[whitetigergrowl]

Originally Posted by cbiweb

Thank you for that. I started to see a lot of what you said soon after coming back. Sad really. vBulletin was my first love, and I hoped it grew and matured the past ten years. Unfortunately it wilted and is dying. I've actually latched on to XenForo, renewing a never-used license that I purchased when they first released it (curiosity at the time, since I was on the vB beta team).


You say IPB has surpassed vB? I should check that out as well. Always good to have options. :up:

It's pretty obvious to me at least that the reason for us still being on VB 5 after 10 years is because when it first launched it was a steaming pile so they keep releasing incremental upgrades to try and fix it's countless issues. MANY who had high expectations and hopes were let down and frustrated. The official forums got flooded with complaints.

As such, VBulletin and the people running it didn't know how to handle the stream of complaints. Customers, even long time ones, were banned or had their access limited on the official forums if VB felt they were speaking too loudly or causing too much disruption. In turn that created a lot of ill will with customers. In turn all that did was confirm everything customers were saying about IB and the developers and staff so many long time VB owners out of spite switched to Xenforo or IPB. IPB was already familiar to many and Xenforo was comprised of some of the old VB developers which gave people hope for Xenforo.

Then to add to all of it over time like I mentioned, none of the official IB forums upgraded which shows lack of confidence in the product.

Then they of course tried suing Xenforo which set Xenforo back a few years, but in turn ended up helped give them more customers as disenfranchised VB customers went their way.

At this point if I was running VB, if I was the one in control, I would get rid of all existing VB Developers and get rid of all of the existing forum mod and admin staff and soft reboot the software from VB 4 and disregard VB 5 and make it easier for people to import their forum to the new software. Basically I would do the opposite of everything they are doing now.

I've never seen such a blatantly mismanaged and poorly run company in a long time with such little regard to the customers. At this point they are just developing VB for themselves. Not for the customers. They are behind on multiple things.

They truly have fallen a long ways. And at this point there is no hope in sight.

As for IPB it's a great piece of software. Honestly I see general respect from customers on their official forums towards each other. It's not as rabid of a fanbase as it use to be. So someone on the official Xenforo boards will prefer Xenforo, but also compliment certain things IPB is doing over Xenforo. And vice versa.

The most common thing? The customers from both in general hate VB and not because it's a threat. Xenforo and IPB are both forum software. Xenforo has focused more on the forum side and IPB more on the CMS side with forum software. So while the same in some respects, different in many others.

No forum software is perfect of course. IPB has some issues and Xenforo has some issues. You'll prefer some things on IPB and other things on Xenforo and vice versa. So you just gotta roll with what suits you best. But they are both stellar software in their own right. But VB? While it may serve a purpose for some, many end up unhappy from it from what I've seen that try it so they switch. VB 5 is DOA for most people. And VB doesn't seem in a hurry to try and convince people VB 5 is even worth a damn. Sad really.

Few developers even support VB anymore and Xenforo and IPB smoke them in mods and mod development for VB 5. And most sites don't even list VB anymore as a forum software to use.