Vbulletin use to be IMO one of the best software solutions out there for forums with tons of support and add ons. We are looking to relaunch a forum but since Version 5, seems that the community is dead. No offense. What happened?
I don't follow the advancement of forum software but like any other company that sells software if your competitors offer a better product and you don't "follow" the market you most likely won't lead the market.. This happens all the time with software, apps, and even programming languages.
It's garbage. 7 or so years ago it was the leader, but no more. IPB and XF emerged and blew vB away. I want to say the downfall of vB was right around when they (Jelsoft?) sold themselves to Internet Brands. They stopped progressing and vBulletin 4 was an absolute disaster. The software was clunky, bug-ridden, and not modern like IPB and XF. I was part of the vBulletin 4 Alpha group and the way they managed that project, change requests, and their developers....it was just a mess. Fortunately XF and IPB stepped up, though. Great communities and software there.
It's not garbage. But the v3 release (I think) (Which is also what DP runs on, i think), is the last "popular" vBulletin version that was around. After that they re-released a brand new version where the majority of the script was re-written. New code, new design, new everything, really, the only thing left in common was "vBulletin" and the term "forum". vBulletin actively tried to go from being a forum software, to a more complete community solution. The second they did, vBulletin went down-hill doing worse and worse until they are where they are today, at the bottom with PHPBB. IPB is the new vBulletin. XF is a nasty mess.
No it's not, this forum uses it. This instance of XF will have been customised (some bits partly re-written, some parts completly re-written, some as they are and some new bits added). Only @digitalpoint knows what sort of % of the codebase has been re-written to some degree
vBulletin 3 was amazing back in the day when it was released. vBulletin 4 you could at least get it to do what you want with some arm twisting. vBulletin 5 is utter garbage. Personally I don't love IPB internally or writing addons for it, but it's better than vBulletin. XenForo is pretty amazing. And the guts of XenForo 2 really do take it to a whole new level of amazingness (I'm talking internal/guts and it's extensibility, not necessarily the front-end UI, which is fine on all platforms).
That is funny because I can't give away an IPB license. Kind of curious, what is your history in forum software? Most successful forum ran?
I used to use a free IPB forum, they may have fixed it by now but back then you couldn't do a search for a partial username, you had to know the exact username
I liked vB3 and vB4 but never vB5. When I discvered XF, I fell in love with it even it was a very new project. I knew by that time it was the end of vB at least for me.