Originally Posted by Hanif

Simple economics, a penny for my thoughts

Every developer has some costs that are incurred, for many of us we pay bills, licences and broadband space. Many of us who are board administrators throw in a unreasonable number of hours in maintaining our site. For some the reward is simply the interaction and the pride and joy that comes from maintaining and running a site for free. For others they make a modest income from their site.

Yet lets be honest if your site was really popular and brought in people from far and wide, then how can you balance your life, your family and your job. It really is difficult, from my brief time on the board, I see that no one over here has retired we are all either working and supporting ourselves and our families.

Even large sites like Yahoo, MSN, MySpace and others have a team of paid staff running their sites. By making money from advertising and other sponsorships they can afford to pay developers to enhance their site in order to draw in more traffic.

And same goes over here, if you want people to come to your site, aside from content alone, there must be ways of bringing in further customers. Maybe some customers simply want a banner on your forum, advertising others of their organisation how are you going to cater for this?

Now you can craft a hack yourself or if like me save time and buy a script. It's as simple as that. For example, in your professional capacity in terms of employment what would you see as your charge out rate??? Maybe for some the hourly rate for their knowledge and experience to others is $50 an hour. Yet if you had to code a script like Geeks how long would it take you?? 10 hours? 15 hours??? Thus basic maths would turn out to be 10(hours) * $50(ones charge out rate) = $500(cost to code script).
Now can that time be better spent by saving yourself the coding time and buying a script for less than $20? That way I know I am using the time more effectively and can use it elsewhere above all I know that by paying the developer s/he too can provide some justification that ok that the hours I spent coding this thing I can support my family, pay the bills and so forth.

I am in now way saying I am not appreciative of the quality of free scripts offered here. I am eternally grateful for that. Yet you have to have a balance in life and I think for vb.org to grow we need to understand and appreciate that not everyone can throw in free scripts. Every coder has different demands placed on him and his economic circumstances are different.

vBulletin to me is without a shadow of doubt the best forum software out there, and to provide a quality product/service one can only carry this out for so long.

Until someone changes the law of economics or say we introduce the barter system of trading I can't see why we should not allow commercial developers to advertise their products.

Kindest regards,

Hanif

Originally Posted by Brad

you are free to speak your mind but you will now be allowed to insult other members in the process.

Originally Posted by smacklan

Man...there are a few "angry .orgers" here :p The bottom line is if someone wants to give you something for free, be greatful and happy and go on. If that same someone decides to stop doing that and charge for their time and work, there's nothing wrong with that and you should say "hey, I got some great stuff from them for free, I sure appreciate that" and leave it at that. As to whether vb.org should provide a conduit for paid scripts/hacks or anything else...they already do...it's called a sig! :banana:

Originally Posted by TyleR

We can? :D

Sorry :nervous:

Originally Posted by eXtremeTim

The sig doesnt really do much. We are limited on sig size so that makes it hard to grab people's attention for your products.

Originally Posted by insane-topics

I personally have no issue with any charging for their work, although sadly it is more common then ever in vb, look at it from a stand point of other forum software such as phpbb, vbulletin has the most ?paid? add on resources. But this is due to vb is a paid script so others believe they should profit from it as well, which is fine time is money.

As for them having links on here I think if they want ?promotion? on such a highly traffic community that reaches their base of clients there should be a price, such as must have a free light version (not junk actually useful) posted for free to pay for their adverts :) Because after all you do get what you pay for.

Originally Posted by smacklan

It's better than nothing and I gets lots of traffic from people who have found me through my sig on various sites I belong to.

Originally Posted by eXtremeTim

Its not that we feel we should profit being the reason. Its more like vbulletin is a much more solid script to build things off of and gives us alot more flexibility and control. So we can do more stuff for it. Plus there is more of a drive to make good quality products for it becuase its not a crappy script like phpbb.