The great vBulletin saga

[zappaDPJ]

I own and/or manage a large number of vBulletin installations. vBulletin being a forum software package very similar in nature to SMF which is what is used to power these boards. I do it free for non profitable organisations and charge a yearly fee to corporates. I also create skins, mods and hacks, some of which I distribute freely, others I charge for.

I own a number of vBulletin 'life time' licences and have done for many years. Every year I pay a modest fee to get access to product updates on each licence. vBulletin announced some while ago that they had started work on the next major revision of their software (vB 4.0) which was to contain some exciting new features including a CMS (Content Management System).

A couple of days ago I received an email from vBulletin with a preferred customer special offer on vB 4.0, saving 'over 50% off regular price'. The email also stated the following:

vBulletin is changing to a one-time owned license fee for each major point release. That means no more annual renewal fees. Once you purchase a major point version, you'll receive maintenance, security and minor point releases for the life of 4.x

To cut to the chase, after reading up on the t&c's and doing some calculations, what was costing me and my clients just under a couple of thousand dollars in total a year will now cost the best part of ten thousand dollars. What was a licence for life is now only a licence for the life of that major point version. In addition, anyone now wanting ticketed support will have to pay an additional annual fee.

It can be no coincidence that the authors of vBulletin, Jelsoft were recently taken over by Internet Brands at which point many of the original Jelsoft staff who had been there for a decade, left. It remains to be seen exactly how many customers vBulletin will have left after the dust settles.



[EDIT]



Having read that back through I nearly forgot the most important aspect of the whole thing, there is no vB 4.0, it's still under development and the special offer on it lasts 15 days.

[Niall]

I used that for a while on my old forums. Whilst it was perfect for what I needed, the amount of bots it attracted was infuriating. I had it sorted for nearly 3 months with a line of code altered and two plugins (or were they extensions for that, I forget, it was 2 years ago!) that stopped bots auto signing up, then they brought out a newer version that started the whole process again and I died inside

I tried SMF after that, which at the time had less features that I wanted, but easily blocked spam. Sadly I lost my user base as a result of the three changes, as at the time I couldn't import users & settings due to a combination of limited knowledge, version incompatibility and hosting security issues (it was too strict in certain areas for some things to function correctly!).

Still, it was fun tinkering for a while

[zappaDPJ]

Oh it always was and still is a bot magnet probably because of the large user base. It can be stopped completely with a combination of reCAPTCHA and other human verification tweaks but it always annoyed me slightly that Jelsoft didn't provide the whole answer themselves.

[Simon]

I was tempted to try vB on my own forum, after we got swamped with bots and spammers while using PhpBB2.  The temptation was the apparent user support available, and it seemed that they would do everything for us to enable a smooth migration from the current board software.  Luckily, though, we then came across SMF, which was free, and we had an Admin who could do the migration himself (not me!), so we went with SMF, and I have to say, never regretted it.