What do you think will happen with vBulletin in the far future?

[cheat-master30]

As in, vBulletin 5 timeline? I'm wondering whether you think it'll improve quite a bit, what with all the old vB 3 code likely having been phased out since then. Think any new, interesting features will be added? Hell, think they'd ever change the name from vBulletin to try and get rid of their own caused bad press?

[kevin]

I look for social networking to play a major part in the forum. Kinda like customized profiles, but a lot better.

Built in chat rooms for example. Why doesn't vbulletin come with a built in chat room?
Someway for admins to manage bounced emails from outdated accounts.
Unsubscribe information in admin emails.
Fix their RSS feed so google does not think its a video feed - when you submit the vbulletin RSS feed as a sitemap, google rejects it saying its a video sitemap.

I think the bloat is going to be a major issue.

I look for an the articles system to finally get an importer for other scripts. So that joomla, wordpress, drupal,,, and the other major players can be migrated to the vbulletin suite.

I would like to see a better downloads manager script.

[Mike]

For their own sake, I hope whatever does happen will not frustrate their customer base to the same degree as vB 4 has. Can they manage to shoot themselves in the opposite foot on a subsequent release?

Stay tuned, film at 11:00.

[AudiTT]

I cant see their future, really.

[Mark.B]

The future is going to be Invision - vB seems to have blown it, and shows no sign of trying to rectify things which I think is the worst part. We could perhaps forgive their mistakes if they'd at least own up to them in the first place.

[3Phase]

They'll keep tacking on new features until it becomes unmanageable ... then they'll break the features off into separate products you can buy as add-ons.

or

When the software + growing features list becomes so unwieldy it's hard to discuss the package in one conversaton, they'll sell it off to some other company with "a new vision." They might part out the add-on's separately.

Total silly-wild-ass-guess (swag.)


Not that IB is anything like AOL & Compuserve ... but in the 90's both built up new-frontier internet companies, and then sold the transmission lines that carried the internet services to a telecom company (WorldCom now MCI) and leased back the transmission. That way AOL & CS didn't have to run the physical network, which is not what they wanted to do anyway. If IB comes to see vb as just the infrastructure and not the real product & focus of the company, they might reverse what they did when they bought it. Dunno, though.

[AWS]

I see IB going the way of Infopop. Cater to the enterprise with a new product and scuttle vbulletin as it is now. Infopop did this with UBB. They created Open Topic which was an enterprise hosted product. UBB users went to vbulletin. It didn't do too well, although some large sites still use it, arstechnica for one. It was just too costly for the small forum owners to afford so they created Eve. A hosted package that was priced for smaller sites. It didn't do well so they bought wwwthreads to try and get back in the small market. Too late. vbulletin had taken over the top spot.

I wouldn't be a bit surprised if they did the same thing. If you remember when IB took over they said that they would be catering to the big boards with enterprise options more than the old staff did. There is a thread discussing this at vbulletin.com and if search worked half way decent I'd find it and post the link.

[The Geek]

Is see 'vB' becoming common lingo as in:

"Don't be a vB man, come out and play"

or

"You didn't give me the correct change back you vB"

or

"Ewww, you smell that? Man that is veeeeBeeee"

[Mike]

So what you're saying is vB could become shorthand for other shorthand, like FUBAR and SNAFU?

'Can you give me a lift, my car is vB'ed.'