Proposal: The vBulletin.org Commercial Services and Addons Directory.

[GamerzWorld]

Although im only allowed one post ill try and keep it short and sweet. Its great that you guys are moving forward with your thinking. Keeping the community upto date with all resources on one site is great to see and keeps me in love with vbulletin and its addons. However i dont understand the idea of charging a uneeded fee; yes a fee to cover costs of the server but just because there profiting i dont think its fair or noble to benefit yourselfs which will only lead to increased prices by the hack authors.

[Lea Verou]

I completely agree with the proposal

[darnoldy]

Originally Posted by Wayne Luke

we have decided that a Directory is probably the best course of action. ... The links will be purchased for a moderate fee...

First, I am a vB user and will in all probability never be a developer/coder--so that's my POV.

1. I am in favor paid modifications being listed here
2. I hope that these modifications will be listed in a way that integrates with the much-anticipated "hack database" so that a search here returns both free and paid entries
3. I have no problem with the staff here getting some of the proceeds--which I know from experience will amount to no more than beer money--from any paid listing. They put in many hours of work with little compensation.
4. a listing method that allowed for user feedback (such as "this modification work great, but it is fussy to install." or "this feature does not work as well as one would expect") would be most useful to me, and I fear if listings are paid, this would be precluded.
5. I know user feedback can be abused, but I feel it would be better to deal with the abuse when/if it happens than to not have the mechanism

[jlaine]

So long as you keep these advertisers from inundating the main forums and turning what is supposed to be a community into a shopping mall...

The line is crossed/redrawn/fuzzy as it is, commercialization of this place would really dishearten me.

Keep their paid services in a separate section where if a user wants to seek out a paid service - they have the area to look for one... But don't allow the tripe find its way into the regular forums by letting it become a free for all once a hack author pays for the advertising rights. We've already seen the results of that, it never ends up working out to the advantage of anyone.

[tamarian]

I still prefer a separate site, linked to from vb.org, just like you do with these sites:

vBulletin Network

vBulletin.com - Official Support Forums, Official Support Site for unhacked vBulletin Boards
vBulletin-Germany.com, Official Support Site for unhacked german vBulletin Boards
vBHacks-Germany.com, Official Support Site for Hacked German vBulletin Boards

Just add vbservices.com to the list, and end of story. All vb.org members will see it on the main forum home, and no longer need to search.

Having paid hacks on the same site as free hacks will add a lot of crap and flame wars, and just add a lot of bad blood, as proven from recent incidents. Yes, there some great commercial hack authors who play by the rules (like the Geek), but the record isn't that good with most, and they do cause a bad stink here.

But, if you guys go ahead with this, you'll probably want to do a lot of fine print on the details. Example: since many of the paid hack authors claim that you get what you paid for, and their stuff is superior, while free hacks are crap, then free hacks authors should have the option of turning their hacks into paid hacks, and see if they get members willing to pay for them than the commercial ones. Chances are they'll out-sell commercial hacks.

[AWS]

I like the directory idea. Probably the best solution.
One thing I don't like about the proposal is paying for a link. While this will more than likely entice me to release mods I wouldn't release for free because of the time it would take to support them for free I wouldn't pay to have a link to them. I don't think Jelsoft should profit from the mod authors work.
If you do go to a pay system to list mods then I have a couple questions.
How long will the link be for? Life of the mod? Until the author stops supporting it?
What will be the criteria for which link is listed first if there are 2 or more similiar mods?

I don't think adding another site into the mix is a good idea. We all know how it turned out with vbulletintemplates.com.

[Valter]

I wouldn't change anything.

Everything is perfect and people love this.

[Andrew]

I think that perhaps instead of having a directory with links to individual mods you should have a directory of providers. AWS brought up a good point about the problem of their being multiple similar mods. If you just have a listing of providers you would avoid that issue and I guess in a sense even the playing field. Other than that I like the entire idea - Paying to be listed is definately a necessity to keep the uncommited from trying to make a quick buck and it also will cover the additional bandwidth used to host the directory.

[Neutral Singh]

I am liking this proposal a lot. I would love to see hotscripts.com look alike directory solely dedicated to vbulletin on vb.org. Best of Luck.

[soniceffect]

read it a couple of times and really don`t get this

This will be a main section of the site and any customer will be able to participate.

Is this saying that the paid section will be the main section??? That I don`t agree with, however I may have just read it in the wrong way.

I do, in part agree with the principle behind this, in the respect of people being able to see from one area what is available, however I would rather see what was suggested above and see a seperate site form for this purpose. VBservices I believe was the example given ...... It just adds another link to the kinda VBring ya have going already with vbulletin.com, .org, and germany. Bringing it to this site in my eyes will only take away what in my eyes is what Vbulletin.org is all about, and that is the contributing community developer. I do not code in php however do a lot of visual basic and sql, so know the hours that can be put into coding, and I would like to code for the community (once I have learnt enough), not only to give back what I have got out of VB.org, but to continue the community spirit in which I enjoy on here.