vBulletin Nightmare

Who knows hey, We will have to endure the "have faith in us policy" and simply don't think for ourselves.

 

People wouldn't be so leery of IB, and would maintain greater trust for them.

Right now, everybody feels like they've been betrayed and not appreciated. This could have been avoided.


Customers' long-term trust can go much further than a short-term boost in profits.

 

You have completely confused two things (1) reasonable notice, and (2) reasonable pricing/license terms. I am only talking about reasonable notice. Feel free to make suggestions as to what they price should have been, perhaps not the equivalent of forcing current license purchasers not having to spend 90% of the cost of a new license just to upgrade a product you supposed own and paid for.

Providing fair and adequate disclosure with some reasonable prior notice is ALWAYS an appropriate manner in treating anyone fairly, business or personal relationship. People will scream about license change terms, that doesn't change the manner it is communicated to them. Well over 90% of the customer base is reasonably notified if an email is sent to the address on file at vBulletin and notice is posted on the home page and forums. To imply otherwise is absurd and consists of a tiny minority.

But it is NEVER acceptable to completely blindside customers with a short pricing ultimatum just because you won't make as much money if you treated the customer honestly and fairly! Do I really need to explain why? As it is, there is a serious question of actual consumer fraud in selling new licenses knowing they'd be changed imminently (requiring an additional cash outlay in excess of 50% of the purchase price). There is no question that if vBulletin had disclosed the licensing change prior to the official notice, virtually every customer who bought a new forum or maintenance plan would have waited to buy a license under the new terms. But the vBulletin plan was not to disclose that information and instead grab the cash through the customer confidence in the licensing plan and suddenly change it the next day. As a result, vBulletin now has a scarlett letter F imprinted on their company's reputation and they earned it entirely by themselves by acting with mind boggling dishonestly.

Yes there is. Tell people about it beforehand. Hear the issues and complaints of your huge customer base. Decide the best way to go forward knowing that not everyone will be happy. At least everyone will be forewarned and not feel like someone punched them in the cahones while they were sleeping.

 

I really think Apple has it right... and yet another way they have it right... any time they release an update to a product, they allow anyone who purchased the product within something like 60 days of the updated one can go in and have it switched out. Which is exactly what vBulletin should have done. If you bought anything within the past 60 days, you automatically get an upgrade to vb4.

 

It's not just Apple. Most companies and anyone with a modicum of common sense does this for customers within X days of a major change of terms. This is what makes the Internet Brands decisions regarding vBulletin almost impossible to believe. They have lost all credibility and there is no backtracking now. While I'm sure the executive team at Internet Brands has plenty of money to do whatever they want, they'd probably be most productive by pre-releasing their resumes to headhunters.

 

To those claiming they were blindsided:
While I feel your pain, you were hardly blindsided. You had 6 months of warning before the announcement of pricing. We all knew it was going up by a large amount. Just because IB didn't want to say it was true didn't mean it was worth paying attention to.

I'm not defending IB here by any means, because I've made my opinion on their horrific tactics quite public , but we did have a few month's warning that this was coming.

 

The vast majority of customer's do not visit the forums and don't visit the vbulletin site for any reason but to solve a problem.

I actually do visit the forums over there every once in awhile and more often at vb.org, and I didn't hear anything about the pricing changes or anything else.

 

The part about "for example purposes only" is because of the mention about vB5 in there. We can all 'guestimate' about when vB4 will be released but there is no timeline for vB 4.1, vB 4.2, or vB 5.0 & above.

That thread tells you exactly how long vB 3.8.x will be supported for security patches, until it is up to four point releases old.

• When vB 4.0 gets released, then vB 3.8.x will continue to receive bug & security updates, vB 3.7.x will continue to receive security updates, and vB 3.6.x will be EOL.
• When vB 4.1 gets released, then vB 4.0 will continue to receive bug & security updates, vB 3.8.x will continue to receive security updates, and vB 3.7.x will be EOL.
• When vB 4.2 gets released, then vB 4.1 will continue to receive bug & security updates, vB 4.0 will continue to receive security updates, and vB 3.8.x will be EOL.

 

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't the only notice we had from the leaked documentation? If so, then that's really nothing to go by. Many people dismissed that information for obvious reasons, while others chose to believe it. You cannot expect customers to believe it when it wasn't intended to be released.

The point is this: IB isn't advertising the new pricing in full-force until now. They should have started long ago.

 

Am I the only one who found Wayne's comment here that they don't want you to use the forum and they are shifting their focus away from it a little weird?

Blogs are years old, and if your company seriously thinks they have a significant future in your product... ah... let's just say I'm very happy that I asked for a refund on my vb4 purchase.

 

By the way, my ban still has not been lifted, and my support tickets are still being ignored. Are they burying their head in the sand over there? Wayne also stopped answering questions here. Have you guys really not learned your lesson by now?

 

I fully agree, especially after that leak. Yes, I was referring to the leaked information, which proved to be oh so true (well, sans the release dates). Just because they didn't want to admit it, or deny it (another clue it was true, from the beginning) doesn't mean it's not a good warning.

Personally, I took it as that, and made sure that licenses were updated as they could be.

The warning was most definitely there. All you had to do was look at how they handled the leak and reacted to it to see it was coming.

 

I just re-read Ray Morgan’s initial announcement on the licence changes re;

You know what's going to happen here, given that from vb3.8.2 up till 3.8.4 took 3 months to release, folks are going to say sod paying for a vb4 licence now, may as well wait for vb5 and only pay once. Now here is the question, what punitive measures will they take for late renewals??? Sounds familiar?

It also seems he knew of these changes back in August, yet they took money from folk’s right up till the announcement knowing that they would need to pay again. And here is the rub, if you have been running vb4 for months then you have a vb4 licence, you must have, as you need to agree to it before you are allowed to download, yet poor ol Ray is saying O no you don’t, you need to pay full cost for another one if your subscription expires before vb5 is released, and when 5 comes out you need to pay again. You really could not make this up.

 

I agree; it definitely didn't come as a surprise.

But as I said in my original post, you cannot expect customers to rely on this leaked information, for several reasons:

1. There's always the chance that it is fabricated or simply not true.
2. Its exploitation could result in its modification and adjustment, making the leaked information void.
3. Many customers probably don't even check the forum or know what the heck is going on with vBulletin except for e-mail updates and the news feed in the AdminCP. Therefore, they are clueless until IB makes the official announcement.

 

Well, all that plus they basically tried to deny that the information in the leak was factual.

As I recall, first they denied it's validity as fact and then later, they more or less said what the leak contained was not finalized and subject to change.

Of course, that's that same deny, deny, deny, approach that IB took when the Beta forum screen shots surfaced too. And then when IB finally did open the upgraded support forums, they sure looked like the screenshots that were floating around.

I guess these guys think we're all stupid or something. :uhh:

 

ptwiggins:

Hopefully they gave you a refund,otherwise they are in violation of the license agreement?

 

Now you're hitting the nail big time. Because this is basically any user that acts like I do.

Just like anyone can look at vB.com, I've been using vB since 2003 and I rarely post on the official forums, or any of these forum administration oriented forums for that matter. Not until I discovered about the vB 4 information leak, after I recived the presale e-mail from vBulletin Solutions and started digging up what's going on in the vB community nowadays, I realised that I'm going to face a bad situation. That's also when I signed up here, while for the first time being to this site. I was even amused to notice that I have an account on TAZ, despite hardly having posted there.

If I wouldn't have used my old know-how regarding where to find vB information outside the official Jelsoft sites, I would've probably been totally lost like a lot of other customers. The admin CP feed has been so simple to follow, so I haven't had to visit the vB.com forums for a long time to know if there's updates available. I believe this counts for many others too.

A short presale timeframe and one presale e-mail will certainly get a lot of longtime committed customers stranded, because that type of customers, like I am, don't usually bother reading all the knitty gritty. We rather focus on running our own shows, than spend our limited on discussing how we ban, choose staff or if we have a new theme.

 

I wonder just how much some of this is tied to IB beating on their competitors such as the AutoForums group of sites. IB gets to update their own families of forums just by moving some numbers around on a ledger. They expense the cost of 4.0 to the forum and enter in a sale over on the vB Solutions side, no cash has to exchange hands. Now if you are AutoForums with 125 or so forums, mostly all running vB you now have an issue. In the previous license scheme they probably had a a few sites every month that had to purchase the annual support license. Much more manageable standpoint with a few 100 bucks a month going to licensing. Now if they want to keep current it's a significant bit of kit at an estimated $16k. Numbers like that sure do mess up cash flow predictions.

Then we have the case of a small developer group that is making a few dollars selling vB enhancements. All of the sudden the sales stop...why..no one is willing to invest any money in their forums as they have no idea of the direction things will go with 4. The folks getting paid will most likely move their products as quickly as possible. But what about all that free stuff on vb.org. Many forums owners have more than a few that will not will be picked up for 4 as the coders are questioning their own desire to move to 4 or not.

This whole bit has really bought a fair number of projects to a halt and is chasing some away that would have moved to 4 if the more traditional betas we had in the past were carried forth to 4 development.

So as one that does dev I'm double screwed right now. People don't want to pay for stuff that may need to be totally reworked and I have to buy in if I want to keep in this line of work. In the end I get to spend money when none is coming in just to take the risk that 4 will adopted by enough users to keep funding development.

 

I think you will be alright, I think that 4 will be widely adopted, one way or another. Apparently a lot of new people are buying it in addition to the upgrades, and many will need help.

Just a slightly informed guess, though. Hope it works out well for you.

 

Scott MacVicar has posted this on his Twitter page:

I'm not making any comment on it, just drawing it to people's attention.