Interview with Joe Ward, co-founder of Launch.forum @joewardpr

6 sites. 3 are forums, 3 are blogs.

CarlosX360 will welcome a new Halo website to the network. Just been working on converting it from vb3 to xenforo. Still working on it and have been for the past week now.

I still do not own the Halo site yet. I still owe the previous owner a grand.

I have a blog that I'd like to acquire to take on the whole Black Ops 2 community. I'm also waiting on this to launch my general gaming site. My entire business relies on a CMS like that to be launched.

 

I registered to these forums because of Joe
I have to agree with you regarding Mert...http://www.vbseo.com/f9/uninstalling-vbseo-nginx-54293/
You are fully right on how he conducts himself at times.

Either way vBSEO is no longer a concern for me, I moved off recently from it.
I am glad you shared your story with us and very much appreciated sir!
Your threads were very helpful over at vBSEO.

vBSEO is a sinking ship the way I see it now.

 

I'm still waiting for launch forum

 

Great interview (and followup!)

I am the one who got in the fight with Mert a few weeks ago.

From what I understand he misunderstood what I wanted, I wanted vbSEO uninstall instructions for NGINX and he thought I wanted him to uninstall NGINX on my server and return us to Apache. I think I was clear with my request, but do understand there is a language thing there so I am not as upset as I was with the way Mert handled things.

I was actually surprised when Mert replied to my ticket after I opened it as I thought I read somewhere that he quit the company.

Anyways after being really nervous about removing vbSEO from my site (I have a very busy site with over a half million unique IP's a month.) I removed it two weeks ago. The instructions that were given to my by vbSEO support did not work, however it gave me a good roadmap of how things should be and I ended up figuring out the redirects myself.

I was nervous about all the links on the search engines, but was surprised... if not shocked to wake up the next morning after I removed vbSEO to find that the majority of my website was reindexed by Google overnight!

Also surprisingly my traffic has increased in the past two weeks since removing vbSEO!

My ad revenue did take a hit, I am down about 25% since making the switch, but its starting to come back already.

My server load went down from 0.77 to 0.33 by removing vbSEO, which is good. The forum feels snappier as well, so that's a plus.

if vbSEO wants to survive they NEED to be open and honest and give their customers a road map of their future. You don't just say that your still working on it without telling customers what your working on and without releasing a major update in 2+ years. At the moment it just feels to me that the vbSEO team is not working to improve vbSEO, instead it appears they are working to collect a paycheck for as long as they can. Another thing I would do if I were vbSEO, is if they are truly working on things then perhaps they should extend all active licenses at no charge and then once a major new version comes out give those folks 30 days to try the new vbSEO before the old license expires.

That's my two cents anyways...

 

Hey IcEWoLF - thank you for your support! =)

ragtek rocks. I can always count on you to keep us focused on the goal! We're trying amigo.

Hey Scott - glad to hear that you got it all sorted out. Mert is a very talented guy; he just hasn't set clear boundaries for himself regarding what is acceptable behavior with customers (by a long shot). He just needs to resist the temptation to put on the Ring of Sauron every once and awhile.

 

I am not a computer geek and watched Joe build LF and was able to play with it and found it very useful aka KISS format. It is easier than word press and the design is not as bland as any forum software I have seen out there. By know means am I an expert but when it comes out I am going to get a copy. It makes the user want to engage and the admin. is easy. And coming from someone who visits forums for answers more than contributing I found it better organized or better stated not as cluttered.

 

Thanks for the interview Joe. Your transparency was awesome and much appreciated

I haven't been a fan of vBseo or their policies for a long time. Back in '06 with the 'black box' technology that always required root access to servers (cringe) or in recent years Juan indifference on the piracy of vBseo.
I currently have 25 vBseo licenses which have sat unused since 2009, and a couple were removed around feb. 2010. I would never ever return to vBseo. Even with Juan doing (yes doing) my vBseo setups on a couple sites to get me to remain bought in on the product they failed to do well. vBseo never worked for us and I was always against Verticalscope using it on their sites when I was there. Now I can't even dump the licenses unless I renew all of them (lame) but that consideration being made I would be willing to give up my account WHOLE for the right price :p

There was a time and place for vBseo and I think both have passed. I have 0 interest in it myself and its future seems bleak.

 

It'll be quite interesting to see how vBulletin 5 will affect the vBSEO brand. I remember when people used to recommend the software in itself, I've personally never tried it though. Kudos on what you did for the company though, you should be proud.