Well, this is not fair Xenforo Vs IB and we are in the middle.
 

I have been thinking about all the past drama and now i see that both Xenforo and IB were at fault and it is not fair. Well they say life isn't fair.

But to begin with, the old VB staff like Kier and Mike left and were trying to built something like Vbulletin. The one thing that isn't fair is that they have followers and when they left, all the followers followed them, after all, they have been with vb for years, that was a leverage and a smart move.

While IB was really stupid to begin a lawsuit, but really there was no choice, i do understand their stance as well. But they are terrible in term of pleasing customers and listening to what they propose, that is their down fall. They bought Vbulletin for business and should also think about its community aspect, that is part of a successful business too. It is not just about "Lets get the job done, and see the number of $$ rising" - this aggressive business approach, doesn't always succeed.

The one thing which bugs me the most, are all the good developers. They left and code on Xenforo. Xenforo isn't complete and lacks so many default features which VB has. VB did not end with VB 5.x, but there is a good VB 3.x and 4.x and 4.x is amazing, it needs more support though, it should actually be the focus as much as vb 5.x because that is what many use.

No matter how much i compare and contrast Xenforo vs VBulletin 4.x, the difference is huge in term of functions and VB wins in that part.

But those who decided to code for Xenforo ex should also code for VBulletin i.e., 4.x. They are taking a stance where they say, ok we will only support Xenforo. But they are being selfish here, why not support both. At the end of the day, the ones who are harmed are all the customers who bought vb, because they always look to improve it with addons and plugins.

It is borderline disrespectful and for us to chose between two products, well I will buy Xenforo 3 years from now when it is complete but not now. It lacks so many features and to try to convince myself to buy all these addons from Xenforo which tries to make up for the missing Xenforo features, honestly you will be spending more like $600+ Xenforo + addons/plugins just to meet of somewhat level of the default features vbulletin 4.x has.

You realize that people are free to code for whatever software they choose, and you have no right to addons those coders make, whatsoever? Most addons here are/were completely free, made by volunteers in their spare time, coding for the software they themselves used.

Simple solution: If you need addons, you pay someone to code them for you. Calling people "selfish" or "borderline disrespectful" just because they do not continue to code for a software they no longer use (and, of course, they should do that for free, am I right?) is just, well, disrepectful and, well, selfish, and, hm, barefaced.

When you pay someone for their time, you are allowed to make reasonable expectations for their services.

If you do not pay someone for their times, you have no right to dictate to them how they spend their time

I never said free in my thread, in fact the example i pointed out, the coder is selling his gallery for 40 USD on Xenforo. It is selfish when many of these coders do sell their plugin and code it only for Xenforo, they can do the same on VB and sell it and offer pro vs lite.

But then they are taking sides because of this whole drama Xenforo vs IB and we are in the middle.

They are being selfish because they have took a stance to support only Xenforo and have left, disregarded all the happy customers/ members from vb who made them popular and noticeable in the first place, through plugin votes, plugin of the month and so on.

Think about it ^ your signature.

*facepalm*

By the same token, they might say YOU are being "selfish" by staying with vBulletin.

That is what happen, i like Xenforo but i can't buy it now at this stage and all i get when i went there, well the users are friendly and helpful, that is an A+ and the staff too and that is where IB and VB are making the mistake.

IB and VB should enhance VB 4.x and add more and better features, and the sales will be going up for sure. VB 5.x will need at least around 2 years of development to reach the stable level and having all the default features of vb 4.x, that is my take on it.

But then again, i am not into joining bandwagons and although i was asked by several to make a migration to Xenforo form VB, it just wouldn't work well for me. There so many default vb features that Xenforo don't have at all.

I am simply going to use what is good, and feature rich and Vbulletin is reach in features more then Xenforo. What i don't like is the coders who joined the bandwagon and followed Xenforo, have discontinued making plugins for VB and not even selling them. It is like they have taken a moral stance but have they also thought about vb customers who are welling to buy their plugin for vb and now they miss it?

What they are doing, isn't going to force many vb customers to make the switch to Xenforo, just for the sake of downloading their plugin or buying them. They should really release them for both Xenforo and Vbulletin and if they sell them on Xenforo, why not sell them on Vbulletin as well. After all, that is where they received their fame, from vb customers.

This is way beyond strange and weird. So people should code for vb just so you can use free stuff, i.e. get what you want and they are selfish when they don''t do it? Are you for real? In what world do you live in? Unbelievable, I have seen some strange, weird and selfish users all rolled up in one but boy, you do take the cake :D

I think you guys don't even read :D read what i said above ^ I do need my Halloween cake though :)

They can code it and sell it for VB as well http://xenmediagallery.com/buy/xen-media-gallery.1/ I didn't say anything about FREE!

But the post has something right,unfortunately you can't see it.

You can't separate customers.They are one and pay all the bills in anything.Whether you agree or not with them,you are certainly nothing without them.

I code for both vB and XF. And I can give you two very good reasons why many coders don't code for vB anymore...

They do not have the ability to post/advertise their premium add-ons anywhere on the vB sites. And they are forced to release LITE versions to have the ability to TRY to sell the premium versions.

From my personal experience, my XF sales versus vB sales are running about 25:1.

So, what do you think most coders are going to do? Where do you think they are going to focus their attention?

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure that one out.

Now, should I code a LITE add-on with 4000 lines of code AND a PREMIUM add-on with 6000 lines of code for vB? Or, do I just go straight to a single 6000 line premium add-on for the other software? Again, not hard to choose.

If you have a suggestion like this, why not raise it to VB.org staff for them to add a system like Xenforo with payment for plugins.

Xenforo just took advantage of a feature like this because they know many coders will love it. It is a smart move.

I do believe it's been discussed many times here on vB.org. But somehow, lite versions of products are always included in those discussions.

No one forces anyone to release "lite" plugins.

Couldn''t agree more with you on this one. It is indeed a very smart move. Unfortunately vb wants to eat everything itself, metaphorically speaking of course. They say something along the lines of we don''t want our customers to pay for mods. Because like that vb becomes more appealing to the current and potential customers.

And they are right. I have seen ex vb-ers when they convert to Ipb or xenforo complain and moan when they see paid add ons and say, why we have to pay for this add on when in vb was for free etc etc.

That is nice for vb but for me not so. I can''t speak for other coders, but why should I waste my time coding mods here so others can download them for free and sing praise to vb how good they are for having free mods etc etc. When I can sell my work elsewhere and make some very much needed money in these hard economic times?

Not to mention the other points put so well above by nhawk.

Not in the literal sense, but if a coder wants to get some type of promotion/exposure of their premium products here on vB.org, they must release a lite version of that product to include a link to the premium product in the lite product's description.

It is very obvious that you never coded an addon for vB, that you never coded an addon for xenforo, and that you have no idea just in what abominable way IB gave a ++++ing damn about addon coders when vB4 was released. And did the same when vB5 was released. Same about style designers.

You make all this out to be some vB - xF battle. It is not. Many coders did not leave because they wanted to take sides, but because vB litteraly drove them away. Also, there are many who did not leave for xF, but for IPB.

Anyway, when you buy an addon you buy what you get, plus a maybe somewhat reasonable time of support. You don't buy llifetime support, nor do you buy a guarantee of further development. Some seem to think that all that can be had for a few bucks, but that's just naive. This is not about fair or unfair, but about real life. Coders who life off their work need to make a living, and it is quite obvious that vB has no future. That's why they leave.

Anyway, what's wrong with my signature? It states what is the case, and I think it's just honest to tell people what they can expect. I gave no promises to anyone, and I gave away my work for free. Because I loved the software, and I loved the community. Nothing of both is left, IB ruined it for pretty much everyone. As far as I know, my addons still work for vB4, and if you think there will be much future development of that branch by IB, you're even more naive than I thought. If you don't like that I decided not to do develop them further, for reasons that are none of your business, I just couldn't care less.

This topic is symptomatic of the entitlement mentality here. Coders don't owe you anything. Most downloaders don't go around rating plugins they don't use. If you leave a review or rating on a plugin, it's because you already took or benefited from their work first, not the other way around.

At the very least, Mike & Kier make things as developer-friendly as they can like allowing commercial add-ons, coming down on people that harass developers over pricing when they've actually contributed nothing to the developer after taking their work, and providing a clean, fun platform to code on.

A lot of the XF resource users have the same entitlement mentality but Mike & Kier aren't giving developers the finger, unlike IB and by extension vB.org, so I don't blame a lot of coders for moving over and not dealing with vB anymore.

You aren't a customer until you actually buy the commercial plugin from the developer. People parade around like they've already bought every plugin they make demands for and complain about on vB.org.

In reality, barring /maybe/ DBTech, <1% of downloaders actually do. Where do I get these numbers? Experience & ask any developer here. Funnier, many who donate will rather donate what's convenient as an alibi instead of getting commercial plugins.

"Take your pennies, peasant"

In an almost surreal way, about half will get angry the moment you mention a commercial plugin, or even, god forbid, a copyright link, like you're their slave laborer and the master says you don't work for pay *whiplash*.

These same people complain about the 100 copyright links in the footer, and yeah I get that. Look at how bad it makes your footer look and take note of each link -- it's a lot, isn't it?

Now, excluding DBTech, recount how you actually didn't pay for any of those plugins. Someone spent hours of their time to make each one for you -- countless hours together. Now, think about all the tired faces of your slave laborers who work without pay.

That said, we have two conflicting viewpoints -- let's be objective. IB isn't going to suddenly change, and XF developers certainly aren't going to start coming back to vB. Time tells no lies.

Well, i see many have been saying Vbulletin died with vb 5.x. I really don't know what sort of illusion is this and what is your aim trying to portray this, seeing that vb 4.x is great and way better than Xenforo.

Others are jumping off the boat, because of this entire Xenforo vs IB saga, but honestly, you forget one thing, it is us customers who buy your addon. I've seen many of the coders who have moved to Xenforo, kept encouraging their vb customers to migrate to Xenforo in order to sell their addon there.

You might not like the subject because it is touching your $$ but it is true that you've decided to abandon vb customers and those who gave you fame in the first place.

Many don't like the way IB runs thing and how VB do not listen to many of the requested features, but that doesn't mean the product is bad because vb 4.x is great, vb 5.x needs at least 2 years of development, it is currently in beta stage, never gold yet in my own eyes.

If i am going to compare vb 4.x with Xenforo, definitely vb 4.x wins in term of features and stability.

If i am going to compare vb 5.x with Xenforo, XF wins over because it is much more faster, Seo friendly and easy to use but not feature rich. Xenforo doesn't even have basic profile gallery, let alone they are using an Editor http://imperavi.com/redactor/, that isn't as nice as the CKeditor http://ckeditor.com/demo#standard

How much of the 'features' are 'really' the necessary with VB though?
I find myself as an admin and owner I do think they are necessary, but as for the members, the ones who make a Forum actually work then maybe not so much.

There are still a lot of free resources for Xenforo, and a lot of the paid ones aren't that expensive.
When a huge Forum like digitalpoint moved over to Xenforo this was the time I started looking more into it, yes he's actually a coder but there's not a huge make over of modifications on his site for Xenforo

I will move over to it one day, it's not the lack of features which are stopping me, more so the actual import from vB to Xenforo and the messing around with things like VBSEO i have installed.

Well - vB4 has a lot of features some may call bloat - it comes with a decade of history. And now, after 3 years of bugfixing and discontinuity (exactly what's driving coders mad), it is in a usable state (shining espacially since, of course, it wins every comparision to vB5 - which really says not much about vB4, but all about vB5).

But calling vB4 more stable than xF just made me laugh real hard. It is really obvious that you have no idea about stability or code quality. That's not a problem, mind you - but then you should be a tad more cautious about such judgements.

I've tested Xenforo and i know i didn't like it, especially the admin cp features. It is missing so many default vb features.

I am not going to praise a product which needs at least 2 - 3 years of development to feel somewhat complete. That is my stance on Xenforo forum.

Like that is your stance on xenforo forum, it is the stance of many coders on vb who left it for xenforo or Ipb. So maybe you should respect their stance/decision and not complain that they don''t come back to vb so they can acomodate you.

I wonder if Chevrolet type forums get discussions like this comparing Chevy to Ford? :p

Long story short the situation is "iffy" at the moment... many coders went to Xen but because their site welcomes them, has an area for paid mods and such. Was this because it lacked so many vBulletin features as Katie put it ever so lightly or was it to help improve the number of add-ons by doing so in-turn helping sell the base product? Heck I don't know and unless Kier or someone else from xen specifically stated so no sense drawing conclusions but we can see that many like that system and that's from the last time I was on the site which was well over a year ago, by now I would surmise things are much better at the xenforo site especially since the lawsuit was dropped/settled.

Does it have the same number of add-ons vBulletin 4 does? No but give it time, how the current setup is seems to work well and is sure to improve. When/If we finally implement something like that here though you'll see many coders return (not an official statement or hint although it has been discussed many times over, possibility mind you = maybe :p).

Although to be fair and flat out honest, if you code well and have a good business structure and work ethic then running off to xenforo just because it seems to welcome coders with open arms would have been silly - I've seen many say "I'm no longer coding for vB only Xenforo" and that's just stupid to say and do in my opinion - if you have talent and are in it to make money (why you argued you ran to xen in the first place i.e. paid mod area/selling them there etc) then why not code for both? Some people contradict themselves so much it makes me laugh more than some of you at statements by members here who you should clearly know do not understand coding at all.

Edit: Moved to community lounge, seemed out of place being in just vB5 general discussions ;).

But yet you're still here and posting!!Why not just move on? Seeing you have made your intentions clear!

I'm still a license holder, I still support my addons when the need arises, and I still help out users in the vB4 section.

That I think vB5 is utter crap and I won't touch it with a stick does not mean I can't do that anymore, does it? And that I do that, does - the other way round - not mean I can't say what I think of vB5.

My consequence was to leave the vB5 alpha/beta testing team once it was clear that IB would pull the same stunt they did with vB4 just once again.

No, in fact, its laudable and I, for one, appreciate it.

The goal of this thread really is not to take sides between VBulletin and Xenforo but to support both products.

This thread was intended to reveal the cloudy truth. Many VB customers vent their anger at vb (because of 5.x or lack of listening to customers' demands), by supporting Xenforo and that is part of the big reality but they haven't realized that vb 4.x is still there and can improve a lot until vb 5.x becomes more complete of a product. IB wants $$, so they will do anything to deliver a good product.

Now for Xenforo, I don't see how possibly a team of 2-3 developers will be able to reach VB level of default features so soon, that is why they will need at least take 2-3 years of development,it is far from complete. For ex they took a short cut toward the editor features by not implementing CKeditor, that is time consuming, something they won't spend time on because they don't have the capability, they don't have that many developers.

This is all about time and competition and for vb 5.x to become more complete, they will need 2-3 years, and same goes for Xenforo.

But VB has a long history and we customers should not be put in a situation where we have to decide which team should we support and join because i am one of many refusing to join the bandwagon.

Mike has pointed out the truth:

A bit off topic, but implementing CKeditor would take more than time, it would take money too. CKeditor is not free in the usage context of vBulletin or XenForo. An OEM license is well over $1000.00.

More and more of the large forums are now switching to XenForo, some of largest in the UK I have noticed are now using Xen. Why?? Because, support from third party coders is dropping off at a staggering rate, so many people are fed up with the way vBulletin is going and I am not surprised. vB5 is just a mess, whether that will ever improve is another matter, and now vBulletin 4.x is just becoming compromised far to often for people to recommend it.

Products are supposed to improve over time, not become worse. :o

"far too often" is still just the 1 major compromise uncovered earlier this year. There was no new exploit causing this latest round of bad PR- not with the vBulletin software anyway. Unfortunately people see "hacked" and "vBulletin" in the same sentence and it is easy to come to the same conclusion.

Hi Joe,

The main problem with vBulletin and its customers from what I have seen is they are "hacked" because of one reason, customers do not update their forums. There is too many people still running on vBulletin versions well below 4.1.x, and wonder why their forums become hacked too easily, or through badly coded modifications. People should get their priorities in order, update vBulletin to the latest version, 4.2.2 is another matter.

There are some people who don't upgrade, I agree- I am not sure it's the main issue though. Many people do at least patch even if they don't upgrade which is better than nothing. The biggest reason for so many hacked forums these last few months were people who didn't get or didn't read their emails about needing to delete their /install/ directories. We still get tickets most days from people who don't know they were supposed to delete the /install/ directory because they changed their email address a year or two back and never notified us or if they did notify us, never responded back to confirm the change.

It's just unfortunate all around.

This whole thing is about people joining the Bandwagon. I personal like VB, and comparing it to Xenforo, Xenforo wasn't appealing to me other than liking their SEO aspect, but it will take few years to reach the level of vb 4.x functions, time will tell i guess.

I also don't like the redactor editor they are using. Xenforo is good for those looking for easy, simple software to use. But if i am looking for feature rich forum type, I'd go with VB or IBP but i personally don't like IPB, i like their gallery though!

It has already reached and surpassed the level of vb 4 functions, and bug free :)

The redactor editor I agree took some time to get used to but does the job nicely.

Xenforo is indeed good for those look for an easy software to use and the same software runs again bug free on very large boards as well.

Moved our forum to XF in 2011 and haven't had any regrets not even for a single second.

But it hurts to see what happened to vB.

Oh really... can you make custom BB codes yet? No?

Can you upload smileys directly from the Admin CP yet? No?

Does it have Blogs or Articles yet? No?

Does it have Multi-quote yet? Kind of? You mean i have to scroll all the way back up again each time I hit reply? So No?

Does it have a way to leave comments when you "Like" something? No?

Does it have 1800 FREE modifications? No? Does it have ANY free modifications anymore? That's a serious question, I haven't looked in a while.

Does everyone need all the features above? Of course not- but there is no way you can say it has surpassed vBulletin in functionality... In stability, yes, perhaps- but simpler software is easier to keep bug free.

Truth is XF hasn't even hit VB 3.x level of features yet, let alone VB 4.x.

It may well surpass VB4 one day, but it hasn't happened yet. I don't hate XenForo mind you, but reality is reality. The only forum software I truly despise is IPB.

VB has everything, but the fact - vB users are still moving to XF.

VB is the vast majority of the forum market, it has been and still is- so of course it has the most people to lose, and it is natural more people will move from VB to XF because XF doesn't have that many people to lose- that said, hardly a week goes by I don't see someone asking for an XF to VB importer for Impex- someone even released an unofficial one here.

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=283111

300+ downloads... not too shabby.

only 300+ downloads, but >200 are big forums which switched to XF :-)

That is the kind of bandwagons i am talking about (: It's so bad when people believe that XF is better than VB just for the sake of supporting the previous vb developers who left and what happen during the lawsuit. No body likes litigation anyways.

Mike and Kier are nice developers but it is not going to make me go blind eyes and say XF is better than VB for the sake of supporting Xenforo. Vb has many years of history. The fact that I don't like how IB handles VB will not make me move away from VB. Rather IB needs to change if they want to continue with a good business practice. They're ignorant actually.

Xenforo admin cp is missing so much moderation tools, when it comes to user, user groups, settings, bbcode, there is a whole list of things that is missing.

May be if i like to support something new with new idea, http://meta.discourse.org/ discourse would be something that has potential future for creating a forum base with a new approach.

Just because you don't get what people like about xF, it does not mean people are "joining a bandwagon" or blindly following some devs.

Most funny of all is your statement that you won't move away from vB, no matter how ignorant IB behaves, because vB has had a great history. If you're still hoping for a change in business pracitce - well, good luck with that. We've been waiting for five years for that to happen. Maybe you'll think different after another five years.