[Kaelon]

The challenge for a sizable segment of vBulletin Customers are those of us who run "Big Boards" (which I define as more than 1,000,000 posts, and thousands of users, with hundreds of concurrent connections at peak), because the addition of optional features often are done at a premium cost of depreciating overall performance. With a sub-par search system that lags the competition badly, vBulletin should make it a priority to invest in a completely redesigned, scalable, high-performance search solution for its forum software. When free solutions, like phpBB, have a fully supported Sphinx Search integration, but the best that vBulletin can hope for is a patchwork of guesstimates by its (very loyal) userbase, there is a huge problem of scalability that makes vBulletin a less-than-ideal solution for sites that are beginning to outgrow dual-server configurations. It becomes a real client value proposition at that point: why stick with vBulletin over the competition?

Having been with vBulletin for the past decade, I am holding on to the hope that they will rise to the challenge that matches performance and scalability with new features and functionality the way that CommunityBulletin, OpenTopic, and LiquidFusion do.