I'm not though. I'm getting a free copy of Windows 7 because my new laptop was Vista and I bought it within a certain time period. (Well if I ever get around to sending in my forms.) That's not happening in this case. One of those posters over there was *cough* expressing his annoyance of only having his license for something like 2 months and is being required to fork over the cash yet again.
The issue here is vBulletin hasnt told us before when we purchased the main license that we have to pay seprately for the next version where as windows has mentioned this from before itself.
lol... okay, well if you buy a server that is bundled with vBulletin 3.x, you would expect 4.x to be free? Let's say you bought Windows Vista 2 months before Windows 7 came out... Microsoft wouldn't give you Windows 7 for free. I've never seen anywhere that vBulletin told me vBulletin 4.x would be free when I purchased 3.x.
Actually that would be one of the questions I would be asking. When I got this laptop, I did check to see if the free upgrade would be included. Some of the laptops I came across did not offer it. (Was it Vista Basic that didn't include it?) I have no real love for Windows but I realize that keeping up to date is a necessity. When I first started hosting way back when in '9*cough*, I started with a Wildcat server. I remember out of the box it had a wide open SMTP server that was open to relaying and the only way to fix it was to buy the upgrade. I don;t remember what the time periods were. To be honest, if I was making a purchase and knew that there was a pending upgrade, I'd make sure there was an upgrade path or *cough* I'd fine a temporary solution if you know what I mean.
When I made the purchase of vbulletin 3.8.x, I was told that the patches would cost $60 a year which is not the case now. I have to pay $175 no matter whether I use VB4 or not. If I bought Windows Vista 2, Microsoft will never force me to buy windows 7 to get the essential security updates for the vista 2.
Security patches are free until 3.8.x is officially end of lifed... I think that is when 4.2.x comes out, but I could be wrong. vBulletin has always done it that way... This is how it would be when 4.1 is released (for example): Version Level of Support Current 4.1 Full Support V(-1) 4.0 Bug + Security V(-2) 3.8 Security V(-3) 3.7 End of Life Code (markup):
Shawn you are pretty much correct here. Security patches are indeed free irrespective of whether you have paid the annual maintenance fee or not
Actually, Ray Morgan said vB4 would be free for active license users. The problem you don't seem to understand Shawn is not really the money. It is in some way, because they approached it in a NEGATIVE way. IB played these tricks and turns on customers and did it to benefit their own selves. If you treat your customers like crap.. regardless of the pay. They are going to hate it and move on. I'm at the vB forums practically daily, so I know what goes on. You probably haven't been there as much. So from your point of view it's just about the fee. $130 and your done... but it's not so much about the fee as it is about respect. BTW, they benefit more by keeping you than pissing you off. If DP moved away from vB to IPB... they would be screwed. True, but that doesn't mean programmers out there can't put up patches themselves. It's not that hard if you know what you are doing...
No disrespect to Shawn but DP is a drop in the bucket compared to some VB installs out there. They all pay the same prices for the licenses as well. Chances are they're making their money off of the hosted installs anyway.
They don't do hosted installs, but yeah... I was about to say the same thing. This is certainly one of the larger vBulletin forums, but vB certainly wouldn't be screwed if we moved to IPB and they lost out on $130. I'd say there's move value in the code I've written over the years for scalability stuff that has been adopted by vBulletin here and there. In fact, just showed them today how to rewrite a single SQL query (that is run every time a user views forumdisplay.php). It give the same results, but take far less DB resources and in my case makes a query run in 0.01 seconds (vBulletin's way of doing it takes 0.5 seconds to run). So yeah... every page view of forumdisplay.php is half a second faster now (and DB servers aren't nearly as stressed). http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?322879-MySQL-Subqueries
It's not about losing $130. Think about the rumour spreading! "DP changes from vB to IPB"... There must be something wrong with vB is what people will think. And that in turn hurts vB's rep when a large board decides to move, when a so called product "vB" is supposed to be the best. I think vB has been good, but in the future it's going to go down hill. I would say vB4.0 or 3.8 will be the last best version.
I was thinking IPB when I said that. Was thinking it from the other thread. http://www.invisionpower.com/hosting They do offer paid phone support though. Paid ticket support for the forum purchases as well.
Ticket support is free for vBulletin Suite owners. But that certainly wasn't the selling point for me (I've never once needed it).
Same here... For those that did get the suite.. hope the cms and blog are good... well those that will use it. I still have a few days to upgrade... but I'm thinking I most likely wont... Who knows, if vB4 actually turns out well and IB changes their ways. Maybe they will have another discount sale down the future for members to upgrade. Although, I predict vB to take a huge hit within the next 2 years.
I don't see the new "CMS" as being anything to brag about, in fact from the little I've seen it, I'm not impressed at all.
Well.. I agree. I mean we do see presales, but to pay for something at $100-300 USD isn't easy on presales. Smaller items can get away with presale pricing. It's like selling a car before it's fully made versus selling a video game, which will be due out.
So, If you have an active license of vBulletin 3.x, the update to vBulletin 4.x is free and you don't have to pay for upgrades 1-2-3 years, depending of the lifetime of vBulletin 4.x. When the'll be realeasing vbulletin 5.x you'll have to pay $xxx the money that you would have payed for upgrades in the 1-2-3years lifetime of vBulletin 4.x. It's the same thing, the only difference is that you just have to pay in advance.