Blog on vBulletin.com to be Emptied
 

As part of our ongoing drive to improve communications with our customers, the vBulletin development team will soon be posting to a new development blog, providing tidbits of information and glimpses into future features, development processes etc. for customers who are interested in seeing where things are going and how they are progressing.

We will be using the vBulletin Blog installation here on vBulletin.com for this purpose, and in order to allow a clear signal without interference we will be emptying the Blog of all its current content on Friday, June 7th.

After this date, the vBulletin.com blog's purpose will be communication between Jelsoft and its customers, so we will not be allowing customers to post their own blogs, though they will of course be welcome to comment on entries posted by the vBulletin team.

If you currently have content in the blog at vBulletin.com that you want to keep, please make use of the time before the data wipe to take a backup of your entries and either post them elsewhere or keep them for your own records.


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So how are prospective customers meant to test the blog, as someone raised the issue of?

most commercial softwares does not have any working demos, you have to see their locked example and watch the screenshots... Jelsoft is using this technique and is not alone... i don't see why it would be a problem.

you could always register on a site where there is existing blogs and play with it...

I appreciate the enhanced communication and it is a no-brainer that Jelsoft would use their own product for such a thing but to not have a 'play area' for prospective customers is perplexing.

So will they empty it on today or tomorrow. As 7th june is a saturday and not a friday...

I'm just hoping to get some news about 4.0

They will empty it tomorrow.

Bad decision IMO - you're selling a blog application for $60 - You would generally want your customers to be able to test the application... Who cares what other sites are doing. vBulletin is the top of the line application for online interactives. And I know whenever I purchase an online interactive script - The 1st thing I expect is to see some working demo of the script. I mean - there is even a vBulletin forum demo... Why take away the blog demo???

To allow no testing of the vBulletin blog application on vBulletin.com shows a lack of care towards prospective vBulletin Blog customers - I wouldn't be surprised if there is now a decline in vBulletin Blog sales.

Jacquii.

It's probably better that people don't buy it. At least untill it's got more features. I'd hate to have people dissapointed in what they bought, when there is no demo.

True... And truthfully speaking - I like the vBulletin Blog - I thought it would be a very popular feature on JPiC, but apparently not... Perhaps vBulletin is gonna do away with it? Who knows...

JAcquii.

Well I bought it for one of my sites and it isn't even used except by me. Plus I was very disappointed in it. I mean for paying the price it is pretty ugly compared to even wordpress or other blogs that are available for free. I think they should have made it something more special if they were going to charge for it. I personally won't be buying anymore blogs from them. The same with the social groups that they started they are not even used. IMO forums are just that forums. That is why people join them. If they wanted to join a blog system they would go hunting for that. I IMO they should stick with improving the forums than going on to other things.

No need to pay for the blogs add-on. As you say, it's not even worth to be a paid product -- Wordpress is a lot better and is FREE. You can however install WordPress, and do some coding so that each of your members could have a wordpress blog, and each have an admin panel. BB.com have done this and it's great!

Since I'm becoming more and more interested in a vb blog alternative, could you give the full url perhaps?

http://forum.bodybuilding.com/

Yes, I'm a weightlifter :p

You need to sign up though to use the blogs. They don't use the vB members profile, they created their own -- and you have a WordPress blog, plus admin powers to it. :)

Sounds interesting. Thanks for the link!

I will loose all my precious memories ? :o :D :D

I've seen no activity problems with the blogs on my own forums, so perhaps it's just a matter of the forum community and their attitude towards the blogs? Still, my best advice for anyone is to poll their users about what's going to be added to their forums, to avoid unused features.

Oh, and I know the blogs are seen by some as a waste of money, and by some this decision would cause Jelsoft to lose sales... but just doing away with the blogs and cutting down sales would cause them far more harm in popularity and such like, especially from anyone who has purchased the vBulletin Blog software. Think about it, that'd would leave the problem that all Invision had to do is make a vB Blog to Invision Blog converter, take advantage of Jelsoft's remaining problems towards stopping the blog and there goes some of their client base to Invision Power Board and the Invision Blog software. What could Jelsoft then do? Offer a full refund and a conversion to Wordpress MU blogs + installation and forum integration service?

I'd agree though that the vBulletin Blogs should have have an area to demo them, so why can't Jelsoft just install say... two vBulletin installations and have the second one as a Blog and Project Tools non vBulletin development random test site or something? Or wait until that multi user per blog functionality gets added in, then just use one developer blog + maybe an RSS feed added to a page on their actual website referenced as 'Developer's Blog'?

Jase how would I go about copying what BB.com have done? Really impressed!

p.s. i have no coding experience :)

It would require some extensive coding. You can post a new thread in the Mod Requests (Unpaid) forum and see if anyone would be willing to do this. Or, you could make a new thread in the "Paid Request" forum. I may look into it sometime in the future...