I was forced away from using UBB.classic due to the heavy load on servers, it got to the point where I couldn't find anyone to host my 150 member message board which was quite sad really..

I pirated vB around the 2.2.4 days and didn't like it - I never actually opened the board to anyone.. Though when I was told that vB3 was in development by a friend and it would be the best thing since sliced bread, well - I gave it another chance at about 2.2.7 (I think) and asked a client for a leased vB license as payment for some perl based work I did for them instead of paying me direct. I didn't have a PayPal account back in those days..

I haven't looked back since, and I now own an owned license of my very own.. :D

The first forum I used was a vBulletin (http://www.cdv-board.de/archiv-englisch/) - I teamed with a few members of it and we started our own UBB 5.x - Eventually as it grew differences forged between the members, and half of us left to form a vBulletin board...

I became an Admin, then began to come to vBulletin.org in November 2001 on my friend's account - I registered on the last day of December 2001 and began to work on modifying our board - I eventually purchased my own in the July of 2002 and went from there :)

Satan

I was managing SitePoint's forums on UBB 5.4.7... We had to delete posts and messages every month just to keep the forums operating and even then they were slow and not very feature rich. Since the company was settling on PHP for all work in 1999, we decided to upgrade to vBulletin as soon as it was commercially available.

Have since left SitePoint (in 2003) and work full-time for Jelsoft.

Was using IPB till just over 2 years ago, then my host turned around and told me that IPB was causing the server to crash, so i was forced to ditch IPB, i already knew of vB but never made the switch since i was happy with IPB and at the time it being free, but i took on vB with no other choice if i wanted to keep my forum going.

After that i just attuned to vBulletin really, i may of only joined the scene as v3 was nerely going gold, but it's changed over the time and i really am glad that i moved to it.

Funny thing is, host told me vbulletin was doing them same, ended up moving host, could of stayed with IPB forever.... must be fate =P

- Zero Tolerance

Had joined a board that was going under, it was running 2.2.6 at the time (back in mid 2002 i think). Me and a couple friends decided it would be cool to setup our own forums, I happened across a nulled copy of vBulletin and we used it for a whole 2 days on my localhost. After that we where like we have to get a real copy. Well we did and now here I am.

Like many others I was a member of a board that switched to vBulletin (from Infopop). Liked it and the features it allows you to use elsewhere on the site and decided to go with it when I started my own board.