vBulletin 4 or vBulletin 5?

IB has proved to be bizarrely skilful at tanking vbulletin as a product. Its really amazing how good they are at turning by far the best forum product into the worst and even being able to make it far worse with each major release.
They have proved to be so good at it that its really hard to believe that they want vbulletin to be a success. My 10 year old nephew can likely do a better job than IB management does if the purpose really is to be successful.

What company lets thousands of bugs including SEO suicide issues and many major, critical issues stand for years, while not updating its own portfolio of thousands of sites to the latest version?
What company lets the software get incompatible with PHP, javascript, etc. when the obvious result of that is that their customers websites will stop working?
What company lets the latest major version of their site rewrite all urls and completely mess up SEO to the degree that it tanks Google ranking?
I find it hard to believe that anyone is that stupid. Especially if being that stupid benefits the income of their massive portfolio of IB websites. IIRC the 100 million yearly advertising income of their website portfolio is way more than what vb is worth. IIRC they qualify vb income as insignificant for IB as a whole.
The main argument that was made when IB was introduced to the vb customers was that they would shape vb to their needs and experience. If IB really believed that vb5 is a beneficial product for webmasters then they would have updated their thousands of websites instead of sticking to vb3 and expanding that to their needs.
I find it much more likely that IB intents to tank the competition to their websites and drive webmasters into despair to the degree that IB can buy sites cheap. I may be wrong, but if it looks like a duck then it may well be one.

Also remember this nugget from 2007:

Who knows. We can't look in their heads. Though XenForo is basically the quality that vb4 should have been. Before XenForo a webmaster could choose between vb and IPB. Moving to IPB means SEO problems, used to mean performance issues and shocking the memberbase with very different UXD. XenForo works similar to vb so that a migration will not shock members as much as IPB. Its SEO is also better than vb and it scales very well. So since XenForo was launched there is a way out of vb without competing websites benefiting from it.

Support is a product which sells for $199. The more bugs and problems vb customers experience, the more support is needed. Their support package must sell like hot cakes.

As said, I can't look into their heads so its all speculation. Yet, the unthinkable has become the most likely explanation if you ask me. But hey, what do I know.

 

Speaking of platform migrations, the other day I was curious about who's switching to what (obviously there's going to be migrations to/from most anything)... but interesting to see it as a chart. One thing that's interesting is every migration the system has detected as either been to/from XenForo. It has not seen anyone moving from vB to IPB or IPB to vB yet.

https://tools.digitalpoint.com/cookie-search



Not terribly surprising to me that the bulk of the migrations are from vB to XF with vB being in the state that it is.

 

Interesting chart. Too bad there aren't numbers in that pie to show how many are making the moves. How do you detect the migrations?

Scott

 

If the spider sees one system installed, then on a later date sees something else. Not terribly magic or anything. Lol

There isn't going to be a massive amount of migration simply because of the work involved (like you will never see thousands switching in a short period of time).

 

One advantage to switching from vB3/vB4 to IPB for vBSEO users is that a former vBSEO employee has created a plugin to maintain the old vBSEO rewritten links, which should mean zero catch-up time for Google and other search engines.

 

Hmm...Ok. It would be cool though, to see a bar chart below that chart with number of migrations aggregated per month. Just to see what kind action we're talking about.

Scott

 

Looking at those % it seems that the total number of websites that migrated is 26 or a multiplication of 26.

To add to the above post, also consider this not insignificant quote:

 

I added something to the charts that really isn't going to be that interesting, since it only goes back a month at this point, but you can toggle the charts to show area percent charts historically. Again, only started logging the historical data as of August 1... but going forward it will be interesting to see trends.

For example, you can see that on August 1, XenForo's install base only had 4% using 1.2... today it's 44.3% (a pretty quick uptake of a new version).


Some of the charts (like forum platform marketshare, web server marketshare, etc.) will be pretty interesting down the road when there's more historical data to plot.

 

I prefer VB3 but since that's not going to be updated again I'd say VB4 as that is more stable than the vb5 connect which reminds me of Xenforo and IPB.

 

Hang on fellers. VB5 will be gold soon and then everything will be peachy.

 

@Big al I doubt Merlin and all his alchemy knowledge could make vB5 gold.