The watching 'vBulletin's market share nosedive' thread.

I think a complete rewrite by competent, experienced people with an easy upgrade procedure is the only way vb could be resurrected at this point.
A painful upgrade procedure means people will look at other forum software also and see more mature competitors.
The size of the remaining vB customer base means they could get away with it being not quite as good as the competition. But they would either need quite a few features fairly quickly or support from a similarly resurrected modding community.
Problem is finding competent, experienced people who can compete with the competency and experience of the competition. The XF team (the only team I am familiar with) are, let's face it, as competent and experienced as you're going to get. And vB would have to wait at least another year before a bare bones brand new forum platform could be created (based on how long it took the XF team and assuming vB don't throw such a huge pile of money at it that they could afford a large team).
Another problem is that they would have to admit defeat on vB5, which might be too hard to do. Even though it is so thoroughly defeated.
Changing the licensing arrangement seems like a trivial problem in comparison.

It's reasonable to speculate that vB licensing is not making a profit. Sure there are naive people spending money on vB but anyone doing research will find negative reviews and will hopefully gravitate towards something else.
Predicting what will happen to vB is difficult from the outside because of the complexity of IB's ownership of so many vB forums from which millions are made.
The admins of those mostly vb3 and vb4 forums, if they care and are competent, should be desperate to migrate to different software. If IB care and are competent, they should allow them to do so. If that happens (and I have no idea whether it is happening), it will leave IB with dwindling reasons to care about vB.
At this point I think vB will continue to lose market share until it's sold off. That could be years down the line.
UBB lost its market share and was bought by a (no doubt enthusiastic) buyer who has completely failed thus far to make a dent in the forum market.

Spinball said:

UBB lost its market share and was bought by a (no doubt enthusiastic) buyer who has completely failed thus far to make a dent in the forum market.

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Not surprising though, anytime I went to the UBB site, the latest news was always them trying to flog their hosting package, lol

Spinball said:

It's reasonable to speculate that vB licensing is not making a profit.

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No surprise, it's tuned exclusively for rush sales and preorder scenarios, where the way to raise capital again is declaring the release of a new major version so people line up again with their wallets. Definitely not sutainable outside big sales periods (combined with not just good press, but the absence of bad press), and does not incentivize to maintain released versions (even the latest one available). Given early script releases tend to bring out a lot of issues that need quick bugfix releases, that's not a viable economic model.

Spinball said:

UBB lost its market share and was bought by a (no doubt enthusiastic) buyer who has completely failed thus far to make a dent in the forum market.

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UBB 8 was going very nicely, and held some promise. Progress topics got archived after the lead developper's death that sent the crew back to maintainance mode.

digitalpoint said:

Nah, I bet they sell a lot of vB5, with the buyers ultimately using vB4 instead.

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I almost migrated to xenforo but because of the lawsuit thing I instead bought a vb5 license during their pre-sale naively thinking they would never make the same mistake again with the plan to upgrade my vB3 forum to 4.2 whilst waiting for vB5 to come out. I admit to liking the upgrade at first in that the vB4 forum was a lot less tired looking in comparison to vB3 but that didn't last and I cut my losses and moved on

BirdOPrey5 said:

The Facebook App worked different, that I would totally believe that required IB servers to function. However the Facebook app is now dead.

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Its not completely dead, its just not for sale anymore. The current apps are still out there, and in use.
A believe part of it was intended to communicate with an central IB system for users to share a list of related sites, but that was never implemented as such, allthough it does still poll the servers, but they just return dummy data (and always have). The people that worked on it have long since departed.

PaulM said:

vB5 has very limited developemnt resources now

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July 21, 2015 in Licensed Customer Forum at vB.com.

Uh oh. Can't say I'm surprised though
But they are advertising a new position, so perhaps he means limited dev work until someone is hired.

But how long would a newly hired lead dev need to be 'trained', before he could become useful and not break things everywhere? No matter the level of general expertise, it does not grant intimate understanding with specific projects (especially ones developped based on old legacy practices and research instead of the modern principles of 2015).

Familiarity with existing processes would require at least 2 months minimum, and perhaps longer if the folks behind QA processes/continuous integration are not around anywhere or replaced with as efficient or more.

LeadCrow said:

Familiarity with existing processes would require at least 2 months minimum,

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Just don't tell Briscoe that, or he'll be told to do it in 1, or leave.

To be fair his original plans were still viable given the economic model they sought, but with parallel development taking place (2 teams separately working with different scopes). This way there's always a backup script to fallback on if one develops too slowly, and by the time IB decides it wants to EOL 'vb4' the other would be ready for release and sale, without development suffering from pressure and with the delay of just one development cycle (necessary).

While it is true that many of us old vBulletin users are deeply emotionally invested in the previous (vBulletin 3.8.x.) product that, by most measures, still out-delivers feature-for-feature the work of other new platforms, I think that the bigger issue isn't whether we - the customers - have "moved on" as BirdOPrey5 suggests we should, but that the Internet has by and large "moved on" from forums as meaningful mainstream user experiences and that these are now relegated to niche experiences, whether they be experiences targeting gamers, hobbyists, or subject matter enthusiasts.

The established ubiquity of social networks and social media as credentialing platforms - LinkedIn as a rolodex, and Facebook as a "people directory," for example - makes it increasingly unlikely that a new dominant forum-based community could emerge, especially when other centrally-administered platforms (like Reddit) make audience acquisition and software maintenance much easier, lowering the bar for entry into the market. vBulletin had an opportunity here to drive a future, innovative vision of forums, and when it failed to do so, the rest of the market responded by simply cloning the vBulletin approach to try and obtain some of its marketshare. This really isn't particularly a good recipe for success, in my opinion, and I think by and large, we've seen the total market for forum users decline substantially over the past 5 years.

For the past 18 months, varying segments of the forum market are trying desperately to innovate, from Discourse to NodeBB, but none of these promise to propel meaningful changes in user experience to the forefront of forum-goers.

The understandable consequence here is that you have vBulletin fans who appreciated the vBulletin brand for being innovative and compelling instead expressing dismay, disappointment, and ultimately, disdain in the company that squandered the opportunity to keep forums relevant and may have instead been largely responsible for the platform's decline, at least in the mainstream enterprise space.

Down to 48.91%
Xenforo at 34.02%.

digitalpoint said:

Then he absolutely doesn't know what he's talking about when it comes to databases and servers. Query count is in no way a misleading metric if you expect anything to scale beyond a couple concurrent users. Database queries are incredibly resource intensive compared to other things. So when the guy leading all the developers is telling them to ignore query count because it's no big deal, well... "Houston, we have a problem." no matter how you look at it.

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OMG... I thought I was the only one that was said to!

This is a quote from me from my site in 2013....

My reasons are all centered around a short private area thread on vB.com where it was said that the number of database queries has no real affect on site speed. That told me there's little hope for vB5. Nobody is going to tell me that 70 to 100 database queries don't slow down a site. Especially if you have thousands of members hitting the site at once.

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vBulletin 5.1 has a 2.40% adoption rate, lol.
Epic fail.

Deimos said:

vBulletin 5.1 has a 2.40% adoption rate, lol.

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Was it ever higher than 2.4% and it is now showing a decline or is the 2.4% rate it's current highest rate of adoption?

No, the adoption rate is increasing very slowly. However, that does not have to mean that the numbers are also increasing. If vb4/vb3 sites are decreasing while vb5 sites stay the same in number, then the percentage of vb5 sites increases.
I also think that a higher vb5 adoption rate results in a higher migration rate from vb to other software. And now that I compare this, it seems to be correct. While vb5.1 has gained 1% adoption since February, migrations away to xf and ipb have increased since then.
digitalpoint how about migrations from vb to BB? BB is clearly gaining marketshare, but not listed on the migrations graph. Could you add this?

digitalpoint said:

Then he absolutely doesn't know what he's talking about when it comes to databases and servers. Query count is in no way a misleading metric if you expect anything to scale beyond a couple concurrent users. Database queries are incredibly resource intensive compared to other things. So when the guy leading all the developers is telling them to ignore query count because it's no big deal, well... "Houston, we have a problem." no matter how you look at it.

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Snog said:

OMG... I thought I was the only one that was said to!

This is a quote from me from my site in 2013....

Snog said:

My reasons are all centered around a short private area thread on vB.com where it was said that the number of database queries has no real affect on site speed. That told me there's little hope for vB5. Nobody is going to tell me that 70 to 100 database queries don't slow down a site. Especially if you have thousands of members hitting the site at once.

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The whole vB4 CMS and vB5 architecture seemed to be built on the premise that PHP is just a dumb pipe and MySQL is just a dumb storage system and that AJAX/Javascript is where all the logic should happen. Lots of little queries and then painstakingly parsing the results in the browser before displaying it. Anyone who endured 3 years of 5-10 second "Loading" screens on vB4 forums knows what I'm talking about. When your "New Posts" link is a JSONblob, you know that someone is completely out of their depth with PHP/MySQL:

vbulletin . com/forum/search?searchJSON=%7B%22date%22%3A%22lastVisit%22%2C%22view%22%3A%22topic%22%2C%22unread_only%22%3A1%2C%22sort%22%3A%7B%22lastcontent%22%3A%22desc%22%7D%2C%22exclude_type%22%3A%5B%22vBForum_PrivateMessage%22%5D%7D

Hi

feldon30 said:

The whole vB4 CMS and vB5 architecture seemed to be built on the premise that PHP is just a dumb pipe and MySQL is just a dumb storage system and that AJAX/Javascript is where all the logic should happen.

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Nothing wrong with that - if done right. It allows you to more easily provide different front ends (such as native apps), as your application basically already is an REST API. It also reduces load on the server as it does not has to render the view and it eases caching.

PacMan said:

July 17

VB 49.6% - Loss of 1.3%
XF 33.5% - Gain of 1.1%
IPB 12.8% - Gain of 0.1%
BB 4.2% - Gain of 0.1%

VB keeps losing market share and it has fallen below 50%. XF keeps gaining market share while IPB and BB market share growth has remained flat.

IPB4 now has 33.5% of the total IPB market share, up from 26.3% from last month.

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VB 48.5% - Loss of 1.1%
XF 34.3% - Gain of 0.8%
IPB 12.9% - Gain of 0.1%
BB 4.3% - Gain of 0.1%

Month after month, VB keeps losing market share, XF keeps gaining market share while IPB and BB market share growth remains flat.

IPB4 now has 41.6% of the total IPB market share, up from 33.5% from last month.

Is the total market growing or shrinking? Are there more total VBs or less?