Here's The Real Reason vBSEO Abandoned Ship
 

I've been wondering what the real reason is that vBSEO shut down. I've read a few things like the topic at admin-talk.com but these are not very revealing.

In my private vBulletin consultancy 3 of 4 clients running vBSEO 3.6.0 have been hacked and had the filestore.info redirect injected.

This leads me to believe that the reason the vBSEO guys really took off was because of the liability incurred by this.

Maybe the owners were fighting over whether or not to send out a proper alert that vBSEO 3.6.0 was indeed carrying a huge security hole.

Their business can now be seen as a hot potato and they're selling it to the biggest sucker. This could be an alternative reason for the disputes between the vBSEO owners.

I recall at some point a staff member said that vBSEO 3.6.0 had no such vulnerability, and they later released a patch fixing this vulnerability.

Those are my thoughts. What does everyone else think.

I would think their tos protects them from that type of a liability but I'm not sure. I remember the supposed story though that someone I will not name was injured and recovering.

Do you really think they are selling? If so I would think they reduced the value big time by damaging their customer base and losing the trust of thousands of users.

I think some of it had to do with Vbulletin building in some of the features and also with the changing tide in seo. I really do not know but I am glad I no longer need to rely on it.

Why they not put out a fix?

You're close vbresults but you're missing the nitty-gritty per say, I was there and reporting to them about that exploit and also furious at them too when all this was going down :(.

People lost trust in it, that one exploit (can't remember the exact exploit i.e. not sure if it was the filestore one or not) was reported to them, their staff patched it on the site that reported the find and had planned to include the patch in the next release however that never happened and therefor a known exploit remained in the product through several variations of it over the course of one year give or take a month or two until the same exact forum owner was hacked again, he went to investigate and realized they had never included the original fix in the product... he had been hacked again by overwriting files that had the fix in it, with new fresh files that had the exploitable code still within well over a year later - I remember his comments and he was shocked to find that was how he was hacked again! vBSEO dropped not only the ball but the chain, the hook, and the crane it was attached to seemingly into the bottom of the ocean.

vBSEO was still alive for a while after that however to me, I noticed the decline right after that fiasco revealed itself. Their own site was infected, their download system also compromised from what I recall... so with that said I've seen a few asking for copies of vBSEO "I was licensed, I should be able to use a copy if I find it they left me hanging" or similar... well good luck hoping the copy you find even if from a friend was not already infected to begin with, might want to consider that based on the fact their site was compromised at one point in time, think of how many members were downloading files during that timeframe ;).

To this day I'm still fixing sites and the owners asking me "do you know how this happened" and in the footer is Search Engine Friendly URLs by vBSEO 3.6.0 or Search Engine Friendly URLs by vBSEO 3.6.1 :p.

Maybe less and less new people are using old version of vbulletin, maybe that's why.

Personally I'm not going to use it because I have coded a custom lightweight mod for seo friendly urls that suits my needs better and as for other features I either don't need them or I have other mods to do the job.

Ha Ha.

I had bought a used license at a reduced cost, so I do not feel I got ripped to bad. What made me choked was after that exploit infected my forum, I was still fairly new to Vbulletin, and instead of asking for help I closed my forum, deleted all the files and started over.

I am on the fence when it comes to installing any SEO options like it. I took a look at the newest one by the competitor for SEO, but @ $200 it seems rather steep for my pockets.

I see enough of the senior members who post here saying products like VBseo are not needed, and content will always be King over SEO programs.

I been here almost 4 years, and am still trying to learn the ins and outs of Vbulletin and all the addons that are created for it.

Interesting posts above. Thanks for the read!

Crap, I have not been paying attention. I have VBseo 3.6.1 and the sitemap generator 3.0 installed. I take it I should uninstall both?

Yes, immediately.

*Please note: It would be best to prepare yourself and your forum ahead of time, by that I mean;

You need to do one of the following:

*** Backup database and files before doing this, you make a mistake only so many ways to reverse things w/o a backup ***

1) Uninstall VBSEO / Remove all files. THEN setup vBulletin to use mod rewrite friendly URL's by including the .htaccess file from the 4.2.2.zip file. If setup correctly your urls are now mod rewrite friendly and appear close if not similar to how they did before, not identical but best they can be since vbseo was removed.

OR

2) Uninstall VBSEO (read DB Tech install instructions/documentation as you may need to disable vbseo first since you want to import data into DBSEO then uninstall vbseo after importing into dbseo etc etc) and install DBSEO by DBTech (Google it) as its the new alternative to VBSEO.

Most of us experienced in these matters go with option one, the rest option two i.e. purchase dbseo then they import and feel safe that they now have something close to what was there prior.

Thank you for the quick reply TLS.

Another question if I may. Currently I am running VB 4.2.0. Should I upgrade before or after removing VBseo?

Thank you again. I really appreciate the help.

I don't believe it matters the order. I personally would remove VBSEO first though, I think that is more important.

Thank you!

I appreciate all of the replies.

Can we not just apply the patch? If so where do we get it?

What patch?

i wanted to make sure the exploits we corrected included the infamous one. its been tested anyways. nevermind

You can modify and fix it all you like but since you do not own the source code, you cannot legally make public and share any fixes unless you become the new owner of vbseo & vbseo.com

Besides, it's now a far inferior product compared to the strides that dbseo has been making regardless.

We'll have to disagree there, DBSEO doesn't support minification of addon scripts and custom css which google pagespeed places a high importance on. It also doesn't really optimize mobile scripts which are highly important now that google has updated for mobile. Lastly, for whatever reason it won't work with VBET translator. It almost seems like the owner of VBET and DBSEO have some type of disagreement going. <--- That was actually the deciding factor because the geotargeted translations actually increased our traffic by 89%.

There's other things too like rich snippets and etc. For now VBSEO is something we've decided to patch. The owner at Dragon Byte didn't seem open to any of our suggestions/needs for future development and we needed a comprehensive solution for this version.

See below.

I thank you sir for pointing this out!

Again, see below.

Its not inferior, its similar and outdated but I'm going to hit you all with one more see below lol.

Ok I need to clarify something, so its understood from here on out:

vBSEO is dead, it cannot be "patched" as there is no ACTIVE DEVELOPMENT TEAM BEING PAID TO WORK ON IT, this does not exist. I don't know who the heck you guys and gals keep getting to "patch" your versions of vBSEO but believing that someone can upkeep a security prone and outdated software is a stretch of the imagination and assuming you're safe and secure on your now "patched" version of vBSEO makes me cringe quite honestly... I'm afraid for you even if you're not afraid yourself, follow the logic now?

Now, can they point out current issues and exploits in your installed version? Sure, anyone could do that and call it a "patch" if they review the code but since I'm not on the now dead vbseo development team, I'm not being paid to do so then why trust someone who happened to see a few issues and charged you for patching... no dev team exist and one person is not a team, mentioning DBSEO - they have a team. This is not "find a nulled version online and use hahahahaha we win" type of situation nor is it "we payed for it, they went out of business its our right to use it" sure its your right however wouldn't it serve as a reminder of some sorts to all of you that, you're attempting to continue using a product that does not receive security updates? Furthermore that company WOW they left a exploit in the software for over a year what else did they miss? What pro can PATCH your vBSEO? NO ONE, not one and if you have one confident enough to charge you have them post here exactly what was done so others can point out what they missed.

I'm sorry, I know that sounded a little off the wall and like I was riled up, I was - I fear for many of you who simply justify how/why its ok to keep using it. *cries inside*

Michael, you're overeacting, vBSEO wouldn't endanger my....

*YOUR SITE HAS BEEN HACKED*

You were right all along, it's hard for us to admit it. :(

lol @ the logic of people. :rolleyes: