Is vBulletin's situation almost like UBB's was before it?

Discussion in 'Community Forum Software' started by CM30, Feb 28, 2013.

  1. CM30

    CM30 Regular Member

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    You had everyone leaving for better software, a large corporation not doing what people wanted and making a fairly mediocre product and a general air of the original software being 'irrelevant'.

    Is history basically repeating itself with vBulletin?
     
    CM30, Feb 28, 2013
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  2. AWS

    AWS Administrator

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    Not quit the same, but, close. John went to Infopop while he was developing a mysql addon for UBB and wanted to get them to add it to the core. Infopop as we know now had other ideas. The forum world was just starting to take off and Infopop thought wrongly that people would want a hosted solution that could scale as the site grew.

    John went on the start development of a still unnamed product coded in PHP with a myssl back end. At first this was only going be for his VBForum. When people starting asking him to make it available for the masses he decided he would. All this was being discussed on the Crypt Keepers forum which was the UBB hacking and support community. They started removing the discussions so John created a community on Easy Board for us to request features and discuss the product. In early March John converted his VBForum and then in April he released vbulletin.

    One thing I'd like to point out, that many people get wrong, is vbulletin was not a rewrite of UBB. It was all new code. I was lucky enough to be there from the beginning and bought one of the first licenses.

    What IB is doing is taking a great product and turning it into shit. John took an idea and created a great product. Infopop make a bad business decision by creating Open Topic, which was a good product, and made it a hosted only solution. I would hazard a guess here that if Infopop had told John and the rest of that Open Topic would be the replacement for UBB and that it would be a downloadable product we'd all be running Open Topic now and there would be no vbulletin.
     
    AWS, Feb 28, 2013
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  3. DaUnknownAdm!n

    DaUnknownAdm!n Regular Member

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    ^Isn't that almost the same story with iKonboard and IPB, Matt wanted to create the next version of iKonboard in php (project Mongoose?) and was turned down. Hence ipb was born. Am I remembering that correctly?
     
    DaUnknownAdm!n, Feb 28, 2013
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  4. AWS

    AWS Administrator

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    I might be wrong because I never used Ikonboard. I did use IPB 1.1 on a site that I have since sold. I think there was some legal issues Matt had to get through when he started IPB about who owned the Ikonboard code.
     
    AWS, Mar 1, 2013
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  5. DaUnknownAdm!n

    DaUnknownAdm!n Regular Member

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    ^I think you may be right, I remember thinking at the time how can it be the same code if iKonboard was cgi based and IPB is php?
     
    DaUnknownAdm!n, Mar 1, 2013
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  6. AWS

    AWS Administrator

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    Back then it was pretty easy to port perl code to php code because forum packages weren't that complex. Heck there was even a tool to convert perl to php although there was still much fixing to do with the converted code.
     
    AWS, Mar 3, 2013
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  7. David Copeland

    David Copeland Regular Member

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    Back in 1999 when we were shopping for forum software and were very interested in UBB, some of our admins were working with Disney and Warner is consulting which forum software the studios might go with. All held out until vBulletin was developed.

    Both Disney and Warner have robust forums, and although Warner appears to have purchased a branding license, Disney remains faithful to showing vBulletin Version 3.8.4 as their choice.

    Sean Hannity has also chosen to stay with Ver 3.8 and has purchased a branding license.

    My opinion is that big dollars will stay with stability and will be very slow to upgrade to versions which have a lot of negative feedback from licensees.

    For myself, I am still waiting for Ver 4.2.1 , which I believe will be very good.

    David
     
    David Copeland, Mar 23, 2013
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