vB5 license agreement?

[slinky]

It seems the largest complaint being lodged in this thread is that vBulletin customers are being forced to "suffer" with version 4.2 until version 5 Gold is ready, and that is no complaint.

Of course it is. If you (a) develop engaging integrated features with your forum, and (b) plan to create many indexed URLs, sticking with version 4.2 until VB 5 Gold is actually ready and usable is a huge issue. I'd rather not deal with the reindexing in a year and I'd rather just get it over and done with now. And until VB 5 is even stable, I can't develop anything compelling for VB 4 which would be wasted efforts and that's a substantial time period.

There are always those who leave vBulletin for another product for varying reasons. Many have returned. The reason is because, for all the issues inherent to software development, vBulletin remains hands down the most functional product of its kind. Nothing else comes close. No one is being held under duress to purchase vBulletin 5. It's an option. There is a demo site. There are fora upon fora detailing what the product is and what the product is not. There are YouTube videos. There is voluminous customer feedback. This is anything but a case of misrepresentation. Caveat emptor.

Misrepresentation is pretending as if VB 5 is in any way comparable to or an extension of VB 4 as has been done on the home page.

At the core of vBulletin is the forum software. This software powers many of the largest social sites on the web. Over 100,000 sites are built on vBulletin, including:

This is marketing done at it's very best. It's not entirely false but it's certainly greatly misleading. To a person who doesn't know much about vBulletin, they are led to believe that at the heart of VB 5 is the core that powers 100,000 websites. But that isn't true. VB 5 is a whole new product with some pieces of VB 3-4 which really aren't what "powers" the core of vBulletin. It has a whole new database schema - no templates, no plugins and we've already seen the usability problems. Most people will never pick that up with a few YouTube videos. They will only discover that post-purchase.

In the distant past, some forum owners returned here because the VB 3 engine and the plugins that were endless, incredibly useful and free. The admin capabilities were fantastic. Even with the VB 4 nightmare, many of the VB 3 plugins were modifiable and updated. But people left in large numbers to go to XenForo. The "what's to come with vBulletin 4" never came. And if you go to the IPB forums or even try to discuss development, they are booked. I've been using IPB for a while on a test drive now because of what happened here and to say that "nothing else comes close" to VB is a misrepresentation. I'd say that now it's the other way around. I think it was a big mistake to now have two versions of vBulletin that are middling and one already outdated and not PHP 5.4 supported.

[Wayne Luke]

Closed at the request of the thread starter.