Official 3rd Party Mods Section on vb.org or vb.com

[daveaite]

Hello vBulletin,

This idea has been brought up before, but I'd like to make a sort of official thread and with the hope of the community to back me up on this. There are a lot of great premium third party mod and theme developers out there. Yet there is not one place for everyone who has vBulletin, to discover them. Your competitors such as xenforo and ipb both have large premium marketplaces, hosted on their sites for easier user discovery, and vBulletin is the leading forum software.

The free sections are great, but why not make it more advanced, one click to purchase..

xenforo market:http://xenforo.com/community/resourc...hted&type=paid
ips market: http://community.invisionpower.com/files/
vBulletin market?

Please offer a marketplace for developers to display and sell their mods. I think this is an immediate concern as this will bolster your 3rd party developer earnings and the number of 3rd party developers that are attracted. If you know from history, Apple has grown their strength not just from their software, but more importantly by the developers who build off it.

Anyone else think this is a good idea, please post below.

David Ahmad
Founder of vBSocial.com

[Chris8]

I think it's a good idea. However, this subject has been discussed here many times and I think that they will not change their minds suddenly. I might be wrong though.
BTW are you going to release vb3 version of your Wall addon?

[DragonByte Tech]

Originally Posted by daveaite

Hello vBulletin,

This idea has been brought up before, but I'd like to make a sort of official thread and with the hope of the community to back me up on this. There are a lot of great premium third party mod and theme developers out there. Yet there is not one place for everyone who has vBulletin, to discover them. Your competitors such as xenforo and ipb both have large premium marketplaces, hosted on their sites for easier user discovery, and vBulletin is the leading forum software.

The free sections are great, but why not make it more advanced, one click to purchase..

xenforo market:http://xenforo.com/community/resourc...hted&type=paid
ips market: http://community.invisionpower.com/files/
vBulletin market?

Please offer a marketplace for developers to display and sell their mods. I think this is an immediate concern as this will bolster your 3rd party developer earnings and the number of 3rd party developers that are attracted. If you know from history, Apple has grown their strength not just from their software, but more importantly by the developers who build off it.

Anyone else think this is a good idea, please post below.

David Ahmad
Founder of vBSocial.com

The paid XF and IPB markets are actually significantly smaller than the vB market. This is partially BECAUSE of their marketplaces - it encourages developers to neglect the free market and instead release all mods as low $5-$10 alternatives.

In turn this stifles innovation because
1) Users don't want to pay to test something they might not want, and so install less mods.
2) Developers charging prices that allow them to develop full time get crowded out by low quality, cheaper alternatives, leading to a dearth of high-quality professional work.

I think if this was implemented it should come with some requirements on the coders - e.g a supported Free version of each mod with a minimum of x% of the features of the pro version, to protect and continue to grow the free mod market on vBulletin.

Iain

[daveaite]

Interesting point, never thought of it that way

[Christos Teriakis]

They'll never add such section here as they don't want to destroy the illusion "Buy vBulletin and get access to 100's of free....free... free adons/styles". How to say at a later time that some of them are commercial?

It reminds me a joke where a seller in a stree marke was saying "Get them all, are free... get them all are free... let that down Madam. It costs 5 Euros".

<removed>

So forget it, unless if you're a dreamer

Edited:
But even with a marketplace active, I believe that time is over. Give a look to the last xx addons. Of any coder. Difficult to find one with more than 50 installations (actually the average is about 20-30 installation). Some years ago most of the addons had reached this amount of installations in just one month.
And I'm not talking for bad addons. It happens even to very good ones. eg even if I'm talking hard for DBT for my own reasons, I admit that some of their new addons are very usefull, and the most usefull I was expecting to be the Forum Ads addon. All webmasters wanted such a plugin improve advertisments in their site. How many installations/downloads it has? At least some days that I seen it, it had 9 or 10. Unacceptable for such plugin.
And the underline note: You can seperate something that exists, and currently I don't believe that there is real/active market even for free addons.

[BirdOPrey5]

As VB4 becomes a more mature platform I think it is just the natural order of things that mods become less popular.

If you've had a VB4 forum for years and you've managed without a 3rd party ad manager all that time, you have no reason/desire to install one now. (Just an example, not a dig at the mod)

Not all Admins like to be constantly installing mods- I think most in fact prefer the fewest mods possible and once their site is setup and working well they don't want to take the risk of screwing it up by adding something new to it.

I remember having the same conversation about VB3 mods after VB4 was released. VB3 install rate dropped dramatically- a combo of existing forums being matured and new users going to VB4.

[Christos Teriakis]

Originally Posted by BirdOPrey5

If you've had a VB4 forum for years and you've managed without a 3rd party ad manager all that time, you have no reason/desire to install one now. (Just an example, not a dig at the mod)

I never used Ads (of any type) in any of my sites (eg a city portal and a dating portal that I was operating). Don't know why but I don't like banners at all. But many friends and/or clients discussed with me such a plugin for years now (even since the time that I was coding for vB3). So, its a surprise for me seeing it down in downloads, and if I'm not wrong it's a unique addon in this category.

Originally Posted by BirdOPrey5

Not all Admins like to be constantly installing mods- I think most in fact prefer the fewest mods possible and once their site is setup and working well they don't want to take the risk of screwing it up by adding something new to it.

.
Yes and No. Yes I do agree that they don't want to change something that they have and works fine. But No, I don't agree that they'll not like to test a plugin type that comes for first time in the community. eg Like the Forum Ads, and some others that I seen relevant to social networks.

Originally Posted by BirdOPrey5

I remember having the same conversation about VB3 mods after VB4 was released. VB3 install rate dropped dramatically- a combo of existing forums being matured and new users going to VB4.

Yes, but at that time there were at least 100 plugins for vB4 and many users already moved to vB4. Now what? What's the popularity in addons for vB5 after 9 months?