Interesting Times for Forum Owners

Interesting times in the world of forums at the moment. I've written about being a vBulletin customer previously, but now that time might come to an end. Internet Brands, the company who own the rights to vBulletin, have announced plans to release vBulletin 5. However there are two problems with this from my perspective:

1. A demonstration copy of this has been released, and to say the least it isn't very impressive, mostly in terms of performance.
2. The cost to upgrade is $249. As a UK resident I would need to add 20% VAT onto that, and even with a discount for upgrading it is still a significant financial hit for someone like me. Paying for vBulletin 4 was a stretch, the cost for vBulletin 5 might have finally priced me out.

In addition to those two points there is also what they mean together. As a customer why reward an inferior product by paying to use it? The only way as a customer to show that a product is not good enough is to not buy it, that is the only thing a company will understand.

From what I've seen the most viable option is a product called Xenforo. It has a high entry price and then has an annual support fee for a more manageable price. It is reminiscent of the pricing plan that vBulletin used to have, and that probably isn't an accident. There are a number of people within the Xenforo team who used to work on vBulletin before it was taken over by Internet Brands.

Now whether it is related to that point or not, there is an enormous amount of friction between Internet Brands and the team behind Xenforo. There is an ongoing lawsuit which has been served by Internet Brands which will go to court in January of 2013. However at the present time development on Xenforo has slowed to a crawl, partly due to the ongoing litigation and partly due to what are at least perceived to be personal issues among the Xenforo team.

So what is the answer if you're someone like me? Well my personal preference is to keep up to date on security patches for vBulletin 4, sit tight on any present buying decisions and see what develops. It needs to be seen what will take place in regard to Xenforo, because if they are able to continue and offer commitment towards development they will probably be the product I move to. However the present litigation is a big cloud over the product at the present time.

Waiting isn't a particularly fun thing to do, and however much I'd like to get a hold of a copy of Xenforo and play around with it this doesn't feel like the right time to do that. I cannot realistically invest in a product for whom the future appears to be insecure at present. That is my right as a buyer, and something which Xenforo must address, in the same way that vBulletin should address quality and pricing issues if they feel that is an issue for them, although unfortunately it looks as if repeat business and past reputation is allowing them to continue with a disappointing product.

Update Time

I've had a busy time of things lately with my youngest daughter now reaching the grand old age of two, so I thought this would be an interesting time to review a few prior posts.

A Few Personal Lifehacks
Ah, backups... I've changed again! Remember how I started with weekly backups stored locally, and then advanced to daily backups? Well now I've gone a step further, and have finally started backing up some items online with Amazon Web Services. This is because I've had failures with both internal and external drives, and so therefore I opted for a third level of backup. Some photos - especially those of the kids - are too valuable not to be kept elsewhere.

Backups as a whole are an area I tend to think about a lot and consider a great deal. I know I consider my data too valuable not to back it up and keep those backups up to date.

The Problem With Joan Harris
We've now had five series of Mad Men, and I'm still not overly keen on the character as a person. Great series to show the acting talents of Christina Hendricks though. I have a new respect for her as an actress, although I still think no actress matches Elisabeth Moss on the show (Kiernan Shipka might get there one day, but not just yet).

I found season five of Mad Men quite odd. Brilliant at times, frustrating at others. I've seen some reviews which felt the whole series was brilliant, and yet I felt a little bit disappointed by it. And yet I'm still wondering where it ends up going in season six, and who'll feature, how they'll feature and even what year it will begin in. If it is 1968 that augurs well in my book.

vBulletin's Venture Into Blogging
Seems a bit odd to me that this continues to be the most popular post I've written, and by some distance. I haven't written about vBulletin for a while but I think as a whole the vBulletin team have lost their way. What was a simple forum software is now a massively bloated content management system. The overall package, which used to weigh in at a manageable 10Mb, now hovers at the 30Mb mark (which does matter for some of us). Where products like Wordpress will update quickly and simply through a wizard that even downloads the software package for you, the vBulletin upgrade is somewhat more laborious in comparison.

I still don't trust it as a stand-alone blogging platform (duh, I'm blogging here after all) but I can see how it makes sense when used with a forum (as I've tested myself over at Braves-Nation.com). Unfortunately the implementation isn't great, there is no uniformity in regard to tags that might see more linking between posts written by separate users, and once again, there's a mammoth amount of bloat there. Pity, it could be so much better and leaner. Unfortunately the way vBulletin has been going recently I can't say I'm hopeful of improvement, and I've even been considering switching to Xenforo.

My Top Three Twitter Peeves
Can I add one to this? People asking celebrities to retweet their causes, all... the... time. But you know what's great? Whereas another site (that won't be mentioned by name) consistently does things to annoy their users Twitter seems to find ways to make things better. However it wasn't until recently that I discovered that you can turn off retweets by anyone you're following. It's a game-changer, something else which enables you to get Twitter working the way you want it to.