Add funds to make vB4.x get supported again?
 

Hi everyone,
As I remembered then Joe D. supported to make vB4 work with PHP 7 and it was great but he stopped since he's left vB team, there is no one supports this version any more. Do you think we should add funds to someone in vB team to support this version again? Is that a good idea? What do you think? If this works, I wanted to add money with everyone to have a better vB4.x forum platform because I also am using vB4.x :)

It was Paul Marsden who developed a PHP7 compatible version of vBulletin 4 but he did not and is not authorized to make it public. I don't even know if he continues to use it. I think it would be fair to say he and vBulletin did not part on the most amicable of terms.

Insofar as the current development team there is a zero percent chance of them going backwards. vBulletin 4 is a technological dinosaur. It still works but for how much longer? SQL 8.0 and PHP 8 are about to become the industry standards.

Good morning ,
the truth that I am observing, and I do not see why if they are easy to adapt to vb5 and being a vb4 a dinosaur,

vbulleting.org is still using vb3 3.8.12 or this website will soon expire?.

well I hope that vb4 have for a few more years.

Thank you for reading .

Oh I remembered wrongly, Paul is exact, I also asked him sometimes in the past and get supported as well from him.

I really don't care if it will use the latest version of PHP or Mysql or not, I only focus on if it is supported or not.

Nice thought. I also don't know why vB didn't support it any more while more people are still wanting to use it.

vBulletin 3.8.12 is a custom build not available to the public and because vBulletin hosts it on its own servers they are able to make it compliant with their SQL and PHP and LAMP stack and whatever else they may have running. It would not run on any publicly available hosting.

I use publicly available hosting (VPS), my forums works just fine and I can use older, or newer versions of PHP. It just works.

I'm not sure where do you get that information that if new version of something (let's say PHP) gets published, all older version just stop working. Really strange notion, really strange...

PHP 7.1 is going to be End Of Life in five months. That's the most recent version with which vBulletin 4 and vBulletin 3 work. Once it is End Of Life hosting companies will be removing it.

https://www.php.net/supported-versions.php

There are still many hosters that even offer PHP 5.6.

Apart from that vbulletin 4.2.5 also runs under PHP 7.3.

Not unless you've modified it. They didn't put this on the downloads page for their health.

PHP 5.6 was declared End Of Life January of this year so while some hosts may continue to run it they could pull it at any time without notice. It's not a risk I would take if I were running a board of any substance.

Aside from that vBulletin 4 was developed using HTML 4.01 and CSS 2. HTML 5 has been the industry standard since 2014 and CSS 3 has been the industry standard since a year or less after vBulletin 4 was initially released.

The discussion here is about why the developers will not be taking on the project of bringing vBulletin 4 up to current industry standards. Holding to that the last two posts are irrelevant. This isn't about whether or not you can make it work today. There will be a day when you cannot make it work. That might be sooner or later. I don't have a crystal ball that tells me when hosting companies will pull the plug on PHP 5.x versions. It will probably be as soon as some security flaw is discovered that isn't going to be patched because, again, security updates ceased in January.

Having said all of that I cannot fathom why a forums administrator would want to continue to work with decade plus old software technology and design knowing that social media has trampled that philosophy and that the survival of forums depends upon evolution. The idea of giving members stupid and useless crap in the form of add ons and mods to keep them around has long outlived its usefulness.

People in the year 2019 want the most bang for their buck, so to speak. They want information overload or entertainment overload. They want the most return with the least investment. If any part of the process is too involved they move on to something else. It's the instant gratification generation. They want it all and they want it now. vBulletin 4 doesn't work that way and it never did. Registration isn't one step. Accessing content isn't one click. Commenting or replying isn't anonymous. Notifications aren't limited to only what someone cares about. The entire approach of traditional forum software is ass backwards.

While I have said this before elsewhere vBulletin 5 is the only forum software that has made any effort to adapt to 2019. It was released far too early and initially had far too many problems that gave it a bad reputation. A good number of people took third party opinion and ran with it. A good number of people migrated to other forum software which (surprise) was nothing more than vBulletin 4 clones. vBulletin 5 today is not the product it was when it was initially released. There are a number of things it does or can do that no other forum software does and that no other forum software will be able to do out of the box. The people who speak ill of it have obviously not used it. Does it still have bugs? Yes, but so does Windows 10 and they have far more than the four developers vB5 has. Literally, thousands of bugs have been resolved and thousands of improvements have been made since initial release.

Forums are a dying or dead niche. Trying to keep a small number of long-time members happy by holding on to outdated software with useless add ons and mods isn't going to change that. The only successful business model is "adapt or die."

Asking someone to invest on the development of vBulletin 4 is like asking someone to invest in the development of the Ford Model T. It lacks power and safety features, and it may not even be safe for highway transportation since it's top speed is well under the posted 65MPH limit but, dagnabit, someone just has to have one because reasons! I'm not that someone.

good afternoon,
I understand your point of view In Omnibus about this problem, but we return to the same, vb5 could have improved over time and can be and as you comment windows10 also had errors, but windows10 could be updated from windows7 without much history, because the developers have not implemented and a tool for its simple update, because as you understand starting again from scratch I think it's a lot of time and work to say that it is your risk to update.
Thank you for reading .