[Hanif]

Simple economics, a penny for my thoughts

Every developer has some costs that are incurred, for many of us we pay bills, licences and broadband space. Many of us who are board administrators throw in a unreasonable number of hours in maintaining our site. For some the reward is simply the interaction and the pride and joy that comes from maintaining and running a site for free. For others they make a modest income from their site.

Yet lets be honest if your site was really popular and brought in people from far and wide, then how can you balance your life, your family and your job. It really is difficult, from my brief time on the board, I see that no one over here has retired, we are all either working and supporting ourselves and our families.

Even large sites like Yahoo, MSN, MySpace and others have a team of paid staff running their sites. By making money from advertising and other sponsorships they can afford to pay developers to enhance their site in order to draw in more traffic.

And same goes over here, if you want people to come to your site, aside from content alone, there must be ways of bringing in further customers. Maybe some customers simply want a banner on your forum, advertising others of their organisation, how are you going to cater for this?

Now you can craft a hack yourself, or, if like me save time and buy a script. It's as simple as that. For example, in your professional capacity in terms of employment what would you see as your charge out rate??? Maybe for some the hourly rate for their knowledge and experience to others is $50 an hour. Yet if you had to code a script like Geeks how long would it take you?? 10 hours? 15 hours??? Thus basic maths would turn out to be 10(hours) * $50(ones charge out rate) = $500(cost to code script). Thats if you know how to code!!!

Now, can that time be better spent by saving yourself the coding time and buying a script for less than $20? That way I know I am using the time more effectively and can use it elsewhere, above all, I know that by paying the developer s/he too can provide some justification that ok that the hours I spent coding this script I can support my family, pay the bills and so forth.

I am in no way saying I am not appreciative of the quality of free scripts offered here. I am eternally grateful for that. Yet you have to have a balance in life and I think for vb.org to grow we need to understand and appreciate that not everyone can throw in free scripts. Every coder has different demands placed on him/her in terms of life and the economic circumstances they are in.

vBulletin to me is without a shadow of doubt the best forum software out there, and to provide a quality product/service one can only carry this out for so long.

Until someone changes the law of economics or say, we introduce the barter system of trading I can't see why we should not allow commercial developers to advertise their products.

Kindest regards,

Hanif