A Honest to Good Aggravated Criticism of Paid Modifications for vBulletin (Essay)

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by cheat-master30

By that, I mean REALLY light version. As in for your ambulance example, no driver, three wheels and no brakes. As in, I understand fully the whole idea of no support, just that in these cases there's no just no support, the product is so lacking it's basically:

1. Nearly completely unusable for the purpose of the modification. Lite enough to make even the basic 3.7 album system that's constantly been criticised for this look as feature rich as vBulletin itself.
2. It's basically a great big advertisement saying 'buy the paid product' on a free website that doesn't allow paid products. Think of it like those people who might post three lines from a paid article and then say underneath 'to read the rest of this article go to mysite.com and pay ?999.99'.

Seriously, these kinds of mods are really pushing the rules here to the limit in terms of near uselessness. At this rate, it'd wouldn't surprise me to see time limited 'Lite versions' now and people getting moderated for it.

I agree. Modifications which are so light they will fail any serious test are about the worst examples of publishing, and unfortunately quite a lot, including also unwillingly introduced "Light" versions of starters.

Starters are often encouraged by their family and friends to show what they can do, and this is what we get. I'm not against starters, but I would like to see a Kid Corner where approaching coders and designers try their best to become famous .