VBulletin
Encyclopedia
vBulletin is a proprietary Internet forum
software produced by Jelsoft Enterprises and vBulletin Solutions, both subsidiaries of Internet Brands
. It is written in PHP
and uses a MySQL
database server.
website using Infopop's UBB.classic
forum software on VB Forums. As their site grew, they noticed that their software, written in Perl
using a flat-file database, could not always cope with the number of users they had. In February 2000, the two decided that it would be better to write their own solution as both were unfamiliar with the software's code and thus unable to optimize it. Initially, it was designed solely as a rewrite of UBB, in PHP
using MySQL
, and was meant only for their own forum. Other UBB owners expressed interest in the solution, and they offered to sell it to Infopop, but their proposal was rejected. As there was still a demand for the software, Limm and Percival created Jelsoft and released their work as a paid solution, called vBulletin 1.
After subsequent minor releases of their software, the two decided to start working on a new version that would be more than a rewrite of UBB: they wanted to turn their software into a competitive solution for forums. Rewriting the entirety of the product, vBulletin 2 commenced development. Shortly thereafter, Limm became the managing director and Percival the lead developer. To help with the scale of the project, two additional developers, Freddie Bingham and Mike Sullivan were brought on to help finish vBulletin 2. Kier Darby was brought on during the vBulletin 2.0 Beta phase to further development. The release of vBulletin 2 proved to be very successful and is what made vBulletin popular.
In December 2002, vBulletin 3 was beginning development. Percival decided to step down as lead developer and product manager, turning his roles over to Kier Darby. vBulletin 3 was under development for a lengthy period of time—nearly two years—as it went from a mere improvement on vBulletin 2 to a complete rewrite
. During this time Jeremy Hutchings joined the development team, a.k.a. Jerry. However, version 3 was finally released in March 2004. In 2005, vBulletin 3.5 was released that addressed some of the shortcomings of 3.0 (discussed later on). vBulletin 3.6 was released as a stable version on 3 August, 2006.
On 4 July, 2007 Jelsoft announced that Jelsoft had been acquired by Internet Brands
, which promised significant investment in software development.
In 2009, long-time developers Kier Darby, Mike Sullivan, Scott MacVicar and Jeremy Hutchings left the company. Kevin Sours, Don Kuramura, and Ray Morgan took Darby's place as lead developer, product manager, and general manager, respectively.
On 22 July 2010 the BBC reported that there was a serious flaw in vBulletin software that allows anyone to easily access the database username and password.
On 4 October 2010, "Internet Brands commenced a lawsuit in the courts of England and Wales against XenForo, and its founders, Kier, Mike and Ashley".
On 29 October 2010, Internet Brands filed a second lawsuit in the United States District Court for the Central District of California through its wholly owned subsidiary vBulletin Solutions, Inc. against xenForo Ltd., and its founders Kier, Mike and Ashley. The lawsuit alleges "widespread infringement and unlawful exploitation" of vBulletin's source code and "equally damaging misappropriation of trade secrets" developed and owned by vBulletin with "investments of millions of dollars over the last ten years." The lawsuit further alleges that the developers of xenForo Ltd. "took with them virtually every type of document a competitor would need to enter the market and unlawfully create a competing bulletin board software program."
vBulletin 1 was the initial release of vBulletin, sporting the same features as UBB.classic
. The release was very popular as it was one of the first systems that was written using PHP and MySQL that had the features of UBB.
vBulletin Lite was a degraded version of the 1.x series that allowed potential customers to test their server for compatibility with vBulletin. The product was discontinued after vBulletin 2 because there were security issues and it was out of date, and Jelsoft did not want to spend resources into maintaining a non-commercial product.
, and a user control panel.
vBulletin 3.5.0, released on September 28, 2005, addressed some of the problems users had with version 3.0. Some of the changes are as follows:
vBulletin 3.6 introduced features such as the multi-quote system, the infractions system, the ability to automatically post threads and announcements from RSS feeds, and podcasting support. The Gold release of vBulletin 3.6.0 was released on 3 August, 2006.
A first look at vBulletin 3.7 was announced on November 23, 2007. It was officially released on April 29, 2008.
New features in 3.7 included an inline spam management & prevention system, thread tagging and tag cloud, thread prefixes, reciprocal friendship between users, public visitor messaging on user profile pages, user picture albums, user-created social groups, user-customizable profile pages, a lightbox viewer for images attached to posts, post edit history, a notices system, multiple human verification systems, and social bookmarking integration.
Version 3.8 introduced more new features, such as social group discussions, social group categories, private message sorting and filtering options, private message history, quick edit for newer types of content (visitor messages and picture comments), social group icons, social group transfers, a private message quick reply box, private message throttling (limit messages sent over a time period), private message reporting, profile privacy (limit blocks to a subset of users), lightbox navigation, thread prefix permissions, and dismissible notices.
The latest stable release of vBulletin is 3.8.7 which was released on 28 February, 2011, and is a maintenance release.
and a centralized attachment system which allows the sharing of attachments across products.
vBulletin's main character encoding is ISO-8859-1, not UTF-8
. If you want to use vBulletin with language not supported by ISO-8859-1 you have to make your own changes to the code.
On 15 December, 2008, James Limm, Managing Director of Jelsoft, posted the vBulletin 4 Series Development Update with significant differences from the August announcement.
In the lengthy discussions which followed this turn of events, additional information was revealed, including that:
The vBulletin Publishing Suite includes Forums, an article-based Content Management System
and the vBulletin Blog product.
. On 27 January, 2009, Ray Morgan was appointed General Manager of Jelsoft. On 13 May, 2009, the Administration section of vBulletin.com accidentally became accessible to the public for 13 minutes. Documents and discussions containing a detailed analysis of plans (and expected customer reaction) for vBulletin 4's new pricing scheme were revealed. A response was posted by Ray Morgan indicating that these were preliminary discussions and that customers should not make decisions based on leaked documents.
On 19 June, 2009, Kier Darby, lead developer of vBulletin since early in the development of version 2, left the company, as well as Mike Sullivan, who joined in Fall 2000, and Scott MacVicar. Jeremy Hutchings moved to part time to maintain ImpEx the data migration system. Subsequently, in July 2009, Peterska2 (Kerry-Anne) and Ashley also parted company with vBulletin. Jelsoft offices in the United Kingdom
were closed shortly thereafter.
On 19 August, 2009, Alpha testing of vBulletin begins with a selection of licensed customers under a Non-disclosure Agreement
. On 13 October, 2009, Ray Morgan announced a new vBulletin.com website, new vBulletin licensing structure, and pricing, all of which was largely identical to the leaked May 2009 documents. Replacing the annual renewal of $60, the new vBulletin Forum license was priced at $195, with the Suite costing $285. With an announced release cycle of 18–24 months for each point release, this was a cost increase of 200%. Customers with an inactive license were offered a small discount off the Suite and had less than 3 weeks to upgrade. Ironically, customers with the smallest investment in the product—Leased License customers—received the most cost-advantageous deal.
On 23 October, 2009, The vBulletin.com website was upgraded to the vBulletin 4 software including a new splash page and FAQ. vBulletin.com was down for 28 hours during this upgrade, with visitors to the site being redirected to a maintenance message at Internet Brands
-owned http://www.best-forum-software.com/. When the site returned, it remained sporadically inaccessible due to high loads for several days. On 12 November, 2009, vBulletin 4.0 Beta 3 was made available to licensed customers. Previous betas were made available to alpha testers. Beta 4, Beta 5, and two Release Candidates followed in quick succession.
On 22 December, 2009, vBulletin 4.0 Gold was released to the public amid customer concerns that it met a predetermined release schedule rather than producing a stable product Common customer complaints included substantial browser display issues, which affected Safari, Opera, and Internet Explorer 6, and a greatly increased number of MySQL queries in the default configuration as a result of the new Content Management System
. On 12 January, 2010, vBulletin 4.0.1 was released with over 200 bug fixes and style tweaks. On 8 April, 2010, vBulletin 4.0.3 was released with over 300 bug fixes as well as simple integration with Facebook Connect for single-signon between customer's boards and Facebook
. On 18 June, 2010, vBulletin 4.0.4 is released with over 450 bug fixes. The release was made despite various "showstopper" bugs, many of which caused issues with the upgrade process. On 24 June, 2010, vBulletin 4.0.4 "Patch Level 1" was released, but none of the previous showstopper bugs were fixed, except for two widget bugs according to official announcement.
integration provided by vBulletin.com, users are agreeing to allow Internet Brands
to access information about the performance of their ad units. Internet Brands will also be given a monetary referral credit if someone signs up for an AdSense account through a link on any vBulletin forum rather as opposed to the owner of the forum.
The owner of the forum also agrees to potentially share revenue in the future, however this is unclear during the sign up process, and Internet Brands
has yet to release a statement about how they will use the information gathered from linked AdSense accounts, leading to potential privacy issues and a competitive advantage for future Internet Brands
-owned websites. While the percentage of revenue sharing is currently set to 0%, a vBulletin Team Member has stated it could be subject to change in the future. However, as per Google
's AdSense rules, all users must explicitly agree to this and will be given at least 30 days notice.
Internet forum
An Internet forum, or message board, is an online discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages. They differ from chat rooms in that messages are at least temporarily archived...
software produced by Jelsoft Enterprises and vBulletin Solutions, both subsidiaries of Internet Brands
Internet Brands
Internet Brands is a new media company based in El Segundo, California that operates online media, community, and e-commerce sites in vertical markets. The company also develops and licenses internet software and social media applications....
. It is written in PHP
PHP
PHP is a general-purpose server-side scripting language originally designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages. For this purpose, PHP code is embedded into the HTML source document and interpreted by a web server with a PHP processor module, which generates the web page document...
and uses a MySQL
MySQL
MySQL officially, but also commonly "My Sequel") is a relational database management system that runs as a server providing multi-user access to a number of databases. It is named after developer Michael Widenius' daughter, My...
database server.
History
In 1999 James E. Limm and John Percival were running a Visual BasicVisual Basic
Visual Basic is the third-generation event-driven programming language and integrated development environment from Microsoft for its COM programming model...
website using Infopop's UBB.classic
UBB.classic
UBB.classic was an Internet forum software package originally written by Ted O'Neill of Social Strata, Inc. in 1996. It was written in Perl and used a flat file database...
forum software on VB Forums. As their site grew, they noticed that their software, written in Perl
Perl
Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Perl was originally developed by Larry Wall in 1987 as a general-purpose Unix scripting language to make report processing easier. Since then, it has undergone many changes and revisions and become widely popular...
using a flat-file database, could not always cope with the number of users they had. In February 2000, the two decided that it would be better to write their own solution as both were unfamiliar with the software's code and thus unable to optimize it. Initially, it was designed solely as a rewrite of UBB, in PHP
PHP
PHP is a general-purpose server-side scripting language originally designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages. For this purpose, PHP code is embedded into the HTML source document and interpreted by a web server with a PHP processor module, which generates the web page document...
using MySQL
MySQL
MySQL officially, but also commonly "My Sequel") is a relational database management system that runs as a server providing multi-user access to a number of databases. It is named after developer Michael Widenius' daughter, My...
, and was meant only for their own forum. Other UBB owners expressed interest in the solution, and they offered to sell it to Infopop, but their proposal was rejected. As there was still a demand for the software, Limm and Percival created Jelsoft and released their work as a paid solution, called vBulletin 1.
After subsequent minor releases of their software, the two decided to start working on a new version that would be more than a rewrite of UBB: they wanted to turn their software into a competitive solution for forums. Rewriting the entirety of the product, vBulletin 2 commenced development. Shortly thereafter, Limm became the managing director and Percival the lead developer. To help with the scale of the project, two additional developers, Freddie Bingham and Mike Sullivan were brought on to help finish vBulletin 2. Kier Darby was brought on during the vBulletin 2.0 Beta phase to further development. The release of vBulletin 2 proved to be very successful and is what made vBulletin popular.
In December 2002, vBulletin 3 was beginning development. Percival decided to step down as lead developer and product manager, turning his roles over to Kier Darby. vBulletin 3 was under development for a lengthy period of time—nearly two years—as it went from a mere improvement on vBulletin 2 to a complete rewrite
Rewrite (programming)
A rewrite in computer programming is the act or result of re-implementing a large portion of existing functionality without re-use of its source code. When the rewrite is not using existing code at all, it is common to speak of a rewrite from scratch...
. During this time Jeremy Hutchings joined the development team, a.k.a. Jerry. However, version 3 was finally released in March 2004. In 2005, vBulletin 3.5 was released that addressed some of the shortcomings of 3.0 (discussed later on). vBulletin 3.6 was released as a stable version on 3 August, 2006.
On 4 July, 2007 Jelsoft announced that Jelsoft had been acquired by Internet Brands
Internet Brands
Internet Brands is a new media company based in El Segundo, California that operates online media, community, and e-commerce sites in vertical markets. The company also develops and licenses internet software and social media applications....
, which promised significant investment in software development.
In 2009, long-time developers Kier Darby, Mike Sullivan, Scott MacVicar and Jeremy Hutchings left the company. Kevin Sours, Don Kuramura, and Ray Morgan took Darby's place as lead developer, product manager, and general manager, respectively.
On 22 July 2010 the BBC reported that there was a serious flaw in vBulletin software that allows anyone to easily access the database username and password.
On 4 October 2010, "Internet Brands commenced a lawsuit in the courts of England and Wales against XenForo, and its founders, Kier, Mike and Ashley".
On 29 October 2010, Internet Brands filed a second lawsuit in the United States District Court for the Central District of California through its wholly owned subsidiary vBulletin Solutions, Inc. against xenForo Ltd., and its founders Kier, Mike and Ashley. The lawsuit alleges "widespread infringement and unlawful exploitation" of vBulletin's source code and "equally damaging misappropriation of trade secrets" developed and owned by vBulletin with "investments of millions of dollars over the last ten years." The lawsuit further alleges that the developers of xenForo Ltd. "took with them virtually every type of document a competitor would need to enter the market and unlawfully create a competing bulletin board software program."
Forum product
Since the initial release of the vBulletin forum product in 2000, there have been many changes and improvements. Below is a list of the major revisions and some of the changes they introduced. The current version is 4.1.7.vBulletin 1 and vBulletin Lite
vBulletin 1.1.0a was released on 25 April, 2000. Development of vBulletin 1 is no longer active, nor is it a supported release.vBulletin 1 was the initial release of vBulletin, sporting the same features as UBB.classic
UBB.classic
UBB.classic was an Internet forum software package originally written by Ted O'Neill of Social Strata, Inc. in 1996. It was written in Perl and used a flat file database...
. The release was very popular as it was one of the first systems that was written using PHP and MySQL that had the features of UBB.
vBulletin Lite was a degraded version of the 1.x series that allowed potential customers to test their server for compatibility with vBulletin. The product was discontinued after vBulletin 2 because there were security issues and it was out of date, and Jelsoft did not want to spend resources into maintaining a non-commercial product.
vBulletin 2
vBulletin 2.0.0 was released on 21 May, 2001. vBulletin 2 is no longer under active development. When this version was released, it had numerous new features over vBulletin 1, which it replaced. Improvements include private messaging between users, attaching polls to threads, unlimited forum nesting, user avatarsAvatar (computing)
In computing, an avatar is the graphical representation of the user or the user's alter ego or character. It may take either a three-dimensional form, as in games or virtual worlds, or a two-dimensional form as an icon in Internet forums and other online communities. It can also refer to a text...
, and a user control panel.
vBulletin 3
vBulletin 3.0.0 was released on 19 March, 2004. Initially, version 3.0 was intended to be an extension of the 2.x release that would improve performance and user experience. However, as time progressed, it proved to be a complete rewrite. Some of the key advantages over vBulletin 2 are as follows:- The templates and style were updated to use XHTMLXHTMLXHTML is a family of XML markup languages that mirror or extend versions of the widely-used Hypertext Markup Language , the language in which web pages are written....
and CSSCascading Style SheetsCascading Style Sheets is a style sheet language used to describe the presentation semantics of a document written in a markup language... - Hard-coding of English text was eliminated
- Support for multiple languages by use of phrases
- A WYSIWYGWYSIWYGWYSIWYG is an acronym for What You See Is What You Get. The term is used in computing to describe a system in which content displayed onscreen during editing appears in a form closely corresponding to its appearance when printed or displayed as a finished product...
editor for users to post with - Paid subscriptions that allow administrators to charge for certain features of their site
- Multiple views for threads: Linear (a flat system), threaded (display of the entire thread tree), and hybrid (a combination of both).
vBulletin 3.5.0, released on September 28, 2005, addressed some of the problems users had with version 3.0. Some of the changes are as follows:
- A plugin system was introduced, that allows for modifications of the software without the need to edit the program scripts. This allows a forum operator to keep their modifications (called "hacks" or "mods" in the vBulletin community) and not having to re-edit scripts after upgrading.
- Inline editing of thread titles and post content was made possible via AJAXAjax (programming)Ajax is a group of interrelated web development methods used on the client-side to create asynchronous web applications...
. - An inline moderation system was provided, allowing forum operators to manage threads and posts on their board without having to go through intermediary steps. An APIApplication programming interfaceAn application programming interface is a source code based specification intended to be used as an interface by software components to communicate with each other...
system (referred to as "data managers") was created to let third-parties integrate more easily. - A template history and comparison system was introduced where administrators can store a specific revision of a template into the database, which can be arbitrarily compared against each another.
- A MySQLi wrapper was added, which added support for MySQL 4.1.
- A database-stored thread-marking system was added. Previous versions of vBulletin relied on a variable stored in the database, and also a cookieHTTP cookieA cookie, also known as an HTTP cookie, web cookie, or browser cookie, is used for an origin website to send state information to a user's browser and for the browser to return the state information to the origin site...
to store information about what threads had been read and not read by the user. However, this information was volatile and did not keep; additionally, if users idled for 15 minutes (some forums have longer timeouts, 15 minutes is the default) this information would be lost.
vBulletin 3.6 introduced features such as the multi-quote system, the infractions system, the ability to automatically post threads and announcements from RSS feeds, and podcasting support. The Gold release of vBulletin 3.6.0 was released on 3 August, 2006.
A first look at vBulletin 3.7 was announced on November 23, 2007. It was officially released on April 29, 2008.
New features in 3.7 included an inline spam management & prevention system, thread tagging and tag cloud, thread prefixes, reciprocal friendship between users, public visitor messaging on user profile pages, user picture albums, user-created social groups, user-customizable profile pages, a lightbox viewer for images attached to posts, post edit history, a notices system, multiple human verification systems, and social bookmarking integration.
Version 3.8 introduced more new features, such as social group discussions, social group categories, private message sorting and filtering options, private message history, quick edit for newer types of content (visitor messages and picture comments), social group icons, social group transfers, a private message quick reply box, private message throttling (limit messages sent over a time period), private message reporting, profile privacy (limit blocks to a subset of users), lightbox navigation, thread prefix permissions, and dismissible notices.
The latest stable release of vBulletin is 3.8.7 which was released on 28 February, 2011, and is a maintenance release.
vBulletin 4
vBulletin 4 was released 21 December, 2009. New for vBulletin 4 is the vBulletin publishing suite, which includes CMS and blog functions. Other updates to the software included a cross-content search system, improved search engine optimizationSearch engine optimization
Search engine optimization is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines via the "natural" or un-paid search results...
and a centralized attachment system which allows the sharing of attachments across products.
vBulletin's main character encoding is ISO-8859-1, not UTF-8
UTF-8
UTF-8 is a multibyte character encoding for Unicode. Like UTF-16 and UTF-32, UTF-8 can represent every character in the Unicode character set. Unlike them, it is backward-compatible with ASCII and avoids the complications of endianness and byte order marks...
. If you want to use vBulletin with language not supported by ISO-8859-1 you have to make your own changes to the code.
Future development
On 4 August, 2008, Kier Darby, former lead developer of vBulletin announced the development of vBulletin 3.8 and vBulletin 4.0. vBulletin 4 was described in this announcement as "an extensive rewrite of the vBulletin system. Architecturally, vBulletin 4 follows MVC (model-view-controller) object oriented principles, allowing far greater capabilities in code re-use and extendability." At the time, the requirements of vBulletin 4 were "PHP 5.2.3 and MySQL 5.0.22 or newer".On 15 December, 2008, James Limm, Managing Director of Jelsoft, posted the vBulletin 4 Series Development Update with significant differences from the August announcement.
In August, we announced a major overhaul of the code base. Rather than targeting all of these changes in a single, long-term release, we intend to accomplish all the planned improvements over a number of versions. In order to achieve this goal, the largest vBulletin development team ever assembled is now working within an Agile development process, allowing us to deliver new features into your hands faster.
Each incremental release in the vBulletin 4 series will include improvements in features, usability and architecture. Development efforts are prioritized towards those areas that can provide real, tangible benefits to our customers, at all times with an eye toward maintaining and enhancing the performance and reliability expected of a vBulletin product.
Key features and improvements that will be included in the first vBulletin 4 release are:
- Cross-content search system providing a single interface to search across forum posts, blog entries and comments and other supported products
- Improved search performance
- A fresh design and layout making use of semantic markup and CSS styling
- An enhanced style and template system to enhance your ability to change the layout
- Controls to assist with the placement of advertising elements
- SEO features, including friendly URLs
- A centralized attachment system, allowing the sharing of attachments across products
- Widget system for single pages
- Video BBCode - Popup to the editor that allows a video url (youtube, metacafe, etc) to be input
In the lengthy discussions which followed this turn of events, additional information was revealed, including that:
- The PHP and MySQL requirements won't be raised as high as announced in August, because the first release will be sooner than previously expected
- Jelsoft is now developing a content management systemContent management systemA content management system is a system providing a collection of procedures used to manage work flow in a collaborative environment. These procedures can be manual or computer-based...
(CMS) which will be fully integrated with vBulletin although it is unclear whether it will be sold separately like Jelsoft's Blog and Projects products. - vBulletin 4 is now being developed and will be released incrementally through 2009, with the first Beta expected "early Q2 of 2009". In a later post, the first Beta got pushed back to "late Q2". For users that paid the pre-sale cost for vBulletin 4.0, a message stating that the Beta will be available "sometime in mid-November" was issued.
Forum and Suite
vBulletin is now available as two product lines. The vBulletin Publishing Suite is $285 for the life of the 4.x development cycle and includes customer ticket support. The vBulletin Classic Forum is $195 for the life of the 4.x development cycle but does not include ticket support.The vBulletin Publishing Suite includes Forums, an article-based Content Management System
Content management system
A content management system is a system providing a collection of procedures used to manage work flow in a collaborative environment. These procedures can be manual or computer-based...
and the vBulletin Blog product.
vBulletin Blog
Now included in the vBulletin Publishing Suite, the vBulletin Blog allows members of a vBulletin community to create their own blogs. vBulletin Blog 1.0.5 was released to the public on 8 April, 2008. With the release of vBulletin 4.0, the vBulletin Blog became part of the vBulletin Publishing Suite.vBulletin Project Tools
This host of tools tracks bugs, tasks, etc. throughout the development of a product through its production and lifetime. vBulletin Project Tools 2.0.0 was released to the public on 30 September, 2008. With the release of vBulletin 4.0, active development of Project Tools has been discontinued. It will become an open source product distributed through vBulletin.org.vBulletin 4 release and controversy
On 4 July, 2007, Jelsoft was acquired by Internet BrandsInternet Brands
Internet Brands is a new media company based in El Segundo, California that operates online media, community, and e-commerce sites in vertical markets. The company also develops and licenses internet software and social media applications....
. On 27 January, 2009, Ray Morgan was appointed General Manager of Jelsoft. On 13 May, 2009, the Administration section of vBulletin.com accidentally became accessible to the public for 13 minutes. Documents and discussions containing a detailed analysis of plans (and expected customer reaction) for vBulletin 4's new pricing scheme were revealed. A response was posted by Ray Morgan indicating that these were preliminary discussions and that customers should not make decisions based on leaked documents.
On 19 June, 2009, Kier Darby, lead developer of vBulletin since early in the development of version 2, left the company, as well as Mike Sullivan, who joined in Fall 2000, and Scott MacVicar. Jeremy Hutchings moved to part time to maintain ImpEx the data migration system. Subsequently, in July 2009, Peterska2 (Kerry-Anne) and Ashley also parted company with vBulletin. Jelsoft offices in the United Kingdom
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
were closed shortly thereafter.
On 19 August, 2009, Alpha testing of vBulletin begins with a selection of licensed customers under a Non-disclosure Agreement
Non-disclosure agreement
A non-disclosure agreement , also known as a confidentiality agreement , confidential disclosure agreement , proprietary information agreement , or secrecy agreement, is a legal contract between at least two parties that outlines confidential material, knowledge, or information that the parties...
. On 13 October, 2009, Ray Morgan announced a new vBulletin.com website, new vBulletin licensing structure, and pricing, all of which was largely identical to the leaked May 2009 documents. Replacing the annual renewal of $60, the new vBulletin Forum license was priced at $195, with the Suite costing $285. With an announced release cycle of 18–24 months for each point release, this was a cost increase of 200%. Customers with an inactive license were offered a small discount off the Suite and had less than 3 weeks to upgrade. Ironically, customers with the smallest investment in the product—Leased License customers—received the most cost-advantageous deal.
On 23 October, 2009, The vBulletin.com website was upgraded to the vBulletin 4 software including a new splash page and FAQ. vBulletin.com was down for 28 hours during this upgrade, with visitors to the site being redirected to a maintenance message at Internet Brands
Internet Brands
Internet Brands is a new media company based in El Segundo, California that operates online media, community, and e-commerce sites in vertical markets. The company also develops and licenses internet software and social media applications....
-owned http://www.best-forum-software.com/. When the site returned, it remained sporadically inaccessible due to high loads for several days. On 12 November, 2009, vBulletin 4.0 Beta 3 was made available to licensed customers. Previous betas were made available to alpha testers. Beta 4, Beta 5, and two Release Candidates followed in quick succession.
On 22 December, 2009, vBulletin 4.0 Gold was released to the public amid customer concerns that it met a predetermined release schedule rather than producing a stable product Common customer complaints included substantial browser display issues, which affected Safari, Opera, and Internet Explorer 6, and a greatly increased number of MySQL queries in the default configuration as a result of the new Content Management System
Content management system
A content management system is a system providing a collection of procedures used to manage work flow in a collaborative environment. These procedures can be manual or computer-based...
. On 12 January, 2010, vBulletin 4.0.1 was released with over 200 bug fixes and style tweaks. On 8 April, 2010, vBulletin 4.0.3 was released with over 300 bug fixes as well as simple integration with Facebook Connect for single-signon between customer's boards and Facebook
Facebook
Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. , Facebook has more than 800 million active users. Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as...
. On 18 June, 2010, vBulletin 4.0.4 is released with over 450 bug fixes. The release was made despite various "showstopper" bugs, many of which caused issues with the upgrade process. On 24 June, 2010, vBulletin 4.0.4 "Patch Level 1" was released, but none of the previous showstopper bugs were fixed, except for two widget bugs according to official announcement.
Controversy over Google AdSense integration through vBulletin.com
When installing vBulletin 4 and using the AdSenseAdSense
Google AdSense which is a program run by Google Inc. allows publishers in the Google Network of content sites to automatically serve text, image, video, and rich media adverts that are targeted to site content and audience. These adverts are administered, sorted, and maintained by Google, and they...
integration provided by vBulletin.com, users are agreeing to allow Internet Brands
Internet Brands
Internet Brands is a new media company based in El Segundo, California that operates online media, community, and e-commerce sites in vertical markets. The company also develops and licenses internet software and social media applications....
to access information about the performance of their ad units. Internet Brands will also be given a monetary referral credit if someone signs up for an AdSense account through a link on any vBulletin forum rather as opposed to the owner of the forum.
The owner of the forum also agrees to potentially share revenue in the future, however this is unclear during the sign up process, and Internet Brands
Internet Brands
Internet Brands is a new media company based in El Segundo, California that operates online media, community, and e-commerce sites in vertical markets. The company also develops and licenses internet software and social media applications....
has yet to release a statement about how they will use the information gathered from linked AdSense accounts, leading to potential privacy issues and a competitive advantage for future Internet Brands
Internet Brands
Internet Brands is a new media company based in El Segundo, California that operates online media, community, and e-commerce sites in vertical markets. The company also develops and licenses internet software and social media applications....
-owned websites. While the percentage of revenue sharing is currently set to 0%, a vBulletin Team Member has stated it could be subject to change in the future. However, as per Google
Google
Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program...
's AdSense rules, all users must explicitly agree to this and will be given at least 30 days notice.
See also
- Comparison of Internet forum softwareComparison of Internet forum softwareThis article outlines the general features commonly found in various Internet forum software packages.-Subarticles:This article is a comparison of some of the major features of the various Internet forum software packages currently available. This page highlights major features that the manager of...
- Comparison of Internet forum software (PHP)Comparison of Internet forum software (PHP)This is a comparison of the features of various Internet forum packages written in PHP.- General information :Basic general information about the forums: creator/company, license/price etc.- Features :- Data storage :...
- Internet BrandsInternet BrandsInternet Brands is a new media company based in El Segundo, California that operates online media, community, and e-commerce sites in vertical markets. The company also develops and licenses internet software and social media applications....
External links
- vBulletin.com — Official vBulletin site
- vBulletin.org — Official vBulletin Resource Forum