This document from the lawsuit paints a picture of vBulletin development...

http://shamil.co.uk/pdf/vbsi-xfl/80-1.pdf

It seems the whole vBulletin management thing was a bit of a fiasco even before Internet Brands, since Kier's comment was that the previous company owners had both asked for social networking features to be added to vBulletin (aka 3.7 and 3.8) and promised Internet Brands they'd get vBulletin 4 within a year or two complete with full rewrite. No wonder it got off to a bad start.

Similarly, this kind of explains the problems with vBulletin 4 in a nutshell:

Brisco replied that only programmers care about software architecture,
and that anyone who proposed a project to him with a timeline exceeding six
months would be fired.

Now to be fair, it seems from the comments and 'history' that much of this stuff was a misunderstanding and it wasn't all bad news, but I guess it might be a potential explanation for why vBulletin 4 and onwards were extremely rushed.

What do you think?

 

Without reading the whole PDF, what don't you give us a summary? Of course without Kier being on the developmental team, things would be different. What do you think about this @Brandon @Carlos @Dan Hutter or @WEfail

 

Well for the history part... basically something like this happened:

Kier was planning on stopping version 3 at 3.6 and going straight to 4
James Limm and probably John Percival wanted to sell to Internet Brands
But presumably to sweeten the deal, they decided that vBulletin should add social networking features. Not sure why, maybe to keep up, maybe to have a better price for the sale.
But they also told Internet Brands vB 4 would be available in a year or two.
So, hell broke loose. Kier and co had to add extra features (social networking, blogs, etc) to 3.6, making 3.7 to 3.8
But this gave them less time/manpower for vBulletin 4
And IB expected a vBulletin 4 to be ready fairly quickly (which I assume it would be if 3.7 onwards weren't taking up development time)
So when the vBulletin team went to meet Internet Brands, IB got annoyed at how 'long' it was taking, and threatened to outsource development to China.
I presume the pressure got to him, Kier left and started XenForo, then the court case was filed.

From what I can tell, the whole thing was a bit of a break down from all sides. The Jelsoft management were basically making promises the team could never meet to get Internet Brands to buy, Internet Brands were demanding development to be done in record time and Kier and co had their own problems (from what I remember from back in the vB days, they were pretty stubborn when it come to accepting feedback and adding customer requests for features, or keeping up with competitors). As a result, everything pretty much went to hell.

Interestingly, it seems like at one point, we may well have had the old vBulletin team working on vBulletin 4, had the whole social networking feature stuff not been thrown on to raise sales. It also seems like Kier himself had the idea for the vB CMS, and that his concept might not have been much better than IB's one. So on that side, I guess IB might have actually got something right.

And by that, I mean that while their coding skills, forum management 'skills', management in general and design in general were pretty bad, Internet Brands did at least realise that if vBulletin didn't change soon, it'd be obsolete. I don't think Kier and his team realised how fast vBulletin 3 was falling behind, Invision Power Board was moving past at light speed and even their free competitors were looking more modern by the day, and if they were just left to their own devices, I think we'd only be seeing vBulletin 4 by about 2010-2011. I also don't think they'd realised that things like social networking, blogs, content management systems, portals, groups, etc were actually becoming required features either, and unless something did change I think vB would never have been able to compete with IPB's 'suite'.

Just my take on it all.

 

Indeed. Kier's passion for quality, his passion for performance is evident with xenForo. Brisco taking to another area of the world that does not have expertise in forum development is something I would not have done. However, I do understand that a company needs to have a proprietary technology. By having a proprietary tech, you're able to keep things in-house. Problem with Brisco's logic is that the Jelsoft acquisition isn't really "in-house." Nonono.....you BOUGHT it. It's yours!

And that sort of happened under Internet Brands' control.

I said the same thing, but some people on xenForo said that it was James Limm who pushed for the acquistion. I don't think the acquisition talks started from the owners, tho. iB wanted to buy them in the first place. They needed more millions to get past the IPO requirements.

Social Media was growing steam, so of course, to keep with the times... it was necessary. Kier added social features to xenForo, and so far, iB had only added facebook.... Not the kind of vision that Kier envisioned.

Kier has proven that it can be done. In fact, less than 2 years.

Actually, social networking and blogs were added before the iB acquisition went through.

Yep, they deserve it, for treating Kier and co. like garbage.

That's iB's fault. Quality > Quantity.

Would've been a bad idea in the first place. The original vB3 team is what made the brand a breakout success. The software was already popular with vB2, but vB3 is the one that pushed that envelope.

We all know this. It's just personal.

Oh, you mean like right now? Kier's repeating this with xenForo, we went months, and a year without any update to the software, answers to the actual questions at xenForo, the only thing they've done so far is made vague announcements, and responses.

No, I disagree. XF's Resource Manager is better than ANY one of vBulletin's 'forks' such as the abomination that is the vBCMS/Publishing Suite.

Had Brisco treated the team the right way, and treated them with a lot of care and respect, I don't think they would've left Jelsoft/vBulletin Solutions.

Newsflash: They already are. In fact, 50% of IPB's recent new changes were reflective of vBSI's actions. I noticed from IPB's recent announcements and moves - they want to make vBSI/vBulletin their direct competitor. I wouldn't be so surprised if vBSI acquired IPS in the future. IPS 'suite' sounds too similar to vB4's Publishing Suite.

 

Well not quite, I got the picture he wasn't planning to make 3.7 or 3.8 at all.

But then I guess the promise of money made Jelsoft management try and force things onto the team as to look better for the sell out.

Eh, no forum software has done 'social' stuff that well to be honest. I'd probably give this to IPB for the integrated logins and stuff.

It would have been the same for vBulletin, had Kier not been told to add 3.7 and 3.8 and the various add ons. This meant they had to code and test multiple releases and features for an old code base, then rewrite everything including said new stuff.

I know. But the point is, the feature was basically forced onto them by management at Jelsoft to make vBulletin look better for Internet Brands. And from what I hear, the team wasted a fair amount of time on this stuff.

You have to admit, IB wasn't the only possible bad guy in the case.

Agree, doubt anyone will disagree. Unless someone like Bob Brisco is a member here.

Yes. I don't like XenForo's current management either.

But I could see signs of it even back in the 'glory days'. There seem to be quite a few features added purely for developer vanity/official site uses. Does anyone use the vcard system?

And hey, the Project Tools were designed purely for the developers and not the customers. What a waste of money and resources that thing was. That time should have been spent on vB Gallery or vB Downloads or vB Chat or vB Content or something, something actual customers might have a use for.

I also still remember the old days where the devs argued it was impossible to make a tableless forum layout or something. Despite tons of expert opinions and showcases, they wouldn't budge at all.

I know this will probably annoy some people, but Kier and his team strike me as a little too... arrogant. A bit too concerned with their own 'creativity' to the detriment of customers, a bit self centered and almost stuck in a bubble not noticing what their competitors are doing. And their fans scare me far more, they seem a bit too cult like.

Well yes, I'm not disagreeing with that.

I'm just saying from what the document says, Kier was working on a CMS and it seems reasonable to believe it might have been a disaster like the vBulletin one. I mean, Kier and his team were responsible for blogs, social groups, project tools, etc, and none of those were particularly good even in their day.

It might have been a good system, may have been terrible. It's just the document gives me the impression Kier drew up the original vB CMS plans.

I agree entirely.

I doubt they'll acquire IPS, the company has been around a while and would be pretty unwilling to sell to the guys who destroyed their competitors. Best let your enemies just burn.

Unless you mean they want to sue IPS, in which case... yeah, that could be a damn tough court case given how they're a much bigger company than XenForo are.

 

Nope, iB's the bad guy in all of this. KAM waited for their contract to expire, I bet they were anxious to get it off the ground.

 

I'm not saying IB aren't in the wrong and that I don't think they're a terrible company, because they are on both counts. But it alarms me how people seem to overlook vB's old shortcomings almost out of creator worship. It's similar to how fans basically worship certain video game creators when they do things that massively damage the series and cause it to stop selling, and I also think it shows a hypocrisy in people, the idea that individuals are mainly good and large corporations mainly evil.

Honestly, I'd say it's more black vs grey morality than black vs white morality.

 

Are you saying you liked vB4/vB5?

It's not just creator worship, it's the quality between today's version of vbulletin [vB4/vB5], the old vbulletin [vB3], and xenforo. Going by your video game logic, maybe so: Before MW2 was shipped to retailers, the original IW team left - so obviously, quality goes down. A lot of people have been complaining about MW2's quality, and it continues now with MW3. I loved COD4 so much I just replayed it today.

 

Nope, didn't like or use either. But I did also think vB 3 wasn't keeping up with the times. Heck, I'd say some of the ideas Internet Brands had were probably wise ones from a business perspective. They were done terribly in the actual product, but they did at least look at competitors, realise vB was falling a bit behind and at least try to update. It's just they had/have no decent devs working there, the design of how to implement the features was poor and they were coded poorly. The old vB team were often quite stubborn and seemingly in it for themselves as much as the customers.

And yes, I know all about the Modern Warfare and Call of Duty development stuff. But even then, the later guys may have had some decent ideas, just didn't use them well/in a great product. And Call of Duty 4 was a lot more interesting than the 3.6/3.7/3.8 versions of vBulletin.