The watching 'vBulletin's market share nosedive' thread.

[BirdOPrey5]

You do like playing games don't you. What's the big deal about saying if you get paid or not?

Because it shouldn't matter.

 

[rudedog]

Who's making a big deal out of you being paid? You're a contractor (paid) for vB, end of story unless you keep dragging this out...... but why would you?

 

[AdamD]

Who's making a big deal out of you being paid? You're a contractor (paid) for vB, end of story unless you keep dragging this out...... but why would you?

 

[russellw]

Back on topic.

Vbulletin have held the lions share of the market for as long as they have for one very good reason - the competition around in their early days was pretty poor in terms of features and ease of use and thanks to that it really became the defacto standard for a lot of forums - particularly larger ones.

That isn't so much the case now. The competition has closed the gap to some extent but they aren't all the way yet in terms of features / functions and even though they may not have the bugs vb has most of us would choose features with bugs over no bugs and less features.

There is also a h-u-g-e knowledge base around vb on the web. Anything you want to know has been done/solved/built/hacked or solved by someone in the world and while the others are building similar pools of knowledge they are inherently smaller.

It's a bit like the choice between an older and perhaps less reliable car that you know the faults of (and which anyone can fix) and a new vehicle made by a smaller manufacturer you've not really heard a lot about that requires specialist knowledge to maintain.

It won't dip below 50% anytime soon if only because we are inherently creatures of comfort - I know in my case the 10+ years of vb knowledge and skills accumulated is going to keep me attached to some version of it (probably an older one) for as long as possible.

Cheers
Russ

 

[DirtRider]

I am a VB Support Representative. People say I'm a paid rep but in truth they are assuming I'm paid, they don't know for sure.

I would suggest if you not getting paid that you follow your mod customers over to XenForo

 

[BirdOPrey5]

Nothing prevents me from making mods for XenForo other than the fact it's so different from existing VB3/4 modifications and I have to learn a new way of coding to make XF mods. Maybe one day.

 

[is_it_me]

I am a VB Support Representative. People say I'm a paid rep but in truth they are assuming I'm paid, they don't know for sure.

Oh, come on, stop playing us for mugs, you are paid by IB/vB, everyone knows that.

 

[rexxxy]

Oh, come on, stop playing us for mugs, you are paid by IB/vB, everyone knows that.

I feel like I'm watching a court tv show and bop is trying to create reasonable doubt to not be found guilty lol

 

[BirdOPrey5]

Oh, come on, stop playing us for mugs, you are paid by IB/vB, everyone thinks they knows that.

Fixed.

 

[DirtRider]

I feel like I am watching

just let me know when it is time for that

so I can make a run for it

 

[SneakyDave]

I think IB will eventually sell the vBulletin brand to somebody, IPB perhaps? I don't know who else would be interested in it.

At first, I thought they might try to buy a (better) forum software unit and call it their own, like ubb did with wwwthreads, but they aren't looking to make a big splash, as evident by their purchase of forum runner.

 

[s.molinari]

Joe, if you aren't getting paid by IB, then you've lost any respect you might have had from me. Because giving the kind of effort you give, which is a commendable part of your work even though you go even overboard on it sometimes, to a company like IB for free is just mind boggling.

And about coding add-ons for XF, now I am getting into semantics, because I know what you mean, but I highly doubt you'd have to learn a whole new way to code. You have to learn a whole new way to code, when you change programming languages. What you'd need to learn is a whole different concept of programming architecture. The way you code, your methods, the language, the coding standards, should basically all stay the same, if you were coding best practices to begin with.

Scott

 

[GTB]

Joe, if you aren't getting paid by IB, then you've lost any respect you might have had from me. Because giving the kind of effort you give, which is a commendable part of your work even though you go even overboard on it sometimes, to a company like IB for free is just mind boggling.

Scott

Think he is, as he has a vB Cloud same as Mark and other vB staff at same time. So read into that what you will, but looks as though he got a free one as paid staff to me. Unless giving free vB Cloud to none paid volunteer staff, do they even have none paid staff?

 

[BirdOPrey5]

And about coding add-ons for XF, now I am getting into semantics, because I know what you mean, but I highly doubt you'd have to learn a whole new way to code.

It certainly seems like it. Subclassing and inheritance isn't something I ever worried about in VB3 or VB4. I need to become more comfortable with it I guess.

Irony is that learning to code VB5 will help big picture in terms of coding XF.

 

[s.molinari]

Yes, theoretically, if they programmed vB5 well. I would suggest though you learn how to extend Xenforo first and definitely learn the right way to program extensions of classes in OOP, before you start with vB5.

Scott

 

[jadmperry]

Well, here we are one week on from the opening post, so let's take a look at the old scoreboard.....

Commercial Forum Platforms - relative marketshare
vBullentin – 68.0% (-0.3%)
xenForo – 20.3% (+0.2%)
Invision – 11.7% (+0.2%)

Commercial Forum Software Migrations - detected migrations
vB to xF – 73.5% xF to vB – 4.8% = xF gain of 68.7% (+0.4%)
IPB to xF 9.6% xF to IPB 8.4% = xF gain of 1.2% (0.0%)
VB to IPB 3.6% [none appear to have gone the other way) = IPB gain 3.6% (+1.1%)

- the change since last week are in brackets.

So, vB has lost another 0.3% share in a week, and if that trend continues at the same rate it will take about 60 weeks to drop to 50% share.

I doubt anyone will be surprised by the last stat....

Vb5 share of the overall vB market remains under 1%, at just 0.9%

Thank again to digitalpoint’s cookie report for the stats.

The loss of market share seems to be speeding up. Now, vB has 67.4% of the market share. So, that is a drop of .6% in a week. (Actually, on the cookie report, if you look at the historical charts button, you can see the drop in market share is accelerating).

 

[doubt]

The loss of market share seems to be speeding up.

As soon as XF speeds up its development, the loss will be superfast.
(Invision''s development seems slowed down to a halt, can't hear anything about Woltlab's.)

 

[we_are_borg]

As soon as XF speeds up its development, the loss will be superfast.
(Invision''s development seems slowed down to a halt, can't hear anything about Woltlab's.)

Woltlab has released version 4 of their software, IPB is still working on theirs and the possible release date that they gave was end of 2013 or beginning of 2014 no more info then that. IPB has lots of Blog entries about IPB 4 that is all ready included.

Xenforo well they really need to step up they only have a basic forum software and a nifty resource manager but other then that no expansion beyond that. While WBB, IPB and well vBulletin 4 (sort of) could run a website, Xenforo is claiming the sites that does not yet need or do not want blogs, cms or any other tool(s).

 

[LeadCrow]

you can see the drop in market share is accelerating

That could be explained this way:
- forums are closing down entirely. Affects more the oldest vB installs, whose upgrade path is blocked, unless they migrate.
- new forums are opening, but more are considering IPB and XF than vB now.

The DP report could do well to filter stats by age, so it makes a difference between new forum (under a year's existence, or specific dates like vb5's gold release) and old ones. This particular stat's numbers may be the most revealing of current sale trends.

 

[DirtRider]

That could be explained this way:
- forums are closing down entirely. Affects more the oldest vB installs, whose upgrade path is blocked, unless they migrate.
- new forums are opening, but more are considering IPB and XF than vB now.

The DP report could do well to filter stats by age, so it makes a difference between new forum (under a year's existence, or specific dates like vb5's gold release) and old ones. This particular stat's numbers may be the most revealing of current sale trends.

Well if you think about it this has always been the case but VB always was far ahead and we never noticed such a dramatic decline until VB 5