Facebook is a large organization. yet their shares have fallen badly. They thought they knew better than their customers,

Money-gram is a large organization but they are paying out many millions of dollars in penalties. They would not listen to their customers.

Ib is a large company but things are not going to plan. The reports on V5 are woeful. They did not put their customers first.

What went wrong? Simple, they all forgot the business rules as below.

A Customer is the most important person ever in this organization. in person or by email. - Listen.

A Customer is not dependent on us—we are dependent on him. -Listen.

A Customer is not an interruption of our work—he is the purpose of it. We are not doing him a favor by serving him—he is doing us a favor by giving us the opportunity to do so.- Listen.

A Customer is not an outsider to our business—he is part of it.- Listen.

A Customer is not a cold statistic—he is a flesh-and-blood human being with feelings and emotions like your own, and with biases and prejudices. -Listen.

A Customer is not someone to argue or match wits with. Nobody ever won an argument with a customer.-Listen.

A Customer is a person who brings us his wants. It is our job to handle them profitably to him and to ourselves.- Listen.

As long as the customer has the mental ability to understand the range of his rights. Where they start and where they end....

Yes, IB is a very large company, however, vBulletin is only a small part of it.

Just for laughs I checked how many unread posts I had pending since last visit about 24 hours ago, and it was 247. I'm on many other forums, and none of those had that many in the same time period.

Can't judge from that how active vB dot org really is, but compared to the other big boards in the same time period, it was more active than those.

A bit off topic, but I saw this and just wanted to note..

The host I work for, rather large and most of you may know who it is, is removing PHP 4 completely and making PHP 5.3 default. PHP 5.2 will be available along with PHP 5.4. Won't be much longer now and PHP 5.3 will be standard for most hosts.

I agree, I dont know why people are saying its going down, we have no true analytics to judge from except the whos online at the bottom of the site. Maybe that day was a light one.

I see over 700 online now and agree with you, its pretty busy.

On average, between 1500 & 2000 members login to vb.org daily.

That figure has actually shot up to over 2500 in the last two weeks, but thats partly due to spam accounts I think.

If you increase the "Show online time" to double, you'll double at once your online users. So never trust the currently online users to ANY site. Finally, I was talking for activity and not for online users. I compared the amount of new threads or the amount of posts. Not very long time ago, it was almost impossible to see in the forumhome "Last post: Yesterday". Now if very often and many forums, ever worst, have dates instead of Today/Yesterday.

Chris
PS- As for me, as thread' starter, I got the reply that I wanted, so any Mod can close the thread if he wish to. It was clear to me that in Forum software field there are no only 3 players (vB, IPB, xF), but 5 (vB3, vB4, vB5, IPB, xF). So I choose the vB4. I'll not support as coder vB5 Connect.

I would love to see someone update vBulletin 3 to work with php 5.4 and MySQL 5.5

.... May even be willing to fund such an adventure upon completion.

Keep an eye at http://www.vb3fans.com during weekend.

Chris