When did vBulletin Jump the Shark?

As you may know, the term 'jumping the shark' is often used to refer to the point in which a series, product or service went irrevocably downhill, the point in which everything went wrong for the thing. It was named after that moment in Happy Days when Fonzie jumped over a shark on water skis, used to symbolise the program's descent in wacky randomness and stunts rather than believable characters or a 'normal' world.



And with many websites (like the now defunct 'JumpTheShark.com' and Bone the Fish) listing series and companies and having polls on where they went wrong, I thought it was time to do the same for vBulletin. So at which point did it all go downhill?

Note: Format based on old Jump The Shark/Bone the Fish pages for TV shows and the like.

 

When Jelsoft sold out to Internet Brands.

 

I agree, that was the point at which the product started its decent into mediocrity although it only became apparent to me when vBulletin 4 was put up for sale at a reduced price, sight unseen. That really did get the alarm bells ringing.

 

They were behind the scenes reinventing the wheel almost immediately. Some of the longest tenured vBulletin employees began to depart almost immediately following the acquisition of vBulletin by Internet Brands. Neither Kier nor Mike nor anyone else associated with the brand would have put out such a half-baked product of their own volition. It seems evident Mike and Kier knew this and began working on XenForo while still employed by Internet Brands. Do you suppose that's what pissed I.B. enough for them to file suit? It's their own damn fault.

 

IB buying Jelsoft wasn't a bad thing until they started actually calling the shots so I voted the vBulletin 4 upheaval with the new pricing scheme and all.

If I was going to do something like the shenanigans they did with vB 4, I would've continued development on 3.x and made what was to be vB 4 a completely separate product with an easy upgrade path / import from vBulletin.

Bifurcating vBulletin into two distinct products would given IB a lot of leeway to do some great things with the next iteration and without being tied down to maintaining backwards compatibility with 3.x.

Even if IB put 3.8 on life support while creating the new platform. Put out updates to maintain code compatibility with the latest mySQL/PHP and security patches that's it. That would've been better than essentially killing a perfectly good product.

Better yet, that plan wouldn't have left such a sour taste in people's mouth and sure as hell wouldn't of trashed vBulletin's reputation like they have done with v4, and again v5.

IB did the same thing with vB 5. They stopped working on 4 just when it became decent and on par with the stability of 3.x. 4.2 is a good product. 5.0, is garbage.

Why 'throw away' something good like 4.2 and move on to 5? If you don't know the answer by now it's only so they can extract more money out of you. Performance and stability issues aside I don't think anyone looks at vB 5 and says that's what the next generation of forums should look like.

For my money, Xenforo is a lot closer to what the next generation of forums should look like.

 

One of the defining moments was when the management decided to launch VB5. It was ill conceived and the totally wrong package.

I feel it was rushed out before it was ready, to be used as a double hammer along with the lawsuit to try to wipe out the competition. Both failed miserably.

The grandiose scheme to bring out VB5 that would be so far in front of anything else, was ill conceived, as they failed to factor in one very vital element. That is the customer. And what the customer ACTUALLY wanted.

They got carried away with thoughts of being the greatest organization in their field ( Delusions of grandeur) and forgot that the CUSTOMER wanted something completely different.

 

I agreed with the rest of your post but I'll have to disagree here.
XenForo looks like the last generation of forum software.
It reminds me of a default vBulletin 3 installation.

 

Feature for feature. I agree with you there. No photo gallery, social groups, etc. As far as the look and all the AJAX 'magic' that's where I was coming from in calling it the next generation in forum software.

 

I remember the uproar we had on our hands at vBulletin Setup back when it hosted the screenshots of the leaked staff forum with the plans for vB4 and the pre-sale fiasco.

Ah, those were the days, eh @Brandon ? lol

 

I was just thinking about that earlier as I was looking over this vbh stuff, those screenshots were AWESOME for my site at the time..lol

We need more of that here

 

Every thing actually started when vBulletin Developers announced Social Features and vBulletin 3.8

Careful people can catch the actual complains vBulletin devs shared with customers within a number of announcements. Though 99% of license owners loved 3.8 idea because they thought adding half baked features to a 7-8 year old code will resolve issues.

Of course in order to accept that , many ex vBulletin license owners first should accept that they also have responsibility within current vBulletin state...

 

when IB took over IMO.

as for xenforo, eh, not really wowed yet...

 

There are some wow elements to XF but for me, as yet, the whole is less than the sum of the parts...or something.

 

When IB took over jelsoft for me, after that everything went downhill since.