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Some background on VBulletin for the uninitiated: back in the day (2000-2006ish), bulletin boards/forums were extremely popular. The popular choices were PHP-ba

by joshmn 11y ago

Some background on VBulletin for the uninitiated: back in the day (2000-2006ish), bulletin boards/forums were extremely popular. The popular choices were PHP-based. There were some in MSFT-based languages, but not widely adopted by the new-age crowd and upstarts. Your choices included PHPBB (FOSS), IPB (commercial), or VBulletin (commercial); SMF was new and "hot" (FOSS), and MyBB (FOSS) gained popularity since it was the child of a few VBulletin wizards. Up until VB4, VBulletin was the bees knees. When it tried to take on an entirely new social face, that's when users quickly opted for other solutions. Two of the most popular forums today are still based on VB3, which would be WarriorForum and WebHostingTalk. DigitalPoint runs on SMF, and I have no idea who uses PHPBB on a huge scale, and I'm not even sure what's going on with IPB.

CM30 11y ago
Kind of. Though there's also the whole saga with the buyout and XenForo. Basically, a big company called Internet Brands bought Jelsoft, the makers of vBulletin. They pretty much said they wanted vBulletin 4 out stat, even if it meant outsourcing a significant amount of development. The old Jelsoft team then left to start XenForo. vBulletin 5 came out (with half the staff being new and the price being ramped up significantly), and the negative feedback basically overwhelmed the official site for a few months. People left en masse to XenForo. Internet Brands then sued XenForo for 'stolen code', which ended up costing everyone a lot of money and dragged on for a few years before the case was dropped. They then released vBulletin 5. Reception was... negative. To put it lightly. Features were missing, the style was half complete, bugs were everywhere. People left even quicker. Marketshare for this version is roughly at about 1%. Either way, you've got a company in meltdown that had to get somewhat inexperienced programmers to take over both PHP 4 era legacy code and somewhat put together a new forum script at the same time. Something was sure to break. IPB released IPB 4, which cause a sizeable amount of discontent in that community, partly due to features that were removed because the staff thought they 'weren't necessary' any more. Many people disagreed. Digitalpoint moved to XenForo. And the free scripts? Well, there's currently a bit of a divide between 'old school' forum scripts and 'modern' forum scripts. On the one side, you have phpBB, MyBB, SMF, and their various forks and spinoffs. On the other, there's stuff like Discourse and NodeBB. PhpBB got a bit ignored simply because it was seen as behind the times and not adding new stuff fast as. (that said, big phpBB sites do exist, Gaia Online runs a modified version and quite a few others are out there too, especially for large open source projects).

by joshmn 11y ago

CM30 11y ago

Kind of. Though there's also the whole saga with the buyout and XenForo. Basically, a big company called Internet Brands bought Jelsoft, the makers of vBulletin. They pretty much said they wanted vBulletin 4 out stat, even if it meant outsourcing a significant amount of development. The old Jelsoft team then left to start XenForo. vBulletin 5 came out (with half the staff being new and the price being ramped up significantly), and the negative feedback basically overwhelmed the official site for a few months. People left en masse to XenForo. Internet Brands then sued XenForo for 'stolen code', which ended up costing everyone a lot of money and dragged on for a few years before the case was dropped. They then released vBulletin 5. Reception was... negative. To put it lightly. Features were missing, the style was half complete, bugs were everywhere. People left even quicker. Marketshare for this version is roughly at about 1%. Either way, you've got a company in meltdown that had to get somewhat inexperienced programmers to take over both PHP 4 era legacy code and somewhat put together a new forum script at the same time. Something was sure to break. IPB released IPB 4, which cause a sizeable amount of discontent in that community, partly due to features that were removed because the staff thought they 'weren't necessary' any more. Many people disagreed. Digitalpoint moved to XenForo. And the free scripts? Well, there's currently a bit of a divide between 'old school' forum scripts and 'modern' forum scripts. On the one side, you have phpBB, MyBB, SMF, and their various forks and spinoffs. On the other, there's stuff like Discourse and NodeBB. PhpBB got a bit ignored simply because it was seen as behind the times and not adding new stuff fast as. (that said, big phpBB sites do exist, Gaia Online runs a modified version and quite a few others are out there too, especially for large open source projects).