Decisions, decisions…

I’ve used vBul­letin soft­ware for about 4 1/2 years now and have always been pleased with it, for the biggest part.  It has its short­com­ings, to be sure, but it has still been a solid plat­form for me over the years.

In the last cou­ple of years, Jel­soft real­ized the social net­work­ing sites were get­ting huge, so they started try­ing add in half-assed fea­tures to the vBul­letin plat­form.  The new fea­tures have been absolute losers on all four of my sites.  A cou­ple years ago, I installed a now-dead blog script on a cou­ple of my sites.  The script was vBlo­getin and it really worked quite well in its beta releases.  Jel­soft came along a few months later with their ‘offi­cial’ blog add-on, which still comes up lame against the old vBlo­getin plat­form.  But my users made it pretty clear — if they wanted a FaceBook-type pro­file page, they would set it up on their Face­Book accounts.

vBul­letin has now also released a devel­op­ment tool that is com­pletely worth­less for any forum site I have ever visited.

Jel­soft, the com­pany behind vBul­letin sold to Inter­net Brands some time back and I’m not real pleased with the direc­tion IB is steer­ing the ship.  IB announced a com­plete rewrite of the vBul­letin plat­form (cur­rently at release num­ber 3.8.3) was going to take place and be offered as vBul­letin 4.0.

As time has pro­gressed, the ‘com­plete rewrite’ has been reduced to a rewrite of the tem­plat­ing for the forums.  The long-awaited Admin con­trol panel has been pushed back for a later release of the soft­ware.  The long-awaited Con­tent Man­age­ment Sys­tem is going to be part of vBul­letin 4.0, but it will appar­ently only be avail­able as part of a suite offer­ing — the forum script, the blog script, the project tools script and the CMS script.

I can only guess this is a failed attempt of IB to actu­ally sell their project tools licenses.  I have used a vBad­vanced por­tal script for years and wasn’t overly excited about hav­ing to pay for the vBul­letin CMS script.  After hear­ing it is being bun­dled with the project tools and blogs scripts, I’ve given up on ever using the CMS at all.  I’ll either stick to the vBad­vanced por­tal or work on a bridge between the forums and a Word­Press front page.

There has been a lot of cussing and dis­cussing over some allegedly ‘leaked’ infor­ma­tion from what is a staff-only forum sec­tion at vBulletin.com.  It sounds as if IB is going to change their licens­ing struc­tures when vBul­letin 4.0 is released.  Instead of a license owner pay­ing $40 to renew a license, which gave the owner access to down­load the lat­est and great­est vBul­letin ver­sion, it sounds as if IB now wants to sell every­one a new license in order to use vBul­letin 4.0.

Noth­ing is cast in stone yet, but many vBul­letin license hold­ers are shop­ping for alter­na­tive soft­ware pack­ages.  Invi­sion Power Board just released their new offer­ing, IPB 3, and it is a pretty sporty script.  I know sev­eral vBul­letin admins have already ported over to IPB 3 and I am giv­ing it seri­ous con­sid­er­a­tion myself.

I have had good luck with the addi­tion of vBSEO to my forum sites and have not been real excited about leav­ing it behind, if I do decide to use another forum plat­form.  I had some con­ver­sa­tion with the peo­ple at Invi­sion today and they assure me we can at least redi­rect all of my vBSEO’ed URL’s over to the IPB 3 URL’s, so that is a plus.  I still am reluc­tant to leave behind all the fea­tures of vBSEO, but I am not going to be held over a bar­rel by the peo­ple at IB when it comes time to renew my vBul­letin licenses.  I already have a sig­nif­i­cant amount of money invested in my forum soft­ware licenses and pay­ing much more is not going to be an option for me.

Now it comes down to a point of see­ing how much IB wants to bend every­one over for their new licens­ing struc­ture.  And weigh­ing that against try­ing to learn an entirely new forum plat­form, if I should decide to switch to IPB.

Until today, if any­one had asked what I felt was the best forum script avail­able (short of the enter­prise solu­tions), I would have said vBul­letin with­out a second’s hes­i­ta­tion.  After spend­ing time play­ing around with an IPB 3 demon­stra­tion forum today, I’m start­ing to feel like vBul­letin is a dis­tant second-place.

There are times I wish I had never both­ered try­ing to set up a forum in the first place.  And today is one of those times.

Related posts:

1. being new does not make it better
2. So long, vBulletin
3. Is IPB right for me?
4. Why fight when you can eas­ily switch?
5. So long Facebook

Tagged as: FaceBook, Invision, IPB 3, Jelsoft, vBadvanced, vBlogetin, vBSEO, vBulletin, WordPress