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Back in the day, when forums were a new concept, and everyone was excited to be out of alt.discuss.something newsgroups, whizzing along with the latest 2400 baud modem forums, were the center of many websites. But fast forward to today, where Facebook and Google make it two clicks away from using their widgets in and out of their own systems, the concept is starting to become more quaint than cutting edge. Unlike the ease that social media makes it to share information, forums, on the other hand make it incredibly complicated to share info even in other directories in the same website. Then there is the complex system of formatting, requiring an internal template and an external page to get one page up and running. And even after changing colors, and a million plugins, forums all look pretty much like colorful spreadsheets.

Hopefully the developers here will do something in future versions to loosen the grip the code has on the content, phrases, and layout. I know I didn't buy vbulletin to learn to code - I bought it to spread information around, in and out of my site, and to be able to make it look more interesting than a glorified spreadsheet. It's hard enough to keep up with html and php, much less add a new layer of code that makes it harder rather than easier to adapt. And adapting is what the 21st century is all about, especially on the internet. If you can't keep up, you can't survive.

I'm not criticizing vbulletin per se, as most forum software looks and acts the same way. I just hope that in the future, rather than trying to build on the accomplishments of days gone by (which were amazing in their time), one of these forum companies (hopefully vbulletin's) start looking to the future and by making the content and design much more flexible.