Interview with Kier - vBulletin Project Manager

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The Sandman submitted a new Article:

Interview with Kier - vBulletin Project Manager

Kier Darby, Product Manager and Lead Developer of Jelsoft's vBulletin, has been working around the clock to get vBulletin 3.5 ready for prime time. Nevertheless, he generously agreed to take some time to answer our questions for an interview regarding the latest version of vBulletin, future releases, other topics of interest to Forum Administrators, and a bit of a personal glimpse as well. :)

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Can you give us a brief bio?

I'm twenty-eight years old and live in Berkshire. My background is in computer graphics and software development, though the computer graphics side has been largely consigned to the past since I joined Jelsoft / vBulletin in 2001 as a developer. In late 2002 the then lead developer, John Percival decided to take a back seat in future development of vBulletin and since then I have acted as both lead developer and product manager.


What activities do you do enjoy for relaxation?

Relaxation? I gave up on that quite some time ago, life's too short to not be busy all the time. When I'm not working I enjoy cycling, walking, spending time with my family and friends and all the other stuff with which normal people tend to occupy themselves.


What are your favorite books? Movies? Music? Games?

Book-wise I'm a big fan of Iain M Banks. I've only read his sci-fi series so far, but when I have some time I think I'll dive into the rest of his work (written as Iain Banks, without the initial). I've recently devoured most of Dan Brown's novels, though I've yet to start The Da Vinci Code. I'm a huge movie fan and people are always astonished when they see my rather eclectic DVD collection. My house has become something of a draw as a cinema for my friends and family since I got a room big enough to properly mount my plasma screen and 7.1 THX system. Games-wise, I haven't played anything seriously on my PC since I came on-board with vBulletin - there's always something to be done that gets in the way of gaming.


What is your educational background?

After finishing four A-levels and two AS-levels I went on to read computer visualization and animation for my degree. The degree was 50% artistic and 50% programming, as the course was aimed at both those who wanted to be CG artists and also those who wanted to write graphics software. At the time I was very much in the artistic camp rather than the programming side... funny how things change given time....
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FlyBoy73

Enthusiast
Joined
Feb 12, 2004
Messages
189
Just came across this.. Excellent interview! And vB3.5 just went GOLD..
Thanks for everything Kier & vB! And great job, Sandman!

Time to upgrade, TAZ.. ;)
 
Bigguy

Bigguy

W.U.B Owner
Joined
Sep 25, 2005
Messages
611
That was good, the part about the release of the software was like watching a movie, lol. Very nice interview and congratulations on your wedding plans, all the best to you and the Miss's.
 
B

Borghunter

Enthusiast
Joined
May 24, 2006
Messages
202
Thanks for the interview Kier, some great tips you have on forums there as well. Thanks a ton.
 
thegotoguy

thegotoguy

Neophyte
Joined
Nov 18, 2009
Messages
4
Great interview.

Great interview. I just joined today and read this interview. I don't run vbulletin on my forum but I run phorum. Phorum is very very basic but it does load fast. I really took in some serious insight from your interview and I believe I can implement this insight to improve my forum. Especially the part where you insist that too many forum categories make a forum seem dead. It really does. I had to revamp everything about 1 month ago when the site crashed and I lost everything when my server changed to php5. So I had to start from scratch so I made a ton of improvements. My (site) forum is only 11 months old and I have had a great deal of success with it so far. I am finally moving up in position on google (took forever) for my search term and am sitting roughly at 300k on alexa (at the time of this post). I can't wait to see what the next few months bring. Its exciting to watch a site grow in popularity. I do tend to delete a lot of posts though and I do often ban spammers. Specifically the ones who make meaningless posts about pharmaceuticals (you know the ones). I just don't see it as quality content for anyone. I don't however delete any other ones. I have been hell bent on ensuring posts are made in proper categories though so I do move quite a few posts a day. Any input on seo since google has dumped page rank into file 13?
Thanks in advance! Dave
 
DRE

DRE

Fan
Joined
Jan 8, 2011
Messages
540
Wow I didn't know vBulletin 4 was in development since 2005. I wonder how he feels about it now.
 
PhantomOfNyx

PhantomOfNyx

Aspirant
Joined
Sep 26, 2014
Messages
28
I loved Vbulletin 3.X
I decided to migrate to Xenforo instead of upgrading to 4.0 but HOLY I had no clue they already had started developing back then.
 
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