[Mark.B]

Agreed, and it's also worth noting that vB now has a small but stable and long term development team, lef by Kevin. They've all been there ages, they now know the vB5 code inside out. Of coure, they cannot work miracles but things are chugging along very nicely, and some of the stuff coming up, if it comes to pass, will please a fair few people.

New features get launched now with very little issue...vB Messenger is the most recent example, well received, popular and I think only one real bug turned up post the initial release, which has now been fixed, and so there can be some focus on improving the functionality. There's now the basics of a page manager in site builder, something that's long been demanded. A major current focus is improving language support, as Arabic (in particular) sites have issues at the moment. In 5.2.5 they sorted out the image upload problems and it just now works. Etc etc.

Meanwhile the cloud platform continues to grow and is proving a popular way to 'test the water' with a forum before going self hosted (since you can port across). Conversely, some long established boards have decided to move to cloud for the low maintenance overhead. Cloud upgrades, which were a bit fraught in the early days, now go without a hitch.