I have got to give vBulletin it's due... it does one thing perfectly...

Kier it remains an absolute tragedy that you had to leave. Setting aside any of the politics behind it all, it now becomes abundantly clear how much of the success of vBulletin was down to you and the way you developed the software.

It's also now clear that your successors cannot match that. I did give them a chance, I don't want to blame the actual coders because I think they are constrained by poor management.

In the long term I believe vBulletin is now finished. IPB has siezed the initiative and will become the market leaders in the fullness of time.

Of course....unless anyone has any....other ideas....ahem...

 

Mark, you took my exact thoughts and put them into words better than I ever could have. Regardless of who may be in the lead now, IP.Board is progressing quickly and in a rather astonishingly positive manner, while vBulletin lags behind and seems to be going backwards at times. In the long run, IP.Board will take the lead, and I fear for vBulletin that they've lost it forever. Not that I care for them (since they got themselves into this mess), but it's just the surprising fact of the matter.

It seems that we are currently in the period of crossing over, where vBulletin loses its customers while IP.Board gains them; the weight of the ship is shifting to the other side, and it's certainly rocking the boat!

In a short matter of time, people who come to the forum-creation/management scene for the first time will be looking at IP.Board as their first choice, with vBulletin being a second-resort option, which is the total opposite of how things were in the recent past.

 

I agree Nick.

I was an original UBB customer. I've owned UBB.Threads, UBB Eve and now vBulletin. I held on with UBB for a long time as I always thought they were going to release "the next big thing" and it never came. But they were always promising it was coming and probably still are!

This time with vBulletin, it feels exactly the same. UBB acted very much like vB is now. The same censorship, the same supression of info, developers leaving etc. etc. At that time you could slowly see vBulletin improving and improving little by little and one by one, admins slowly started changing platforms

When I left UBB, it was my site's database that was used by Jerry to develop the importer for UBB Eve into vB3.

Now that Rick Baker has regained ownership of UBB.Threads (from Ted O'Neill and Infopop/Groupee/Social Strata or whatever the heck their name is this month) I would think good things are no-doubt coming with Threads. I still actually own an expired .Threads license. But I digress!

vB feels like it's very much going down the very same road that UBB did. And this time 'round, I don't plan to stick around to read the writing on the wall. :unhunh:

 

I would be really surprised if everyone agreed on anything.


I have no remarks on the past or might-have-beens. I am very impressed with the vb4 Stylevars and the opportunities it offers and the upgrade to vb3 (which was nice) ... without having had time to really explore and use it. For those not immersed on old-vB politics I doubt vB is finished, far from it. Perhaps a newer customer base will have a different appreciation of what it offers. Further improvements over time will not be seen as catching up, but as, well, improvements.

I would love to see links to a number of sites with a lot of customization using only admincp, not separate css files. And, are they using vb3 or vb4? Anything with a separate css file, not done through the admincp, doesn't count.

 

I'm going to try to be opened minded and see where vB is headed. Sometimes the light finally blinds people to do the best thing for their customer base.

Don't get me wrong. I don't mind if the time comes spending some long weekends to convert to another platform. And I certainly will be one of the first to hop over.

Now that I've gotten over the shock of the change to vB4 I'll base any decision I make on response, customer service, and if they address the known bugs over the 4 series.... Unless someone comes out with something better....*keeping an eye on Kier's page** I maybe going over to IPB when the 3 series is no longer supported. I've already converted one due to hefty renew fee. I was one that let it expire.:doh:

I've been styling vb4 and must admin I prefer the css tableless way better. It would have been nice to see some things different. Especially with the stylevariables. Not to mention the merge system definately has some issues to work out. But I finally did get it styles and it looks like IPB. :lol:

As someone that doesn't care and won't get into the politics over at IB I could care less. I do care on paying for something that works and provides appropiate bug fixes, customer support, and cares about their own products. And that's where my business will go. That's what I pay out money for otherwise I could probably go with any open source product. But for my piece of mind that's what I want and what I expect.

 

MyBB has a pretty good styling system, which many will not be aware off because they don't look at it. You can edit all the CSS directly from within the Admin CP, add new CSS as well. PLus they have everything arranged to make the CSS changes much more user friendly.

As far as vBulletin 4 goes. You should look at it like this, it can't get worse - only better as time moves on.

 

I like MyBB.

 

For myself, I prefer IPB's styling system.

This may be because I'm a designer and can work well within css files, but its organized much more, and their in-browser editor is great for what you need it for. I'd still much rather upload files to the server and use dreamweaver or another syntax editor to work with them, but as far as the in-browser experience it seems the most powerful for me.

I don't need to worry about some main css pieces being in a separate admin area than others, just much more organized to me.

I can see where vB is nice for people who just want to change simple things, but aren't versed in CSS.

 

Do never forget where IB makes its money from: From vbulletin forums. It's their core income.

The vbulletin customers (we admins) are a total minority in the advertisement money they get from their forums. That's why they need to have a stable platform that can easily be upgraded, skinned and maintained. Never forget that! This is far more important for IB than "being better" than other forum software. Although some things like the forumhome sidebar seems to be copied from IPB which I do not understand. What IB needs is a stable software that can be maintained easily and can run without any more products they have to rely on. Hence the seo and cms integration.

• SEO is obvious as you do not want to rely three figure million dollar worth of forums on a third party script where you own the core software to run it anyway.
• The cms is obvious as you can not market forum software to most ad agencies, you can not even place your website on wikipedia as its "just a forum".

IB people are not stupid and I do believe they do not care that much about their "vbulletin admin" customer base - but they care much more in creating a better software product than jelsoft before!

 

I highly doubt that vBulletin is IB's core income.

I also do not believe that they care more about vBulletin than the jelsoft people before them.

 

Peggy, I meant IBs core income is from their forums that run on vbulletin. The income they get from us customers is minor.

Jelsoft needed to address the small board owners as there are far more small boards out there than the bigger ones. And they are only paid once per each forum regardeless how big it is.

But now IBs core income depends on their huge forums and if they would be intelligent - which they are - they need to address the big boards in their software development.

 

I disagree. Do they care about making vBulletin better to suit their own auto-forums and such? Yes, of course. Do they care about making it better for the vBulletin customer-base as a whole? Probably not so much.

It's really skewed that a company like IB, who relies on vBulletin for the success of its communities, is now the developer of vBulletin. Being the developer and one of the (if not the) largest customers at the same time just doesn't work out.

The people in charge shouldn't have such close ties to the product as IB does. To me, it's almost comparable to letting employees create their own salaries - you know they're going to make decisions out of self-interest. What's to stop IB from acting the same way?

 

vB was and still is a nice system to style. The only problem with vB4 is the default is broke in so many places (IE6!!) but on the whole, from a professional designers pov it is better than the 3 series.

The way the code (template system) has been structured will take some getting used to, but in the long term it is a more efficient way to work. While the mark-up and css may be daunting at first, it is undoubtedly better. Certainly the html is semantic and lean.

The learning curve is steeper - esp with regards to the way inheritance is being applied. But on the whole the code is clearly a definite improvement and a lot of thought has gone into the way it all works.

My biggest gripe about vB4 is the way they didn't get it working for all major browsers including and specifically IE6!!

 

ah ok I gotcha.

You know what? I truly believe that they don't give a rats a** about small board owners. Truly. Sure there are more small board owners than big board owners, but they want the big board owners, and the multiple license owners. That's where the money is. Small board owners and hobbyist license holders don't bring them the big $'s.

 

As I pointed out I think IB is not that interested in selling vbulletin licences, they are far more interested in creating a product that suite their IB forum needs.

But on the other hand the pre-buy, the fast 4.0.0 gold release ... That does not fit in this picture I drawed.

 

To be blunt, that does not fit into any logical picture that I could imagine, either.

 

It fits if you think the way Bob Brisco does in this blog post.

excerpt

The way I read it is that they are cutting back on testing ... and they are not fixing much before they launch. They just let the feedback keep coming in and continue to drop fix after fix after fix. That's my interpretation, dunno if that's what he really meant.

To me this explains the buggy release, the overwhelmed support staff, and the chaos in the vb4 "Questions & Troubleshooting" community forum. Where the same questions are being asked repeatedly (no manual and the search is too hard for most to use effectively,) and it's hard to get a knowledgeable answer. When threads are answered a good many deteriorate into complaining without much help offered.

As Bob's customer, my initial reaction the theory is: "Ow."

 

I completely agree. Especially the logical part. :p

 

Agreed on all points. If you study the IB brands forums carefully you may notice they do not seem to care about quality. I really don't think the guy at the top cares about anything as long as the advertising revenue keeps coming in.

With that in mind, why would anyone continue to use vb? No assurance that the releases will work at all.

 

Scroll back in history ... just as the internet was taking off with the public ... or just after telecom deregulation when the private long-distance companies were launching ... the era of adventure, chaos and opportunity. The frontier. Speed to market matters more than quality because there isn't much comparable for customers to choose from. And if you wait around for quality you miss that moment of limited customer choice. It's a moment in time, and it won't last, competitors will overtake and compete on price, driving down profits. I read between the lines that Bob gets that.

For IB it makes sense to vertically integrate production of the platform for their commercial forums. Yes, quite likely it means they will develop more for themselves than their license customers. Especially if it is true that license revenue is a sideshow compared with forum revenues.

Long term? Honestly? Why would IB sell a powerful forum platform to competitors of their own forums? [waving all that smoke and haze out of the crystal ball] (even though there are lots of companies doing business with their competitors ... but only if it makes financial sense to them)