vBulletin 4

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I don’t know how many of my readers are forum users, but I would like to discuss this piece of software with you, if I may. (I’m not really asking for your permission as it’s my blog and I’ll do what I like but it sounded good, didn’t it!)

Over the last 48 hours there’s been a leak from the vBulletin sites where for some reason (conspiracy theorists say a disgruntled administrator changed the permissions) the private forums were on display to the general customers for a while. In fact, for long enough for one enterprising customer to take screenshots of a conversation regarding the future of vBulletin. (And, no, it wasn’t me!) The contents of the leaked information has yet to be addressed by vBulletin and IB (the company that owns Jelsoft (the company that produces vBulletin), but I really think as a company they do need to address it as keeping silent really isn’t doing them any favours with the panic that seems to have come about.

The way things are currently, when buying a vBulletin licence you have two options -you can buy an owned licence, which means you own the licence forever and pay a smaller fee yearly for member area access which gives you the ability to keep upto date with any updates or you can purchase a leased licence which means you own the licence for a year then have to renew it by purchasing the lease (at full lease price) again.

The new plan for vBulletin seems to be to remove the availability of leased licences completely and to offer two new ways of purchasing vBulletin licences. The first is solely for the Forum software. Price (as per the leaked information) stands to be $195, which is $15 more than the existing price of an owned licence. On the plus side, there will never been any renewal fees (so no paying yearly for member area access) for the duration of the vBulletin series you’ve paid for. (So if you purchase a series 4 model, you won’t ever pay unless they release a series 5 and you wish to upgrade to it.) However, as we don’t know how often a new series is likely to be released nor do we know the cost of upgrading from one series to another, whether the existing customers (myself included) will be happy with this change remains to be seen. Another change here is the support. Currently, with an owned licence you get a year’s worth of support and then when you renew your member area, the support continues. The new proposal is that with this purchase you will only receive 30 days of support (with the suggestion that the 30 days does not start until you submit your first ticket). The assumption, as far as I can tell, is that most customers don’t need the support system anyway and only newcomers to the software will require help. Again, whether this is the case, is unproven to the customer-base, but I can say in the 6 years or so I’ve used vBulletin, I’ve used their support system once only and that was simply to fix a password problem for my access. There is also a note suggesting that this support cuts off 90 days after your initial purchase and for support after that a potential cost of $80.

The second new package is a full suite. At a cost of $285, a customer will receive the Forum software, blog, CMS, Project Tools (and other future released products). They will also receive the unlimited support that we currently have with Owned Licences. It looks like there won’t be an option to purchase these features separately, which I’m not sure I understand as I can see some sites wanting blogs but not Project Tools and the vice-versa. Also IPB offers both options – the ability to buy everything as a complete package and the ability to buy them all separately. A sentence that did concern me in the leaked information states :-

vB Suite customers will get free ticket support, as well as continued access to support on the forums.

As the support forums are not mentioned in the first package, are we to assume that we will lose this if we do not buy the suite?

As for current leased licences, it looks like those are going to be null and void – and, thus far, there is no mention of whether there will be some kind of deal made so owners of leased licences can upgrade to one of the new packages without having to pay out the full amount. I do have a little hope left after reading the following from the leaked information:-

…existing customers are treated as valued partners in our success rather than as numbers on a ledger sheet.

And I hope this means that there are people still on the vBulletin team that will fight the customers corner and get the best deal for us.

Moving away from the costing of vB, it seems that for vBulletin 4 they are changing how they do things and not releasing any public betas. This is something that really does puzzle me as it’s well known that having people beta-testing a piece of software in an actual user-end environment will lead to the discovery and repair of bugs faster than in a closed environment. Surely this method will mean they will need to release further version more often than has been necessary thus far.

If the timeline leaked is correct, we should know what’s going on before the gold release of vB4 (15 July – 2 days after my birthday *hint hint) so, to finish up, I am going to simply say that I will keep watching with the hope that the vBulletin team will do the right thing for its loyal customers. Change is not always a bad thing, but the way it’s handled goes a long way toward how it is perceived.