The vBulletin kid?

[David Gonzalez]

i don't know why you guys talking like that about infopop, now that they are writting a new bulletin board and going to remove ubb.classic and ubb.threads, what amazes me is that they going to use php / mysql 4 and up ;o (is a miracle!)

[Zodiak]

Don't forget that if Infopop would have bought vBulletin 1 things would be totally different.

[ManagerJosh]

i don't know why you guys talking like that about infopop, now that they are writting a new bulletin board and going to remove ubb.classic and ubb.threads, what amazes me is that they going to use php / mysql 4 and up ;o (is a miracle!)

I think its the mentality a lil too late sorta thing

[Kathy]

Aww, I like going down memory lane.

I moved from UBB to VB (after just a bit over a month using UBB...had to prune every few weeks....because it was such a resource hog) back in May of 2000. VB 1.something

Loved it then. Love it now.

[James Miller]

It's cool how it was mate.

[harmor]

I think if Infopop bought vbulletin then it wouldn't be as advanced.
I also think vbulletin 1 series should be released for free since it's so outdated.

[0ptima]

I think if Infopop bought vbulletin then it wouldn't be as advanced.
I also think vbulletin 1 series should be released for free since it's so outdated.

So you can get hacked in 30 seconds?

[harmor]

So you can get hacked in 30 seconds?

Just for nostalgia purposes.
I'm sure people just bought an Atari just to have it.

[ManagerJosh]

I think if Infopop bought vbulletin then it wouldn't be as advanced.
I also think vbulletin 1 series should be released for free since it's so outdated.

Infopop had their chance and they let a gold mine slip through their fingers.

[Ted S]

Infopop had their chance and they let a gold mine slip through their fingers.

I was at one point an official UBB installer, just before they restructured and shifted most support in-house. At that time they certainly had the market cornered but vbulletin's success was, from what I can recall, in large part due to people wanting a different solution, a more community driven product written by people who ran forums. Had UBB purchased it it would have likely been a great addition to a well run company but would the same user following have grown? Would UBB have added a hack/ mod forum and thus developed that part of its appeal? Clearly we won't know but I would guess that while it would have succeeded, it would be a much different product, with a much different aim and an entirely different community and following.

[ManagerJosh]

Possibly true Ted. It is my understanding that people left Infopop for vBulletin primarily because the UBB flatfile infrastructure could no longer handle certain board sizes. So John finally got tired of his board breaking down and developed a hacked UBB version developed on SQL and PHP.

As people started pressuring him to release it, it would have been only logical to add additional features to push away from the UBB feature list and develop additions to vBulletin as a way to market the product and as an alternative to vBulletin. The additional features would have served as a way to distinguish vBulletin as something totally unique and different than UBB.

Of course we can always speculate what would have been the outcome if Infopop did take up on John's offer for a PHP version of UBB back then. Possibly they could have axed or discontinued their Perl version of UBB (like they are doing now) to further development on the PHP version.

[steven s]

I moved from UBB to VB (after just a bit over a month using UBB...had to prune every few weeks....because it was such a resource hog) back in May of 2000. VB 1.something.

Whenever UBB was free, that's when I started with boards. Pre-infopop. Then I was hacked and went to phpBB for years. Now I am here.

[KingSpade]

I used to use UBB way back when , back when they didn't offer so many extensions of the script. UBB wasn't horrible, to an extent, until many hosts stopped allowing it due to the load caused by larger boards.

I remember reading in quite a few TOS that I read years ago that specifically outlined that UBB wasn't to be ran on their servers.

Times change though . I'm personally glad vBulletin branched out to it's own product and not a backing by InfoPop. Nothing personal against IP, I never had an issue with anyone there, but during my use, flat-file only went so far .