[In Omnibus]

Originally Posted by nhawk

You THINK you know why they left.

Unless you've personally spoken directly to each developer that has left, you are making assumptions. I can make that statement as fact because I have never made why I left fully public and you haven't spoken to me.

And there is no point in discussing those reasons because in most cases they still exist today in the current version of vB5. There's nothing that will make vB5 fix problems that were brought out in alpha testing and still exist in the bug tracker today after years of being there.

I think you'd be surprised the number with whom I have spoken. No one purchased vBulletin 5 with the expectation that development of third party add ons and modifications would become virtually non-existent. Customers wanted to know why. I am a customer. Again, there were a number of reasons the people with who I spoke left.

Some of those reasons included the difficulty and the inability to make enough money to justify rewriting existing mods from hook-based to API-based code. Some left for health reasons. Some left because they felt forums were not the future or at least not their future. Some had grievances with the manner with which vBulletin conscripted the third party mods and add ons site.

I'm not speaking for you. You're perfectly capable of doing that yourself. When a number of coders spoke of "problems" they were specifically referring to a lack of hooks. You may or may not be referring to that as a problem. I don't know. I never claimed to speak for everyone. I can only speak as to what I have been told firsthand.

This isn't really relevant to the issues with crowdfunding vBulletin 4 but it's an important discussion that warrants far more consideration than it has been given. Glenn Vergara seems to have no issue developing add ons and mods for vBulletin 5. DragonByte Tech was doing fine with it until they determined there was money to be made from XF and IPB since they charge for every add on and mod.

People get angry when I claim there were a good number of hackers who weren't really coders or developers making vBulletin 4 products. There were. A number of those people did not know how to rewrite their products for an API-based system and had no interest in learning. I spoke with several of them as well. I never said you were one of them. As you stated we've never spoken on any personal level.