I've post many times, many negative reviews for vBulletin. But even if I have active licenses for xenForo, IPB (and ALL the official addons) and finally WBB (quess what. I found it much better than other two), I can't use any of them. Very difficult to find how to do even the simplier things. After so many years using vB, good or bad, I'm stuck with it.

I think this number really means nothing. Significant amount of this must be spam bots, another significant number included there must are users that registered only to ask some question and never bought the software. There must be way less real users and even less of the ones that actually post and visit here regularly. Though it's still one of most popular forum software.

Yeah a good gauge is the active users, but that will also depend on what the setting is for cutoff time.

We never know Chris, i will agree with half of your opinion. What if, if more members started to hate fb like me. To me, social community/sharing is like a cycle, if you don't match with the current trend you will be ignored. One day or the other people will be bored to use fb, they will find an alternative to spend their leisure time. They will join a forum that interests them & the no of people who likes & hates fb will be the same at one point. Thus forum's won't be dead at any point if you know understand your users needs.

To hate something in most cases means that you loved it before. And really can't understand how people loved this "thing" other than the reasons that I mentioned above. Never liked it and never used it in real. My account is there since 2007 but very rarelly I'm going online.

What I believe that made it popular comparing with forums is that forums are for specific users (eg fans of a game console, fans of fishing, or (more specific) technicians), while FB is an arena open to all. It started as a way to connect old schoolmates and finished as "anything for all".

But again I have a feeling that forums (at least the way that we know them), should be out of field soon. It's just a feeling and nothing more. Evolution. That's why I mentioned before Newsgroups. Maybe forum software need a refresh. Maybe to give more attention to mobile access. The current solutions for mobile access is for fun. Needs deeper analysis... less features but more speedy. Or something like this.

I seen somewhere a chat (that one that exist at the bottom line, just like FB), which was working by talking to it. It was funny... but really worked. I tried it even with my bad English (and the old voice), but it wrote the message correct.

Maybe some features like posting by SMS or (cheaper) post by email. Really don't know. But they need a refresh for sure.

@Christos, But 90% of the fb users use it to show off purpose only, only few people use it the way it is meant to be. No offense anyone, i am bored of this fkn fb!

Yes, forum software's needs to do tweaked to match with the current trend, new features etc.

I strongly believe forums won't be dead even in the near future.

What comes up must go down!

Yeah, me personally I never got into the facebook thing, or twitter and all those other social group stuff, just not for me.

I can't stand facebook myself, I completely blocked facebook from our website's features, the fb connect, I use the ban spiders mod to block fb from my site completely, don't want it don't need it. Nevertheless the 500k member count is till a "milestone" regardless of how the count got to that level.

Lol ! My gaming site is about to hit 3,000 registered members soon and I am excited for that. I plan on giving something away on our site when that 3k member registers! ..