The Burning Question

Always felt myself, "maybe" John and James looked at sales and renewal spreadsheet figures and saw things was changing in the forum market at that time. They decided it was the right time to sell before things got any worse with the company being worth less if sold later on. Always thought it was more of a "retirement business move" than anything else, they've not come back since leading another new forum software product. So for me they wanted out and felt it was the right time to doing it, especially looking at the bigger picture of everything else going on around them at the time. IPB was making drastic gains on vBulletin because they stood still for many years after vBulletin 3 was released, they rested on their laurels and didn't start work on vBulletin 4 soon afterwards, not for many years in fact. To this date when they did announce vBulletin 4 was going to be a complete rewrite and Kier started doing some design mock-ups, it was probably a ploy by James and John to help boost the sale and price of vBulletin floated for sale soon afterwards. Used as to make things appear they was progressing forward to any prospective buyers.

I think the problem with adding feature after feature, or only adding features the developers want in there. It's very much a two bladed sword, because you'll get members wanting features being added willy-nilly, that others see as bloated junk put in. If the developers follow that rule of thumb throwing everything in wanted by the masses, that's what the product will become, bloated junk. So in that respect the developers can't win really - dammed if they keep throwing those features in, dammed if they don't. I'd sooner see them NOT throw everything in people want, best they make the final decision to avoid the product becoming bloated trash.

What I could never get my head around, was why they never created an official "Gallery and CMS", just like IPS had to strengthen their position against them. There are some things like that "most people wanted" on vB, and they should have created them years ago without a shadow of doubt. That where vBulletin fell short for me. That gave me the impression for the last few years at vBulletin, Kier and Co was having an easy life resting their laurels with vBulletin 3 success against other forum products. Which it did without a doubt make vBulletin the "Number 1" in the forum paid market for a good few years then, just a pity they rested on that success for too long!

 

Honestly, most customers do not care one jot about this rewrite thing. The power users and coders do because they understand programming code. Your average joe doesn't, they just want the software to work. It sounds like vB5 might be mostly a rewrite but even if isn't, that won't determine its success other than with a handful of noisy users in the support forums.

 

I couldnt agree more.

 

True. I recall xenforo did not want the text include in subscribed emails. I didn't think they'd come around to include it.
Things like join date. I think that is something important to show in the 'postbit'.

 

I remember the time on vBulletin when the mods let it slip the developers ignore the "suggestions forum", saying they never read it. Did that cause a rumpus!

 

Spotted they don't display a user "post count" on XenForo below your avatar. Sure they did before?

 

None of that was ever there by default.

 

I will have to agree with this, but this was more Kier than Mike.

Before XF was released, he asked me a few times how I felt about this or that feature. For example, how important did I feel that smilies were to forum members. Well, y'all know how I feel about smilies, and I DO feel that they are VERY important to forum members. The smilies ended up feeling like they were thrown in almost as an afterthought. That really backfired on them.

There were many other features that were talked about and discarded. This is one of the reasons that I stepped down from staff - Kiers' reluctance to listen to the customers' requests. It just made me angry, and we butted heads about it. So I said bye bye...

 

The default postbit doesn't contain it, but the "kitchen sink" postbit does.

 

Just that question alone shows how out of touch he really is with the forum community. Smilies are pretty much a "have to have" for nearly every forum.

 

Yeah well he discovered that when customers were pretty ticked off that the smilies weren't organized and sorted like they are (or were) in vB.

 

Actually quite interesting to read about Kier more than Mike as thats how it comes across to me. Mike always seems to be frustrated, it comes across in the way he writes at times. He is also a lot quieter than Kier and as awful as it sounds, it comes across like he doesnt get the credit he deserves for what he actually does.

At the end of the day the problem does come down to one thing IMO at the end of the day. Both Kier and Mike are developers. They can develop a fantastic product, but cannot manage a business very well as has been proven with xenforo. I still hope that they do manage to make it stick, as much as I dont feel they will. Unfortunatly I think they will be crushed by vbulletin in more than one sense. Firstly the lawsuit and secondly VB5. Because as much as people critisise vbulletin they are a very big company and its extremely unusual for such a company to make the same mistake twice in a row. Make mistakes twice maybe, but not one after another. I believe they will build the product well this time around in a bid to gain back customer support, and then it will likely go downhill for a while again whilst they cash grab.

 

Well, I think their lack of business skills may have been at least partly to blame for their falling out with IB to begin with. I dont think KAM has the business acumen necessary to successfully deal with the realities of the management and marketing of a business.

 

Isn't it technically one guy(Ashley) who is supposed to be doing the business front while KM do software?

 

Whoever is responsible for the "business" side of things - I'm afraid it's simply not been good enough.

They have turned potential massive success with unprecedented support and goodwill from customers, into near disaster.

There were even many people giving them money in the form of licences even though they did need those licences, just to support them.

Yet they steadily and progressively alienated a large number of these.

I doubt I will ever grasp why that was allowed to happen.

 

Don't think they've done it on purpose to alienate customers, still get the feeling something IS going on in the background.

 

I was one of them. I bought licenses just for testing purposes for some of my vB forums.

Funny though, xenforo threw everyone a bone (1.1.3) and all is quiet now.
Doesn't take much.

 

Yes, you are correct.

 

Ah well, fun and games again!

Looks like we "post dribble here 99% of the time", according to Slavik on XenForo we do anyway. Just read it now and made me laugh! Funny, because the remaining 1% we got correct that XenForo 1.2 would not get released, which it didn't of course (just like we predicted). Not to mention all has gone quiet on XF again since the 1.1.3 Maintenance release was made. Things are right back to square one again there, and even spotted SmackLan asking the question "Bug Fixes", and getting "no answers" coming forward from his so called close buddies KAM. Guess that buddy thing only swings one way these days?

Slavik said:

I would, because we got it right! Shows how much even that small microscopic 1% left can mean! :lol:

Link: http://xenforo.com/c...-move-on.33588/