Premium mods for other software brands are all for sale, not free. Why should it be any different for vb5?

Free mods are usually a sales pitch to get you to purchase the premium versions.

Here's a free mod with two functions no one cares about but if you want the one with functions and features you actually want that'll cost you!

The options are typically limited to free half-baked products that don't do everything you want or paid full versions that lock you into a particular software version and a host of future compatibility issues.

There is no perfect solution but the one that comes closest is the one most forums use:

Zero modifications.

Definitely not tiny, if so vB3 and vB4 were no where near what they archived. I've built many forums and I know each forum need special things to attract people. You could begin a forum plainly simple, without modifications but at the end, site owner have to do more to increase activities, if they do not want the site looks dead. Back in the days, I had some forums which could fill the latest posts statistic within every 10 seconds, and I knew modifications got an important role. Content is the first thing, but the question is how to keep people interest, how to make them keep supporting your forum, not only content can do, because your site is not an unique on the internet.

You provided an example of vbulletin did not have many modifications from early days, but it is invalid argument for me. vBulletin had potential to be great and useful was main reason attracting more modifications and addons, but now they want to turn back to the bronze age. You could not pay for every modification as I stated in my previous reply.

I know some giant forums which have great contents also great amount of active users. Most of biggest forum are still in old version with plenty of modifications, you just cannot see through their old style, for example 2-step authentication. They've been there since vb2, upgraded to vb3, some forums even upgraded to vb4, and likely stalled forever or chose to migrate to another board / system.

Anyway, this thread is just a unreal expectation as it would never be considered. I just want to express the fact of how their strategy changed.

I'm glad you said what we were all thinking...lol


so a few false (in my opinion) statements in this thread.
1. vb5 is a trainwreck.. vb4 was for years, vb5 is destine for the same if not worse future.
2. Saying no one makes free mods anymore is a lie. Check wordpress, check phpbb check opensourse scripts. 1000's of free mods all across the board. Paid as well of course, but there are free moders out there that just want to help out.
3. vb5 is far from gold even today after "released" years ago. No way in the world it should attempt to create another major version.
4. Correct vb isn't going to die because lack of mods for latest version. The mods at vb.org were certainly a large perk to owning a vb license back in the day.
5. Don't even run a site "in the cloud" It's like renting when you have enough money to buy a house and you know how to fix a broken pipe if needed.

In short.. you'll never polish a turd enough that I'll be convinced to put it on my head and use it as a hat..

Assuming there were ever to be a new version (and there are no signs of that heppening atm) then it would be vB6.
There is no reason to jump to 7, php only did that becasue they had started on designing php 6 before abandoning it.

Microsoft just cannot count, there numbering has been all over the place (e.g. 3.11, 95, 98, 3.5, 4, 2000, XP, Vista, 7, 8, 8.1, 10).

Fun fact: Microsoft skipped 9 because a lot of (old) software checks for the number 9 in the Microsoft version in order to determine whether it's something like Windows 98/95. It would of caused conflicts.

vBulletin 5 is not suitable for my needs yet, but perhaps it will meet my requirements sometime in the future. It's starting to look a lot better than a few years ago though.

Fun Fact #2: People who purchased a competing product which is essentially a stripped version of vB4 and then paid for every add on and mod are hard to take seriously on their opinions of vB5.

Personally I cannot see me ever running anything beyond VB4. The basic design of VB5 means it will just wont perform that well on large sites, and a new version (VB6+) designed in a different way seems compltely unlikely now, or in the forseeable future. Atm, vB3.8 is running our site quite happily, and will continue to do so for a long while. We could move too VB4.2 if necessary, but in both cases the only likely issues are php compatibility, so I should be able to keep them running for years yet.

If it ever came to a point where I had to move, then I'd look at what alternatives were available at the time.

Yes, that's certainly what I am doing. At least, vb4 can run on php7 (however require modifying core classes), which is enough by now. In future, the only option is to move from vb.

[S]vB5 took nearly 4 years to fix bugs and now said: "You don't need modifications".[/S]

Fun Fact #3: This thread seems to be the most replied thread recently. But we have run off arguments.
We agreed that there would be no vb6 in a near future. vB5 is lack of addons and vB want to tell us that we don't need modifications.

I believe there's a version out there that has support for PHP 7 at vbulletin.com, but it's not stable release. (?)