[Logikos]

Originally Posted by UKBusinessLive

Are there really people that spend 10s of thousands either ?/$ on their forums??

Yes and to reiterate Brent's point a few pages back, many of them have legitimate concerns about the possiable conflict of interest that Internet Brands and vBulletin poses. Internet Brands is in a position to manipulate the market that best fits the needs of forums they already own.

Brent also brings up a good point about the Google Adsense integration. I'm not entirely sure how that helps vBulletin make money. There doesn't seem to be any real explanation as to why they added it and the doc link they give you doesn't seem to work:

http://www.vbulletin.com/docs/html/adsense_integration.

Downloading a separate vBulletin altogether seems a bit counter intuitive if you ask me, and I don't like the idea of vBulletin and Internet Brands being able to obtain even a limited amount of my adsense information. I find that to be very alarming, especially if you have a competing forum.

The original staff leaving vBulletin isn't all that surprising to me. They probably had everyone under contract to stick around and help with the changing of ownership. But once that contract is up, they can cash their checks and leave, which I think is fine but a little transparency would have helped a great deal. Censoring your customers doesn't help either.

In any case, I'm skeptical about vBulletin's future. I had high hopes that vBulletin 4 was going to be coded using standard MVC and OOP practices, but from what I have seen and read, that isn't going to be the case.