Why is VBB so expensive??

[ExAvIoUr]

yeah, its the best thing my friend ever bought for me as a present

[ibeblunt]

Just wanted to chime in why I purchased vBulletin.

I have been running my site since 1995. I was using UBB since 1997. As I started getting more users I realized that I couldn't target my audience. It's hard to just type up a query and find out who's on your site. You can't do anything with a bunch of flat files especially if you don't know Perl.

Anyway, about 1999, a company bought into mine. And they wanted me to switch to CFBoards, a version of UBB written Cold Fusion. They hired a Cold Fusion guy ($85 per hour) to write a script to convert UBB flat files into a SQL database. (Now that I know PHP it's actually not that hard, but it's still a lot of work.) This job ran about a week (50 hours, you do the math). And in the process I had to shut down the site for about 8 hours so that no new users would join or post. The first import didn't take, so about 3 month later we did it again. (Another 50 hours, you do the math.)

The company that bought into mine went under and I was stil stuck with UBB. Then I heard about PHP and came across vB. I bought vB because it was using a DB and it could convert from UBB.

The software paid for itself just in the conversion. Because thinking back, I could have bought vB just to convert the files into a database.

If you're running a serious site, don't let $160 be what stops you. Since day one, vB has been good to me. From tech support, upgrades and basically still being around. I can't say the same for these other clones.

[Admin]

And people forget that vBulletin's price isn't that high, compared to UBB and co. Of course there are free boards, but they will never provide the same quality when it comes to support, let alone the product itself.

[scsa20]

I like to say that I used to run wBB and it was good (untell I heard that you have to pay for the new version of it)....once I heard you have to pay for the new version, I just said to myself "If I have to pay for a board, why not just get vBulletin"...and it's the greats thing yet to get!!! I've been using it for about 2 weeks now....sure, some board makers that does it for free (phpBB, ikon., etc) well take up suggestions and actuly "helps you" but, trust me, they won't stay free forever, plus nothing can beat vBulletin

[bigmattyh]

And another thing, too:

If you buy an owned license, even though you pay $160 up-front, including the first year of updates, you only pay $30 every year after that for continued ugrades. This for a product that has so consistently improved even over the last 12 months (when I got my license) -- it's a great deal.

Doing the math, after 2 years, I will have paid $95 a year. That's about $0.26 a day. After 3 years, I will have paid $73 a year. That's only $0.20 a day. This product gets CHEAPER the longer you use it.

[scsa20]

yep, you got that right

I must say that I find XMB nearly as good as vB, but some futures have got me thinking of "upgrading".

Unfortunatly there isn't a XMB -> vB script so it must wait *sigh*

[SaintDog]

XMB is nice, but the coding is of such poor quality, it is also run by a vast amount of children that do not know how to conduct themselves in an orderly manor. I was visiting their "Today's Posts" page and looked to the bottom and to my surprise it ran 350+ queries just to call the posts from that session (1 query for each post for that day).

After I seen that amount of queries that were within the page, I asked if they intended on fixing it and they banned me from their forum for asking, what I though, was a support question.

The vBulletin team has never failed me in anyway, I have always had my questions answered in rather quick manner and they have always been friendly.

- SaintDog

[Velocd]

One of the greatest reasons Vbulletin is so nice is because of its developers environmental interface (my term, much known as the AdminCp). No other bulletin board system I've used has one this nice, reliable, and easy to use. I wish webpages were based on structures and layouts like the templating system in Vbulletin is. When VB3 is released I'm sure it'll stomp all those bulletin boards out there, mostly with its improved template system that will make us all awe at it's power. If I could make only one suggestion to VB, it would be to stylize their website more (attract more attention). Maybe use flash. I know that suggestion had nothing to do with vbulletin itself..but umm, oh well..

Speaking of flash, has there been any development on a totally flash-based PHP/MYSQL forums? that would be coooool (if possible)

[wannaberockstar]

There's always this: http://www.phpforflash.com/board/
It's actually pretty good, but it's not like an actual fully uh made board like vB or anything lol It's still interesting.