[DragonByte Tech]

Originally Posted by katie hunter

I really stay away from all of Dragonbyte plugins, he creates his plugins in a way that heavily alters VB tables. Something I also don't like very much with any plugin that is coded that way. It locks my database, every time i try to export or import his product xml plugin, it would take 6+ hours for me and the site would be down. Why ? because it applies changes to all my tables and when you have a site with 1.5 million registered member, all these tables needs to be altered. It was a nightmare for me trying to uninstall few of dragonbyte plugins. And you can't interfere when the tables gets locked many times, I would just leave the site and come back later and see if the task is done or not.

Would you say that it is better to spend 6+ hours on a "finalise" action to import all your members into a different "user" table?
Would you say that it is better to leave your forum running gradually slower and slower due to multiple queries needed to fetch all the information, compared to a one-time slowdown when installing the product?

We don't create table alterations because we enjoy hearing complaints from large forums. We created them because it is the best option when considering the performance of your forum.

Originally Posted by katie hunter

I am aware of his SEO plugin but i wouldn't install it for that fact mentioned above + I personally don't think it surpasses Vbseo. I mean Fillip isn't an SEO expert, he creates plugins but that doesn't mean he knows how SEO works.

I know enough to know that there are multiple features in vBSEO that are either irrelevant in today's SEO market (whitespace stripping, pingback/linkback) or directly harmful and will get your site penalised (archive links in footer).

DragonByte SEO was designed in cooperation with www.SEOvB.com and we will continue to work with them in the future on implementing new, modern SEO practices in future versions. We are currently working to improve the stability of the existing feature set to make sure it works on as many configurations as possible.

I also know that it's bad customer relation to leave multiple exploits unpatched. DBTech itself nearly got exploited because I had forgotten to remove the root vbseo.php file from our server, from back when we ran vBSEO.
Without giving away too many details in the interest of protecting forums still running vBSEO, our error logs showed that malicious users were able to bypass any and all protection running on our AdminCP directory (permissions & .htaccess) and attempted to run code in an admin environment. They were only stopped by the fact that critical files in the /vbseo/ directory had been deleted.

Lastly, I also know that DragonByte SEO does not feature any of the licence checking mechanisms found in vBSEO. This means that even if our servers go down, or we close our doors for whatever reason, any and all copies of DragonByte SEO will continue to work until the end of time.
I honestly don't know the extent of the vBSEO DRM, but I do know that we do not use any form of DRM at all, meaning the stability and continued operation of our service is not a requirement for our products to function.

I sincerely hope your site manages to stay off the radar of the malicious individuals that know how to exploit these bugs in vBSEO, and that should vBSEO come back into operation, they will honour existing licence agreements to fix the existing bugs.


Fillip