vBulletin Mail System

[high]BEFORE YOU READ FURTHER, DO NOT INSTALL THIS MODIFICATION IN ITS PRESENT STATE. READ THE RELEVANT SECTIONS OF THIS POST FIRST IF YOU WISH TO INSTALL VBMS. I AM NOT OFFICIALLY SUPPORTING THIS MODIFICATION.[/high]

Note: For now, this thread will serve for all support questions. Obviously, the thread is going to get very long, very soon, and quickly lose any manageability. I hope to have a Premum Modification forum set up for vBMS, depending on whether the administration here supports it.

The vBulletin Mail System is now a free modification, instead of $40 to $48 (depending on the license). All features of the developer license (notes, etc.) are public as well. These files will be released shortly; they are not available yet.

For product information: http://www.webdesignforums.net/vbms/ .

What's attached to this thread?

The latest development version of vBMS, designed for 3.5 (incompatible with 3.0 in many ways, incompatible with 3.6 in a handful of ways). It is not to be installed in a live environment under any conditions.

What does this mean?

The forum at http://www.webdesignforums.net/vbms/forum/ will no longer serve as a support forum. If you have questions, you should do one of two things:

• Post in this thread ONLY. All technical, historical, and nearly all other threads should be posted here. In all likelyhood, I will not response to technical questions in this thread, and I will not respond to such requests via private messages or other means. By posting in this thread, tens of thousands of other users can help you in addition to me (provided they don't get there first and I have the time).
• If the question is personal for me only--no development questions--then send me a private message. Send the private message only through my site (http://www.webdesignforums.net/), not this site, so I can easily look up your customer history. Effectively, this involves billing only, or other licensing questions.

What about those who purchased the product?

When you bought vBMS, you were paying for the stable 3.0 release that has been around for over a year, and a 2.3.x release that has been around for much longer (since 2003). You still have access to those products (they will be released in the new forum). However, your license has been inherited to a standard open-source license: you may now install vBMS on as many domains and forums as you like, as well as freely distribute it.

Your input has also allowed a stable 3.5 version to be very close to completion. The expertise of the tens of thousands of coders who are now exposed to vBMS--which includes the developers of vBulletin themselves--will further improve the product to create a stable and full-featured product for vBulletin 3.5, 3.6, and beyond.

If your intention was to buy a 3.5 release, please note that it was clearly and repeatedly mentioned that a 3.5 version was only under development, not readily available, and that the version available was specifically not suitable for live use. I apologize if you thought this was different as I attempted to make it abundantly clear, including specifically telling people not to buy vBMS if they are running vBulletin 3.5 or later.

However, with this transition to open source, you will still get what you paid for, and faster: a stable 3.5/3.6 release.

Why go open-source?

To be honest, it is not fair to those who bought a vBMS license but have upgraded their installation of vBulletin to beyond 3.0. This will allow a much faster development cycle with support from many vBulletin modification developers. There are secondary reasons as well:

• Time. vBMS is well over 16,000 lines of code. Managing a product of that scope is simply beyond the several hours free I have each week to develop the product. Also, with Jelsoft churning out the vBulletin versions, developing a product that is dependent on frequent changes is extremely difficult. That is not to say that frequent new versions of vBulletin is a bad thing; it simply makes development difficult.
• Product scale. As mentioned above, vBMS is huge--far bigger than the majority of vBMS additions and even bigger than some of the version transitions of vBulletin itself.
• Reverse engineering vBulletin. As a factor of the two above, I am finding it increasingly difficult to develop for vBulletin. While I applaud Jelsoft for offering a product and specifically not mangling, encrypting, or otherwise prohibiting the viewing of its source (obviously, for customers only), there is still much to be done to favor strongly to developers who build products exclusively for their product. Others who feel catoring towards developers can help Jelsoft can see my request for a "developer license" of vBulletin.
• Fraud. As many people know, online software vendors are among the worst hit for credit card fraud, and it's extremely damaging: even if a thousand copies of a piece of software are sold, it only takes one single fraudulent order to leak the product, voiding, in all honesty, the majority of future orders. After putting a great deal of time into vBMS to see it stolen so brazenly, it demoralized me.
• Bad experiences. I have appealed several times to the community to hire additional developers, but the developers I hand-picked did not work out on these occasions. So far, none of the experiences has sped up development time, so paid outside help has not worked out.
• Personal reasons. I have changed jobs, taken on part-time work (I'm still poor), and even had a death in the family break up my work.

But the ultimate reason: I want vBMS to be available for all current versions of vBulletin so those who paid good money do not feel cheated.

What can and can't I do with an open-source vBMS in terms of licensing?

You can:

• Distribute vBMS to anybody you like.
• Modify vBMS to do whatever you like (excluding changing copyright notices), and then claim the changes as your own.
• Remove mentions of vBMS, the "vBulletin Mail System", or other branding.
• Develop special distributions of vBMS that you have extensively modified, and distribute those changes as a package
• Sell any components of vBMS that you have directly created (this is allowed, but discouraged). Only the components themselves may be sold, not the entire package with your modifications included.

You cannot:

• Advertise any of your modifications that you may be selling at vBulletin.org.
• Use vBMS for any illegal purposes, including use vBMS on a forum without an active vBulletin license.
• Modify vBMS to do whatever you like, and then claim the entire product as your own.
• Remove mentions of vBMS, the "vBulletin Mail System", or other branding, and replace them with others that imply you exclusively developed the product.
• Sell any components of vBMS that the product originally contained or others have freely developed.
• Sell the product as a whole, including a modified product.

What technical skills do I need to understand how vBMS works?

You need the usual vBulletin skills in general. This means PHP, MySQL, HTML, and CSS. You also should have a working knowledge of XML.

You'll also need to familiarize yourself with how MIME headers in e-mails work. If you want to modify how vBMS receives and routes mail, you'll need to understand the beast that is the imap library: http://www.php.net/imap . The imap library is only used to receive messages; sending messages has no dependency on imap.

Will you help with development?

I'll offer simple assistance in whatever free time I have--and I'll only do it publicly in the new forum. I will not write extensive parts of code for you or talk to you privately about vBMS. I will enjoy answering questions about how vBMS works at a high-level, and then you can see the inner workings to see how it's actually implemented.

So can vBMS actually be installed?

The version of vBMS that has been uploaded is the latest development version. It can be installed on a test forum, but there are several critical bugs that need to be resolved. You can browse the old support forums (http://www.webdesignforums.net/vbms/) for an overview of those bugs. I have a suspicion that they are simple fixes to you, the community with experience with vBulletin.

What is the first goal of those movement to open-source?

I wish to have a stable version of vBMS with little to no known bugs available for vBulletin 3.5 and 3.6 as soon as possible to appease past and present customers. Feature additions should come later; compatibility and bug fixes should be the utmost priority. When the stable version for 3.5 and 3.6 is available, then new features can be added. At the old forums, there is a list of feature requests, many of which have been addressed.

What will be my role in this?

As a user experienced with vBulletin development, both you and others will benefit from a stable 3.5/3.6 version of vBMS. That should be the priority. Feature additions, visual tweaks, etc. come later. Compatibility and just making it work completely with the features already present is the most important.

What remains to be done for a transition to open-source?

The version of vBMS attached to this thread is the latest one to which customers had access. It is still littered with copyright information and warnings about piracy. While the copyright information is still valid and will perpetually be valid, you can obviously ignore the piracy warnings. A proper version will be uploaded within several days that is fully suitable for open-source use.

Remember, this means that the piracy warning is no longer applicable, but the copyright information is applicable and must never, under any circumstances, be removed.

Any last thoughts?

As with any modification, back up your site files, but more importantly, your database, before proceeding. vBMS makes a significant number of alterations and new tables.

[DaNIEL MeNTED]

Originally Posted by Lionel

with 50 installs one would think that hack is working. It is at least for me.

True... but the problem is there is no package - and no real support.

If everything were packaged up and there was someone willing to support it I'd be more inclined to install it into a 1500 user forum... as it stands I'm not sure if I am willing to do that.

[Lionel]

I thought you packaged it? (it was not you?). I am using it in a 12000 members forum. I could try to package my install, but I am in no way in the mood to start answering questions from newbies, like how to import an XML etc.... I think that there is a minimum of php/templates/database knowledge involved.

[COBRAws]

Originally Posted by Brent H

I said this before, but it bears repeating:
Slap this up on SourceForge or Google Code and let's get some REAL development here... I'm tired of having the original poster tell us he's working on things or that he'll update it whenever.

If this was truly open source (as the author claims it to be) it should follow the rules of the General Public License... Not the Filburt1 License . It seems that for all intents and purposes, we're on our own.

I'm going to look in to what it takes to create a SourceForge or Google Code setup; perhaps someone who knows a thing or two about it could beat me to the punch?

True, this way this project is dead, and my (and other's) money lost.

I should start a website where you can search for coders who dont do their job after paying. I have plenty. All of them found here at vb.org. Weird huh?

[DaNIEL MeNTED]

Originally Posted by Lionel

I thought you packaged it? (it was not you?). I am using it in a 12000 members forum. I could try to package my install, but I am in no way in the mood to start answering questions from newbies, like how to import an XML etc.... I think that there is a minimum of php/templates/database knowledge involved.

I did throw together a quick XML file to take care of the DB changes.

No one has really packaged together a .zip with the xml, php files with all the fixes, etc.

Right now the "install" consists of combing through this thread to find all the "change this" and "change that" posts to make changes...

[Discussions]

Could we at least have all the required fixes updated in the main post? That would make easier to get this updated and a new version sent out.

[Parker Clack]

I agree. It would be nice to have all the corrections that have written put together along with the original files so we could use it. I know it has been worked on for 3.6 but I would like to see something done for 3.5.4 1st.

Thanks,
Parker

[DaNIEL MeNTED]

Originally Posted by Parker Clack

I agree. It would be nice to have all the corrections that have written put together along with the original files so we could use it. I know it has been worked on for 3.6 but I would like to see something done for 3.5.4 1st.

Thanks,
Parker

To be honest I don't really see much of a reason to develop something for an out of date version of vb... YMMV.

[wrmoss]

Originally Posted by DaNIEL MeNTED

To be honest I don't really see much of a reason to develop something for an out of date version of vb... YMMV.

Yea I'd think it would be easier to upgrade vbulletin rather than find/fix/install depricated plug-ins. plus version 3.6 is hot

[Eric]

Originally Posted by Parker Clack

I agree. It would be nice to have all the corrections that have written put together along with the original files so we could use it. I know it has been worked on for 3.6 but I would like to see something done for 3.5.4 1st.

Thanks,
Parker

I've been working on cleaning up the code, as well as incorporating fixes posted here. I'm doing this in my spare time (the very little I have); so don't expect it soon soon (and it will be for 3.6)

~SecondV

[filburt1]

Originally Posted by Lionel

I thought you packaged it? (it was not you?). I am using it in a 12000 members forum. I could try to package my install, but I am in no way in the mood to start answering questions from newbies, like how to import an XML etc.... I think that there is a minimum of php/templates/database knowledge involved.

Don't worry about that at all; you wouldn't be responsible for it. As with many (not all) open-source projects, the entire team overall is responsible to an extent, not merely individuals within it.

Anybody who wants can feel free to post their compiled version should do so. If others say it works for them, then the AUTHOR OF THE MODIFICATION ONLY, NOBODY ELSE should send me a private message and I'll add it to the first post.

Or another moderator can do it as well if they feel it's appropriate.