF forum index run? How much does vBulletin's forum index run? There goes your answer, and really, I kind of figured right off the bat they were going after vBulletin's neck when they first launched. Why else would pages load faster and have a better design if they weren't focused on competing and taking some market share?

Let's be clear, vBulletin has been around for a long time, so thus, it has its fans, same with XF. The two softwares will be competing head-on for a long time, unless the lawsuit kills XF as we know it, then what do people do? Go back to vBulletin?

IPS is okay "but not my cup of tea" since I've used it in the past, vBulletin was just a lot easier for me to understand, and use. It's all about preference really, and what your users like.

 

Not sure... I think they are in a really tough position due to the corporate politics involved.

If they admit to themselves it's a resource hog that needs to be designed from the ground up, then you need to start taking into account job security. Someone might start asking the question, "So you have 25-30 developers working on this for years, and you guys are now telling me it needs to be rewritten from the ground up?" I suspect we'll just see them cobbling together fixes the best they can without rewriting anything or admitting that their fundamental design is flawed... Like they could build a front-end caching system to cut the queries, but then of course the content on the site is always a little out of date since you will usually be hitting the cache. And then say something like, "Well, that's just what needs to happen for such a modern application. It's so modern, that it simply requires a lot of resources."

The real problem is the developers didn't have enough foresight to take scalability into account when designing the system and it shows at every level.

Look at the source code of just the main page on the vb5demo, and at the bottom you have 27 DIFFERENT JavaScript files being included for that one page. lol

Code:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.vbulletin.com/vb5demo/js/jquery/jquery.thumbnail-radio-checkbox.js?v="></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.vbulletin.com/vb5demo/js/jquery/jquery.tinyscrollbar.js?v="></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.vbulletin.com/vb5demo/js/jquery/jquery.qtip.min.js?v="></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.vbulletin.com/vb5demo/js/jquery/jquery-ui-timepicker-addon.js?v="></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.vbulletin.com/vb5demo/js/jquery/jquery.cookie.js?v="></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.vbulletin.com/vb5demo/js/jquery/jquery.selectBox.js?v="></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.vbulletin.com/vb5demo/js/jquery/jquery.placeholder.min.js?v="></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.vbulletin.com/vb5demo/js/jquery/jquery.form.js?v="></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.vbulletin.com/vb5demo/js/jquery/jquery.elastic-1.6.11.js?v="></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.vbulletin.com/vb5demo/js/jquery/jquery.jcarousel.js?v="></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.vbulletin.com/vb5demo/js/jquery/jquery.condense.js?v="></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.vbulletin.com/vb5demo/js/fileupload.js?v="></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.vbulletin.com/vb5demo/js/autocomplete.js?v="></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.vbulletin.com/vb5demo/js/poll.js?v="></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.vbulletin.com/vb5demo/js/video.js?v="></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.vbulletin.com/vb5demo/js/vbSlideshow.js?v="></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.vbulletin.com/vb5demo/js/conversation_filter.js?v="></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.vbulletin.com/vb5demo/js/link.js?v="></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.vbulletin.com/vb5demo/js/content_entry_box.js?v="></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.vbulletin.com/vb5demo/js/inlinemod.js?v="></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.vbulletin.com/vb5demo/js/sb_activity.js?v="></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.vbulletin.com/vb5demo/js/jquery/jquery.tmpl.min.js?v="></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.vbulletin.com/vb5demo/js/blueimp/jquery.iframe-transport.js?v="></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.vbulletin.com/vb5demo/js/blueimp/jquery.fileupload.js?v="></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.vbulletin.com/vb5demo/js/blueimp/jquery.fileupload-ui.js?v="></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.vbulletin.com/vb5demo/js/blueimp/application.js?v="></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.vbulletin.com/vb5demo/js/facebook.js?v="></script>

From an application design standpoint, vB5 itself would be a great study on how to design a bad application.

That's not to say people won't use it... I'm sure it will be successful to some degree, but much of that success will be because it's a brand people know and had good experiences with in the past.

 

SHHHHHHH!!!!! Don't give them ideas! We need an alternative to ForumRunner!

Actually, I think the better idea would be to acquire vBSEO and put it part of the vB4/vB5 core. Two versions: One installed with vBseries, and the other is premium (the same setup as current vBSEO).

That way, iB is armed with not just the patents, they're armed with the codebase to work upon, or build upon. As of right now, they [vBSI/iB] suck at "friendly URL's."

Then merge all users, threads, and posts into vB.org, since vBSEO is a plugin. Relevance.

And actually, I think, the reason why vBSEO was at ForumCon 2012 was to look for more investors - I think Juan wants to either pivot vBSEO, or be acquired by Internet Brands. iB sponsoring ForumCon 2012 was a "last minute" thing, as was Juan's attendance.

It's not only because of "it's not as resource-heavy as vBulletin." It's the overall user experience, including notifications, easy navigation, and whatnot. On the SEO side, you have a very strong traffic thanks to xenForo. You can move threads and not worry about your friendly URL's break. On the moderator, and admin side, you have some great moderating technology to work with. I love the options in xenForo's ACP, I can easily divert my trouble makers to another site! That's something that I love! The fact that I can give my competitors my 'bad' users, is something I'd love to have in any software. xenForo has it. That's the one thing that kept me on xenForo more than anyone else. vBulletin's ACP was powerful, I can ban and IP ban and whatnot. The options are limitless, I give you that, but I just can't get past the problems.

As for bolded... I don't think you understand, then. They didn't want a lawsuit, which they got regardless of how careful their planning was. They were prepared. But then, the lawsuit hits, and they have to struggle through the hardest of times. Even though they "grabbed" vBulletin by the neck, and as such, they wanted to; they didn't really want to compete with vBulletin at all. They had the experience to build a new software. I guess what I'm saying is, what KAM is saying with xenForo is simply: "This is what we can do, and this is what vB4 could've been if you had listened to us [er, me]." Brisco didn't listen to Kier from the get-go, so Kier went and built his own software.

But, I don't want to go back to vBulletin! Even if vB5 is shaping up to be a stronger version, I still can't get past the shoddy development (their lust for quantity over quality), and the horrible support. I don't think their $199 support will solve anything as a customer, because the staff will always be rude.

I'm in the same boat. I don't like IPS/IPB all that much.