or be like Invision Power Board and PMS when you change classes in a DIV tag. (Which caused several functions to be "not authorized")

I was a software developper for 17 years (dBase II, dBase III, clipper, FoxPro, Visual FoxPro ) who now I quit and I strongly disagree with you.

If you build a 1 room house you will have to pay the materials and labor for every room. If you buy a 10 room house every room will be cheaper since you pay once the architect, the engineer, etc, but every room will stil cost you a lot since you must still pay the materials and labor. If you build a 1000 room house the same logic applies: Lower cost, but every room has a very important cost

In software, the price of every program that you sell is almost zero, you may download it from a server, so in many cases the guy that builds a 1000 room palace may get all the market, since making that palace is expensive but the cost of every aditional palace sold is very small, so if one company spends thousand of hours developping great software there are good chances that it would end dominating the market, since they would be able to sell thousands of programs to cover the cost, and every new customer will pay to better and already good program, and customers will lost interest in competing software that is not as good. So in software you actually get the result of thousands of hours of skilled and very expensive labour for almost nothing. This is more or less what happened with Windows, Excel and Word.

I am here in order to choose and purchase bulletin board software. My customer told me that I could program it, I know that would be the best for my personal finances. I say no, it is useless, you should choose a ready made product, debugged, a program that is thousands of hours of labor of many people, a program that is tested, a program thas was used by millions so the features in it represents the needs of those millions users, a program that will go on growing and bettering and you will pay almost nothing for the skilled and expensive labor that is necesary for those improvements.

Anyway learning php has a cost, since time is valuable, and I doubt a single guy can make something as big as vBulletin alone. I tried to do that with accounting software in my Latin American country, and I lost a lot of money (even tough I was not by myself). I just do not want other people to make my mistakes. There is an enormous market for custom made software, I lived from that all my life and lost that money trying to make "off the shelf software". I think one should develop off the shelf software (like vBulletin) ONLY if one has a strong possibility of being the market leader, because the market leader will take all.

If you want a quiet life I suggest forgetting about trying to make "mass software" (I do not know what name to give to software that SHOULD NOT BE CUSTOM MADE, software that solves the problems of millions of persons without needing code changes as vBulletin is) and do only custom software. I just want other people not to repeat my mistakes.

I am here also looking for the market leader, I think vBulletin is it. Probably I will recommend my customer to buy it.

Well I have now had my VB board online for a month or so.. Basically its all I expected. A few things were not as I liked, but most was easily fixed.

I still think $160 is a bit much, but it really is teh most stable forum I have run yet, and is a worthy investment. If your site is worth that kind of investment.

If yoru running on a budget server, you probably do not have the need for Vb (server load, and member count), but if your like me, running a dedicated server, with loads of hits and such, then yes, it is very well worth the investment, as its capable of the traffic that type of sever can handle.

Would I buy VB again.. definately.

Hey, I wrote that hack for YaBB. :D
YaBB was great for my smaller community, and to give me a chance to write a lot of my own custom hacks and contribute to the community.

But now I'm reaching the quarter-million mark for number of posts, and flatfile just won't cut it. So here I am, a perl man converted to vB. And I must say, I'm impressed.

- Dave Baughman

Speaking of support. Does anyone know if there is a mirror site for vB forums. I haven't been able to get their site to come up for the past two days.

Frank

Its a common problem Michigan which has numerous threads on this site :)

It is a result of vB blocking IP's due to recent Ddos attacks.

Email support@vbulletin.com stating your problem and you IP and they should help you get access once again.

Goodluck.

Thanks MindTrix,
I appreciate it.

Frank

No problem mate, goodluck.

Alright...

I read the first 2 pages, and I just felt an urge to write my own thoughts.

Now I been using vBulletin for about 6 months or so (give and take a month) and frankly before hand I was with the group of people who felt $160 was too much to ask, and I didn't see all the hype over vBulletin.

Though... when I got vBulletin and tried it out, I finally saw why vBulletin is truly worth $160. I have used YaBB and phpBB in my past, but truly was blown away by vBulletin.

The only way to really understand why vBulletin is worthy of the $160 is to use it yourself. So before you say vBulletin isn't that great... I'd say at least try it out, because I know I am hooked on vBulletin.

Well that was my 2cents, hope I didn't bore anyone :ermm:

i know what ya mean about being hooked on vbulletin once you used it you don't wanna use anything else