Free alternatives to paid mods
 

Just an idea to throw out there. I doubt I'll have time to be part of it other than to offer my alternative to vBseo due to my personal commitments, but it'd be nice to see the community (that used to be here, anyway) participate.

I'm not a fan of paid vBulletin modifications. I will have been part of this community for 4 years, starting january. When I came here people shared their work for free, and didn't ask for anything in return. I'm not saying that's wrong or right but I know there's people in this community who agree with me entirely when I say that commercial ventures have destroyed this communities spirit.

So how can we change this? One word... competition

An open-source, community driven, alternative to the paid modifications. Bigger projects will require more coders, but even a gallery to rival photopost or vBa gallery will only take a team of 2-3 coders a few weeks to replicate in their spare time.

What do you guys think?

I agree 100% although I'm greedy and driven by the lust of money........ no wait I'm not that goes against my princples.

I think you are right, but right now I'm doing the myspace deal with Danny.

It's great that you're doing something free for the community Michael! You can be excused ;)

i definately agree. open source has continued to challenge its private sector rivals with innovation they lack or the integrity to continue innovation. Firefox, phpbb, and open office are products that challenge their competitors to be competitive. vBulletin.org should do the same by its community members creating both innovative and competitive products. without competition innovation ceases to exist. i personally do not have time to venture into such things currently due to personal issues and vB Journal. i however, encourage coders, even novices, to come together to create this competitive software.

As long as there are free alternatives to paid styles listed as well, I'm game :D

I don't have any problem with paid modifications. I also use couple of them but I love vb.org and i spend couple hours everyday in here. I am not so good in coding but if any of you need any king of html or template help i am always around here to help.

I'm good with graphics so I don't see why I couldn't create some free style alternatives (provided I learn how to make a style in the first place). :P

I like the idea, but there are some kinks that would have to be settled out to prevent any disputes/issues in the future...I am also very busy but I can help get this off the ground if needed.

what are we getting off the ground? I thought this was just a thread about promoting my free stuff.

I'd like to see more complex stuff for 3.5 like there was for 3.0

Seems like everyone wants to make a buck with 3.5 hacks. Some I believe are taking advantage of people's misunderstanding of things, like SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION.

And I'm not to happy to find out I paid and supported software that was later found out to be STOLEN and now back in the hands of the people I didn't like to begin with.

I think the community has been sucky lately. A bunch of give me give me's and a bunch of pay me pay me pay me's

The idea Michael is very simple. Instead of letting the members here fork out hundreds of dollars for modifications which cost money such as photopost, we make free alternatives :)

Then make us a torrent tracker please. :ninja: I wont give or pay I promise. :devious:

Hey, you guys like Dean C are good guys. AN-net is right in what he wrote. Everyone should share their ideas because ideas should be free and not privilaged or supressed to the few cause thats just so wrong to live life that way. People should be sharing ideas for free. I know some people are like "well i came up with the idea so to the victor go the spoils and i should get paid" but i mean no one owns any ideas themselves cause originality is really undetected plagerism anyways. We all get ideas from others no matter what it is. No one is truely original. What if education (early) was done this way? It would be a sad world that a kid would be refused the right to learn right? Well, thats just my 2 newbie cents

I can respect when one person does all the work it can be hard. And I can also respect people who come up with custom stuff and dont' want to share becuase they don't want everyone on the neat with the same thing.

People dont' need to be spoon feed, but I don't think we should have our wallets rapped either for products that aren't worth what some people think they are.

I'll give photopost benfit becuase they are a legit company with due over head.

But college kids with free time and no over head need to learn to properly and fairly market and price their products.

You know who you are I'm talking to you!

I'm exteremly successful at reverse engineering code and pulling things from the net. So I'm willing to help with projects as they develop.

But I have my own adgenda right now. I am actually going to be releasing some more template hacks to improve the VB interface which will go hand in hand with Danny's vbSpace.

I am also working on a few plugins. They are being tested on my social networking site.

Don't get me wrong, as I said in my first post I completely understand those who want to charge for their work. We all have expenses to pay - right ;) But at the end of the day, in my own experience, I've made more than enough money off custom work for vBulletin. And paired with a bit of social networking practice, I've managed to build myself up a very successful business which is more than I could have hoped for.

If people want to charge for their modifications than that's up to them. However, I have found that it's easy to make money just by putting yourself out there and giving something for free. I think a lot of the people here who are intent for charging for their mods could make a nice amount of money just by releasing some great work for free and then that in turn invites requests for custom work.

So come on vB webmasters! Give it a try and give something back to the community :)!

For what its worth, I'm working on 3 projects 100% free. An integrated/searchable Bible, a world weather hack, and a how-to guide.

A good place to start would be a quality content management system. One that would make everyone stop waiting for Jelsoft to create one. There really is nothing out there that satisfies this need. Just a few bandaids and paid ones that aren't that much better.

I like vbadvanced, so I hear that one alot, people want a CMS.

What is it in a CMS you want?

Free alternatives sound good and there's always a place for donations from appreciative non programmers like myself.

May God, Allah, Buddah, Messiah, Ganesh, Shango and Darwin's Fish bless you all for the work you do.

Now, get back to work on vbspace Danny and Michael! :)

vBadvanced is great. Everyone has a definition of a CMS but I really think it satisfies most peoples needs so we have a great free alternative in the market, hence why projects like cPublisher (proposed paid CMS) never got off the ground.

List of paid products that I can think of:
- Banner system
- Articles/Review system
- Shopping cart
- Gallery
- Links Directory (No perms to view???)

That's just a quick review. Some of those wouldn't even take a day for some intelligent coders to make :)

Lets not forget the vbSEO which is a bunch of over hype.

BTW I think the gallery would take more than a day to code.

Actually there is an alternative for vba links which i believe is better then vba links :) AndrewD's Links and Download Manager ;)

A lot of people would like an Articles/Review system.

but there is one!

There is a Gallery posted here Photoplog Lite which is free and for a freebie its damn good, there looks like a Pro version coming along to but thats unlikely to be free, but it does look like the prices will be pretty fair..

I know vbportal is paid but, aside from the cart and gallery it has everything in your list and lots more Dean_C, and again the price isnt a harsh like some other mods, you can also just not use any of the elements of it you dont need.

Im all for free and open source, but a donations button does not allways work either.
At the end of the day providing mods such as these is not just down to "here you go" as most required a reasonable amount of support dedication as well when your looking at mods of this size.

I personally have nothing against paid modifications.
In fact, the advanced software that costs money is usually done by a team of professional coders, whereas large free hacks are most often done either by novice user (or a team of novice users) and are full of bugs, which makes it much less nicer to use...

I dunno about that, I can count a dozen paid modifications that are done by a bunch of college kids. Some of them with huge followings.

I can only think of a two vbulletin mods done by an actual company.

That's where the community comes in. I think you'll find more people support each other on this site than the hack authors do :)

A free one, for 3.5 ? Please do point me at it then, thanks.

oof- was that a snub?

Paul, Im pretty sure cinqs is on its way.

Not at all, you're a great coder and it's nice you share some of your free work here :) I'd just like to encourage more people to start sharing their work instead of charging for it!

if you'd all send me 3 easy payments of 19.95 $ I'll make all the stuff you want and offer it to you for free.

The title of this thread made me think I could see alternatives to paid mods, yet in all three pages not one post (that I seen) contained a link to any alternatives to paid mods.

I noticed a few members talking about Photopost (paid) which I run on my site now, but would be interested to see what other "alternatives" there are that work with vB 3.5.2 as well as Photopost does.

I also noticed a few people talk about vbSEO, but again no one gave and free alternatives.

Maybe I read into this thread title the wrong way by expecting to see alternative, and not people discuss if people should or shouldn't charge for their work. If that's the case would anyone be willing to point me to the direction where I could see a list of free alternatives to popular paid mods.

Thanks,

-Michael

This thread isn't about highlighting the alternative to paid mods which exist, it's about encouraging to people to make the alternatives :)!

If only i knew how to start coding VB stuff then i would. Is there a tutorial on how to start or even a few helping hands as i dont mind getting my hands dirty.

Here is a great place to start kpr:
https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/forumdisplay.php?f=110

And there are always helpful people to try and answer your questions as you get started (providing you post in the correct forum ;))

Thanks Dean appreciated

Now to do some reading :)

I am for it, mind you I am new to VB so it will be slow.

I always release my mods/hacks/"advances" to the public for free, but ask for either a donation or that if you use it you keep my link. That way I get a lot of free links to my site. Also since the mod is usually on my own site for a month or two before I release it, want to get rid of bugs, it lets me take advantage of my idea before everyone else :)

That said, I don't mind paying for a good MOD, or script, but when some of these people are really scamming people that don't know any better it really discourages me.