Obviously you haven't read through the countless pages of problems with the mod. This doesn't "relatively function", it doesn't do anything but barely function, and it causes massive problems with forums, so, no, this does not function, even relatively, and the author is refusing to support it properly.

Paid? We already paid for vBulletin. This is put out by the same people, so why should we pay again for a hack that can't even work 1/2 way right?

This is a free mod and it is not made by the same people who make vBulletin, just a clarification.

May as well stop ranting sweetie, it's not going to do any good. They're simply not going to support this thread, nor help these people.

Apparently this product is not compatible with PHP version 4.4.9 or lower.

Say again? Does not IB produce vBulletin? Are you not a member of IB? Ahh, yes, as your name indicates, you are, and yes, they do.
So, by defacto, this is an IB mod.

4.x was EOL over a year ago, it's time to update that old server to something more secure and up to date.

Sucks to see people ruin a good thing.

IB does not produce vBulletin - Jelsoft produces vBulletin. It may be the same head hanchos but they are different companies. More importantly, they were kind enough to release this to the public you should be appreciative that they are doing this and not just keeping it to themselves. They too run a bunch of vBulletin forums, and to some of us, are the competition.

Personally I am seeing this as a proof of concept modification. Sure, it's only in beta now, but I'm sure there will be many other similar modifications to follow. Why are we complaining that it's not 100%.

1) Nobody paid for this
2) It's still in beta
3) It's unsupported

Check your license again. It's for vBulletin; not everything the same (and I'm being generous here) company creates.

IB should not have put their name on it if they weren't going to keep it up to date, plain and simple, and yes, they did put their name on it.

I'll admit that you've got me on #1, but 2 and 3 are massively incorrect.
#2 - When a product is in beta, you don't ignore your beta testers and the bugs they report to you, you fix them , in a timely fashion. This is how you reward your beta testers.

#3 - This only recently went to unsupported because IB (the company whos name is behind this product) refuses to support it for better than a month. It was initially released as a 'supported' mod, which got people into installing it, on those grounds.

I have no problem working with beta software, as long as the author is responsible enough to act on reports and get issues resolved in a timely fashion. Now, I'm stuck with a mod that doesn't work and the author has essentially abandoned it.

The only person "ruining" this good thing? The author themselves. They promised support, lied while doing so, and now have basically abandoned the mod.

My mistake if they recently changed it to unsupported.

However, remember that they are testing it on their own boards, too. That is more than likely their testing process because I'm quite certain they also have a QA department that may be testing it, not to mention their users. Who knows, they might just be publishing the releases here and not using it for direct feedback. I'm sure they have enough users for that.

I still say people have no right to be upset about it. It's NOT anything official. They are no different than myself or you when it comes to these releases. How many hundreds of mods get abandoned here?

Honestly, this is NOT something I would have installed on a live board. It's one of those things that can seriously mess with data and can open up all different cans of worms in regard to security, privacy, data integrity, etc.

I do see merit in your points, but I also see the other side that they were acting as a contributor to the community, and at the very least, should be applauded for that. Perhaps they do not have the resources to fully fund, support and develop this as a paid modification. Do you guys prefer it's kept in the closet forever, or shared with the world?

Honestly, they should have at least tested the product before just throwing it up here, and even if it is beta, hey, they shouldn't have released such a bug ridden product, then stepped back. Yes, in that case, I would have preferred it to be delayed, until such time as they were ready to provide support for the product.

This mod doesn't actually 'mess' with anything, it merely adds tables and allows users to connect accounts outside of the vB normal login procedure, much like the facebook connect mod.

If you're going to release something here, you have to at least test it to make sure it's stable and supported, because otherwise, you're screwing the community by doing this kind of stuff. It's a responsibility thing. It is flat out irresponsible to just ignore this many problems, and this many bugs like this.

Then problem is that using a mod like this becomes a commitment. Once you have users who have joined via this mod it becomes very difficult to step away from it without abandoning them. A required email address would help as it would allow people to request password resets.

It does not need much work to get it to a usable state. Some path tweaks to the java and code will net you a running script. Better use of templates would go a long way to being more portable. The number field edit clears up a lot of the template issues and, IMHO, should have been the top priority to fix to add immediately once resolved.