What's happening with vBulletin Germany?

I know they apparently can't sell vBulletin licenses due to some change of attitude by Internet Brands, and that Scott Molinari is running a new company dedicated to a new community script/service, but... does anyone know what's actually going on with the site itself?

Is the forum going to be kept up as a general vBulletin 'support' forum, even if it is only an unofficial one? Is it being closed down at some point due to lack of ties with vBulletin.com and lack of interest from the owners?

What exactly is the plan over there now? Because I can't read German, and I'm just curious what the actual plans are for the whole site/setup...

 

I haven't heard of that myself, but it sounds perfectly reasonable. Thanks for the post!

Now let's see if Scott himself can give some more information on this matter too...

 

Hi,

This is the news from the horses mouth! (need a horses mouth smiley)

We have stopped the ticket support for vB4 Suite (and obviously any other ticket support for other versions) at the beginning of this month. We are only accepting tickets for license holder changes, which we are obliged to do according to EU law. We are also changing customer data (e-mail) per request. However, technical issues aren't being worked on for the most part.

That said, we still release any security updates (like the last YUI/ Flash Uploader issue) and should IB release a new version, we will also release it too, as the German version.

We have also taken over the data from IB for the forum, moved it to our server and we will keep the community forum open until the interest among the customers to help each other dies. We monitor/ moderate the forum and Pogo is still quite active on it in his free/ spare time.

Scott

 

It's a shame that it has come to this. From what I can tell, German customers received some top-notch support over at vBGermany.

 

Yeah, it is a shame. We did our best and I do believe we did a good job. We had 2 figure growth all the way up to 2009 and it was all down hill after that, unfortunately.

This whole deal with vBulletin "dying" is actually good. Without it, we probably wouldn't have decided to go at it on our own. We're working on something new and special. Not everyone will be liking our concepts and direction with PaaS, but it is unique and we will be able to do things "the others" can only dream about, which means opportunity for community owners who decide to work on our platform. It's going to be cool.

Scott

 

Well something new is good and if it means more competition that is good to that makes others work harder as well as the new comer.

 

Exactly!

Good and fair competition is always healthy, for the companies themselves and especially for the customers.

Scott

 

Just be careful that you don't get sued by Internet Brands or something. After all, they tried to bully XenForo into shutting down with a bogus lawsuit, so they seem to have something against people who 'turn against' them.

 

Hehe... I never turned against them (and although I criticize them, I am still not against them). They actually just cancelled our contract without reason.

Scott

 

Well that's why CM30 is warning you a company as Internet Brands/vBulletin does not really care who did what.

 

Yeah, I know and CM30's warning has merit. But, there isn't anything anyone can do about questionably led companies, who seem to think suing their competition for reasons other than ones with true legal merit is a correct thing to do. If it happens, we'll have to simply handle it.

Scott

 

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Yeah, but you know why that happens? Because almost all people have short term/ make themselves happy thinking. I'm guilty of it myself sometimes. It's "get pleasure now over or despite knowing pain will come later". It is ingrained our psyche as a human race and unfortunately, also a big issue with us too. It causes the climate to change negatively. It causes stupid presidents to get elected. It causes CEO's to not think past the next quarter. I causes millions upon millions of people to go into too much consumer debt. The list of results for our "pleasure before pain" psyche is long and ugly. I don't want to say, we are all bad for it. We just need to see it for what it is and try and go through a bit more pain and restraint short term, in order to have actually more pleasure later.

Scott