Dear vBulletin Forum Community - vBSEO is Suspending Operations

It's a sad day for vBSEO.



After several months of no communication, our present CEO has privately communicated to me his intent to close down the company.

I'm Ilia Muriente, co-founder of Crawlability Inc. We created vBSEO in 2005 to enhance the SEO positioning of your forums.

Unfortunately, I was forced out of my role as Vice President in 2009 and have not been permitted to be involved with the company at any level since. The company has been fully under the control of my co-founder, Juan Muriente.

Since my departure, the company has been in sharp decline. Recently, our customers have been abandoned without any support. vBSEO has not been a priority for the "active" team for several years. In fact, our CEO and lead developer became involved with Topify Inc in 2012.

I feel that it is important for you all to know the current status and how it may impact you. I created this short video to talk to you today.

I invite you to join me for discussion here. Let's brainstorm on how we can best serve you all if vBSEO closes.

I would share this at vbseo.com, but I have been locked out of my administration accounts.

There may be ways for us to continue to serve you if I am able to regain control of the company - and I'm asking for your support.

Let's discuss. Please share your feedback and ideas with me here.

Best regards,

Ilia Muriente

NOTE: For businesses that have been engaged in anyway with Crawlability Inc, vBSEO, or any of the projects Juan has launched with our resources, please contact me. I do NOT authorized any transactions without my approval. This includes the acquisition of our company or the transfer of any of our intellectual property. For companies such as Topify that have had interactions, you can get in touch with me to disclose your involvement where applicable.

 

woah..

 

what is this crap. You're acting as if you're still representing VBSEO...and somehow you've managed to send an email to all owners of VBSEO software.

This is a childish way to get VBSEO owners attention, even if your accusations are true.

 

What I have said is 100% true, and I am representing vBSEO because I own the company, FYI.

 

If you own the company, why aren't you in control of it?

You've asked us for ideas and help, but this sounds like a legal battle to me. VBSEO users have no idea of what's happened, and nor can we truly help in any way (unless there's some lawyers around who want to contact you). What action did you envisage the users taking when you wrote this email?

If you have the codebase in an unencrypted format, and copyright (if you really own the company, and depending on the licence) then one thing you could do is open source it, and get a community built around that.

Whatever you do, seek good legal advice.

 

Ilia, it's a shame things have come to this point. But there's no changing any of that now, so trying to move forward is the best bet. I really don't see Juan as being interested in any dialogue at this late date, but he might surprise all of us.

In a perfect world, vBSEO should become multi-domain licenses, so license holders can still utilize the software, if they desire. As WebsiteDoctor suggested, if the software becomes open source, then I imagine that might attract a support community of sorts.

My best wishes to you, Joe and the girls!

 

vBSEO died long ago.

 

Ilia,

I'm not sure what you are trying to accomplish here or by sending out an email to Juan's customers.
You & your brother did start vBSEO. But you were released from your duties by your brother.
Now whether or not he had the authority to do that is beyond my level of knowledge in this matter.

I was there at the early stages and was given multiple licenses by Juan in exchange for being a pre-release team member and Juan just liked me enough to offer additional licenses.

I won't pretend to say I know what happened between you two... but you are family.
Don't let this crap destroy that.

Whatever happened between you needs to be resolved face to face.
Perhaps Juan feels you betrayed him by taking sides with Joe Ward (who eventually became your husband - correct me if I am mistaken) and together you two left to form another company.

During the time I knew Juan he was a great guy. I remember you as well.
You were both fair to all.

I hope this is not an attempt to steal your brother's customer base or try and do a hostile take over.

vBulletin is as good as dead and as such vBSEO couldn't continue.

 

Man, I just watched the video. I didn't have the sound on, but man she's hot.

Whatever she's selling, I'm a buyer.

 

Hi Mike, thank you for your wishes.

The first goal is to make sure all vBSEO customers are aware of the status. They were abandoned. That's completely unfair to them, and not something I'll stand for.

I'm not sure what Juan's plan is for communicating and handling this matter. He certainly cannot continue accepting money for vBSEO without providing support to our customers and community.

We'll have to decide how to handle vBSEO asap. If we cannot continue the company in any way, at least making unrestricted use for our customers makes sense.

 

I'm not here to get involved with whatever your dispute with your brother is, but when you say the above quote...and your original post says,

it's not helping your credibility whatsoever.

You have somehow managed to get the mailing list of VBSEO owners, would you mind telling us how you did that? Also, can we expect any more (what appears to be) vindictive actions from you?

Again, even if this accusation is true with VBSEO...this was not the way to do it.

@Brandon I respect you, the staff, and the community here. Please do not share any of my signup/email address with the OP if asked by her.

 

Here's what I know as a former employee. You two (Ilia and Joe) are the reason things happened the way they did. It was by your own doings that a highly profitable company was left for dead.

I only know what i've been told, and frankly, I don't care which side is the rightful owner. It phases me not as I haven't worked there in years and I'm moving to xen foro when 1.2 goes final anyway, forever leaving vb/vbseo behind.

However, it is with this level of discontent that I must continue to side with Juan.

This email blast that was sent, only went to old members it looks like.... which means it was from the time befor I got hired there as staff. I have like 5 accounts on vbseo.... most were testing accounts from the time i was on staff, but all with valid emails that all forward to me. And I only got the email on my briansol account, which was made before Illa and Joe were banned from vbseo.com and "fired" from the company. The accounts made after when I was working there, did not receive the blast.

President trumps Vice President. Founder or not. Sorry.

If they had 'rights' and access, don't you think they would have sent it to the modern list?

This entire email and video is full of deception, and it's the same level of BS that Juan has been fighting for years. Eventually, he just gave up and started a new company without Illa's name on anything. False claims, lies, and neither side has the proper paper work to back it up. And such, it went to limbo mode and eventually the back broke.

Mert and I tried to buy vbseo from Juan a few years ago when we first started noticing the lack of interest in the company. We still cared. We wanted to save it before it got bad. We had a lead developer lined up in case Oleg jumped ship with Juan (basically what happened anyway). We had a figure on the table with investors ready.
We helped the customers day in and day out, made many friends, and with the help of a few other staff ran the site like it was our own. However, because of the legal issues, it couldn't be sold and that was basically the beginning of the end.

The rest is history.

And now, they ask for your support in a spam blast? How they can help you? List the address of a company INC'ed in Puerto Rico as a Florida address? And it sounds like they plan to issue a lawsuit against staff members for simply doing jobs they were paid to do by the president of a company, while the vice president was on 'administrative leave'.

Wow.


From the email:

So you admit that you do NOT have control then? Why do you pretend to?

I have no ill-will towards any party involved. Joe and I were e-friends at one point... at least i thought so. Ilia and I chatted a few times as well. Unfortunately, the company issues got in the middle of everything personal and we were all forced to take sides. That part is true. It went beyond family. It went to all of the staff who liked everyone.

Greed F's everything up every time.

And so, here we are, at the end of that road....

My professional opinion- vb is dead. 4 sucks, 5 is worse. Jump to xenforo 1.2 when it's final and leave all this behind like everyone else has....

 

I was locked out of all accounts in 2009. I am the co-owner, and without legal action was never able to come to agreement with Juan. Even up to recent he was trying to sell the company, had a buyer, and lost the deal due to his refusal to share financial status and other essential documents. There was no cooperation.

My #1 goal here today is to ensure vBSEO customers are aware of the status. If you review the vbseo.com forums, you will see that they have been abandoned. Current leadership is not communicating with them. I'm stepping in to make sure nobody else buys vBSEO thinking that the company has any active staff, or plans for continuation.

I want to hear what you all would like to see at this stage, and I'd like your public support if you agree that something needs to change.

Open source is a possibility. I have to assess if the company is in anyway viable. There is the potential for directing any remaining resources into a support team to get back up and running. TBD.

 

If that is the case, it's my opinion that management should have let customers know about it.

 

Whatever is best for the software is what should be done. It's a shame that it hasn't been supported. Let's hope everyone can put their egos aside so that it can get back on track.

 

Thank you. Flattery helps reduce stress!

 

Why don't you guys just lawyer up? Is it because it doesn't make sense to pay lawyers so much money to fight over a company that's basically worthless now? Not trying to be rude, just genuinely curious.

 

I can't speak for them, but would you sue your sibling?

 

Why don’t you start a new company and offer a product which is similar to vBSEO and offers customers an easy way to migrate off of vBSEO, while still retaining the same URL structure as before. This will offer you a new source of revenue and a way for the existing clients like me, to migrate off of vBSEO and hopefully to something stable and in development, rather than being forced to stick with the current vB versions in hopes of maintaining compatibility with vBSEO.

That way if Juan is still acting in good faith and plans to continue development of vBSEO, then he can go ahead and show that in action and we will have two competing products to choose from.

 

No I wouldn't but this doesn't seem to be much better. Their fight has spilled over into every admin forum for the last few years and isn't some well guarded secret. Correct me if I'm wrong but I think both sides have traded insults and accusations publicly in the past. I'm a vBSEO customer and would like to see the company prosper but if its been years without a resolution, I don't really see this being solved without litigation.