Vbulletin Dead ?? No rich resources/mods available.. Upgrades Costing too...

[Uncrowned]

VB is a large and expensive to develop software that needs a lot to come back to life and the biggest hurdle is gaining the capital funds to pay new developers and fund the development the software needs to come back alive in a market with dying customer bases and huge competitors. I personally believe the best shot VB has is to fully go under and allow someone else to rebuild the platform though crowd funding or the like, although with giants like Xenforo and IPB doing a fairly well received job right now, that may even be impossible.

 

[feldon30]

I really don't know how you fix vB5 when it's built on faulty premises.

 

[silver_2000]

many users dont want to bother with a forum, they prefer to use social media groups ... I still have 3 or 4 old VB sites that I maintain. Most are based on old cars that arent made any more so the user base shrinks with every crash

 

[thenashy]

The moment it was sold was the day migration plans should have been drawn up to move to another platform.

5 was a disaster at launch and many of us who planned to migrate to 5 decided to jump ship.

 

[Jeremy8]

The moment it was sold was the day migration plans should have been drawn up to move to another platform.

5 was a disaster at launch and many of us who planned to migrate to 5 decided to jump ship.

Internet Brands bought vBulletin in 2007, 2 years before vB 4 was released. I don't think vB 4 was a failure, it was pretty popular. Most vB forums I see now are either (still) vB 3 or vB 4. I don't think I've ever come across a vB 5 forum in the wild unless I was purposely looking for one.

I don't think XF 1 vs. vB 4 was so clear, but XF 2 is better than vB 5 and a lot of the vB community has now moved to XF as a result.

 

[dougdirac]

Nostalgia. I remember with vB5 arrived with this awesome promo video and I wanted to try it out, but it turned out my "lifetime" vB licence was meaningless. That turned out to be a stroke of luck.

 

[zappaDPJ]

I don't think vB 4 was a failure, it was pretty popular.

It was very popular and still is with a lot of forum owners. However it was also a turning point. It's release signaled a loss of faith in the company, primarily because the product was released long before it was ready.

 

[rhody401]

5 was released long before it was ready. I always found 4 to be fairly stable. I have licenses for both, and abandoned the V5 setup, because it was just too slow and buggy at the time.

 

[Abizaga]

but it turned out my "lifetime" vB licence was meaningless. That turned out to be a stroke of luck.

What do you mean?

 

[vojo]

am i the only one who still using vb ? no?

 

[haqzore]

am i the only one who still using vb ? no?

Certainly not.

Much of TAZ conversation skews towards new announcements & industry news, upcoming info/updates, lots of "how do i start" type discussion & info... recent developments, etc etc...

And its quite unanimously agreed that VB, in its current state, doesn't have a place in any of those conversations.

 

[dougdirac]

What do you mean?

When vB4 came out, we ended up paying some hundreds of dollars for a "lifetime" license which included "lifetime" updates and ticket support.
When vB5 came out in Fall of 2012, it turned out that "lifetime" license holders would have to have to pay for the upgrade at a price that reflected hardly any savings compared to a new license. So lifetime didn't really mean lifetime, it meant until they arbitrarily decided to change the version number for a cash grab. I couldn't even get a discounted version to try on a non-public test site. I found it so insulting at the time that I held off.
It was a good thing too since it turned out that if I paid the ~$180 for a vB5 license, I would have lost my vB4 ticket support. Made no sense.

 

[feldon30]

vB4 arrived with the license change which was a lump sum up front -- killing financial support for incremental updates. This concerned me because I knew that when the vB4 money train ran out, they'd be pitching vB5 within 2 years which was a super tight schedule.

Just as importantly, vB4 was an incremental upgrade after the lead developer -- Kier Darby -- had told us that vBulletin 3.7 was already virtually unmaintainable because of a decade of development cruft and that a clean slate was desperately needed, one that never came. It was the first time we saw Kier seem both stressed and muzzled in what he was allowed to say to the public. I picked it up right away.

It seemed very suspicious after being clearly told that vB3.7 was at the absolute limit of where it could go as far as more features being bolted onto it and that every time they fixed something, 5 other things broke. And then suddenly vB3.8 happened (as we now know, forced by founder James E. Limm to make the company attractive to buyers so he could go get him a nice sailboat). Then vB4 was so obviously rushed not as a complete rewrite as we'd been promised, but as yet another bolt on to the ailing vB3/vB2 codebase.

Most people kept saying "but it's vBulletin, it's Jelsoft, it's the best forum software ever! I'm sure they'll figure it out." I was one of the few warning people that this was some seriously concerning s***. Sad that it played out the way it did, but it was not completely unexpected.

 

[Abizaga]

When vB4 came out, we ended up paying some hundreds of dollars for a "lifetime" license which included "lifetime" updates and ticket support.
When vB5 came out in Fall of 2012, it turned out that "lifetime" license holders would have to have to pay for the upgrade at a price that reflected hardly any savings compared to a new license. So lifetime didn't really mean lifetime, it meant until they arbitrarily decided to change the version number for a cash grab. I couldn't even get a discounted version to try on a non-public test site. I found it so insulting at the time that I held off.
It was a good thing too since it turned out that if I paid the ~$180 for a vB5 license, I would have lost my vB4 ticket support. Made no sense.

Oooh wow yeah I noticed how they incresed the upgrade price from 3.x to 4 too, also from using a lifetime license. With competition charging hundreds less than that you'd think they'd re evaluate their pricing system.

 

[feldon30]

Oooh wow yeah I noticed how they incresed the upgrade price from 3.x to 4 too, also from using a lifetime license. With competition charging hundreds less than that you'd think they'd re evaluate their pricing system.

You have to remember the context. vBulletin was the industry leader at the time.

 

[we_are_borg]

What people forget is that there is no incentive for vBulletin to hurry development, the only income are new licenses and support sales. Internet Brands and their main company have more then enough money to make a new version but there still milking vBulletin 5.

 

[Abizaga]

You have to remember the context. vBulletin was the industry leader at the time.

True, by then Xenforo would have been just starting up, but IPB would have still offered some stiff competition for that time, I'd think.

 

[ManagerJosh]

vBulletin is owned by Internet Brands, which owns thousands of forums. IB has actually converted some of their forums from vB to Xenforo.

I want to see a list

 

[Smokey]

vBulletin died when Jelsoft sold it to Internet Brands.

 

[feldon30]

I want to see a list

The thing we quickly found out is that InternetBrands apparently has absolutely no shame. They buy popular forums and then seem to let them rot until they aren't making enough money to justify their existence. In my opinion They're litigious, digital slumlords.