[KGodel]

I have to say that after working with various systems, free and otherwise over the years, I am quite impressed with Xenforo. I use it for a non-main interest board I run and it is very smooth, fast, and easy to navigate. The vB admin options and back end took me quite awhile to understand fully, even with the knowledge I had working with free systems before it. If Xenforo had comparable mods to all the things I need there is a good chance my community might be pushing me to switch to it, but since there isn't, we stick with vBulletin. I do hope that the vB team would see what a great product vB4 has become and put more resources into making it even better...(I mean, we all would like that right?)

I see where Mark is coming from. Forums for the most part haven't really evolved over the years in their core functionality. It is difficult to say how they should evolve or what the "new generation" of message board should look like. What I think vBulletin did wrong was decide to try to be innovative with their main product when that is absolutely not what its core customer base wanted. If you want to attempt to see what the "next generation" of forums should be, create a smaller new product that isn't beholden to a current customer base to roll out and test different things, or, here is a thought, create mods for your current project to change its functionality in new ways and see what people think. They put all of their eggs in one basket in this case, betting everything on the new "innovations" they had, and what they ended up with was a less functional, less customizable piece of software from the consumers' standpoints.

I like vB, and for me personally vB.org has been the only saving grace of this software. If it wasn't for the great help and friendly atmosphere I get here I'd have left a long time ago and moved back to free stuff or hopped onto the Xenforo train.