This was recently posted on vBulletin.com. Personally, it smells like typical CEO bullshit. But hey, maybe it won’t be.
As we continue to introduce to our new vBulletin 4.0 Publishing Suite, we would like to share our broader vision and answer some questions about where we are headed.
First, our vision. We believe that both content and community are king. Launched in 2000, vBulletin has grown to become the leading and most powerful forum management software in the world, with considerably more than 100,000 copies sold. If you combined the traffic of all vBulletin sites, they would easily rank in top ten largest sites globally—roughly same the size as Wikipedia in terms of unique visitors.
We take pride in the success of our customers as they build some of the leading websites in the world.
But we feel this is only a start. To bring vBulletin to the next level, we are investing heavily. Over the last year, we have doubled the number of developers working on the product—and they are a very talented group. You should expect a much faster pace of development—and more exciting new features.
To focus our efforts, we continue to do research with vBulletin community owners and webmasters. We find that many of the most successful sites want to become more significant content publishers. This is because many communities that started as simple discussion forums have grown into powerful databases of knowledge and content— true leaders in their areas of expertise.
These site owners tell us they want simple, but powerful tools to manage articles, blogs, and all manner of content—all in one publishing platform. The new vBulletin does this elegantly. And by fully integrating with our forums, we believe that our new Suite uniquely captures the power of community and content in a single platform.
This doesn’t mean that we have slowed investments in forum functionality. To the contrary, we continue to invest heavily in the core forum platform and the new product includes some important new features. In our research, vBulletin site owners tell us that in addition to content management, they want tools to help with such activities as: advertising monetization, SEO, site analytics, and mobile.
While we have made some changes in vB 3.8 and vB 4.0 along these lines, many of those changes are ahead for the vB 4.0 series. In subsequent posts from our staff you will learn more specifics about our vision in these areas, in addition to our plans about more content management features, and more enhancements to forum and blog functionality.
You may have noticed that we’ve priced vB 4 products to strongly encourage adoption of the Suite by offering a much larger discount on the Suite. This is very intentional. We now view vBulletin Publishing Suite as our core product. As we add new functionality, it will continue to be fully integrated with the Suite.
You may have also noticed that we’ve finished migration of vBulletin development from the U.K. to California. We have deep respect for the wonderful heritage of vBulletin.
The primary reason for the move was the availability of pools of technical talent and proximity to the resources of our parent company.
We are occasionally asked about the role of Internet Brands as the parent of vBulletin. For instance, how important is vBulletin to Internet Brands? The answer is: very important. Internet Brands is the largest operator of vBulletin sites in the world. We deeply care about the software and will continue to invest heavily in its development. Internet Brands brings far more resources to the ongoing development of vBulletin.
We are also asked: how do we view certain vBulletin sites that compete with Internet Brands sites? The answer is: we manage vBulletin for its own success and we view those sites as valued customers. vBulletin thrives as its own community continues to grow. Internet Brands websites must compete on their own and receive no “special treatment”. Even where we compete, we are all in this together. It’s a big world.
In closing, we are extremely confident about vBulletin’s continued growth and success. We are grateful for your wonderful support. And we have enormous excitement about the road ahead for us all.
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# Wayne Luke Fri 17th Apr ‘09, 7:32pm
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A few things from my mental notes:
One thing mentioned for phone orders was that an Interface added to the Admin Center where those on the phones could place orders and process credit cards directly. This would allow us to recapture some potentially lost sales and eliminate some of the problems and costs associated with the current phone order system. It would also be a lot more customer friendly because right now we have to tell customers we can’t help them which is never good.
It was mentioned that we should eliminate and replace Worldpay. The current options are confusing to a lot of customers who don’t understand why they can’t just click a radio button next to Visa and enter their information. Worldpay itself presents additional issues because they don’t allow a mechanism to easily see chargebacks and fraudulent orders. Authorize.net was mentioned as a potential replacement.
Ray mentioned that if certain countries are restricted by the card processor, we should take the information that customers enter on the order form and just display the payment options available in their region. Make it easy for the customer and only show what they can use.
After purchase the customer should be redirected to a “Thanks for Purchasing” landing page with further information instead of the vBulletin.com home page.
For suggestions, I am more of the mind to use Project Tools now with a Project just for suggestions or even combine with the vBulletin 4.0 project where suggestions can be voted on, assigned to milestones by the project manager and we can tell a customer outright if their suggestion is under consideration, accepted or denied. The entire forum idea isn’t working and Project Tools gives more of the “Two-way communication” features that users want.
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# Ray Morgan Fri 17th Apr ‘09, 8:47pm
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Steve, Wayne, thanks again for spending the day.
And all, please keep the above _*strictly confidential*_ until official announcements are made.
I’m sure I’ll have some questions, but 3am with a major headache is not the best time to be trying to decipher the thoughts in my head into questions that make sense.
A very quick comment though, I’m in agreement with PT for suggestions and restricting announcements discussions to license holders. Both are excellent suggestions, and IMHO long overdue on both counts.
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# Andy Huang Sun 19th Apr ‘09, 12:36pm
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Thanks for sharing these with us.
One thing that springs to mind and I would like to suggest is a possible upgrade path to go from vBulletin forum only to vBulletin Suite. This, of course, will act similar to the lease to owned upgrade, where it is a bit more expensive than purchasing it striaght up.
Aside from that, I need to re-read the whole thing a few times for it to sink in. If anything else comes up, I’ll reply again.
1. Yup the shopping cart I no doubt is too confusing for folks so an overhaul there is great
2. Knowledge base – yay nice to hear to build on and expand from the wiki
3. With no public beta/RC releases, the Gold release better be spot on for folks going through the upgrade or first time vB 4 install process. How will we go for non-standard/unusual forum/server setups ? Operating systems windows vs linux, internal intranet setups, load balanced setups, non-apache based web server setups i.e. lighttpd, litespeed web server, nginx ? Shared and VPS based web hosts with weird or tricky pre-defined security or server settings and restrictions.
4. I agree about the problem if mishandling existing customers, the potential for it snow ball via dissatisfied customers is huge. My head’s blank as to suggestions for this right now, but I’m sure I’ll think of something
5. Announcement threads and dealing with customer dissatisfaction over the intended changes. I like Steve’s idea of a detailed and indepth FAQ explaining the changes include pros and cons from the CUSTOMER’s perspective AS well as the specific and direct consequence for the customer of such change. I love table formats for pros vs cons = consequences where folks can more visually compare them – but that’s just me
A more informed customer is more likely to come to terms with the changes. I guess we’d have to play devil’s advocate ourselves to come up with what customer’s are most likely to complain about and address those concerns and issues in the FAQ before the customer comes up with the concern/question/issue.
Not sure if this would make things more complicated, but instead of a single announcement discussion thread for customer feedback. What about splitting the announcement thread into 2 threads, one for customers who are FOR the changes and one thread for customers AGAINST the changes. Folks in the FOR thread and their opinions and comments will also serve to help persuade the customers that are AGAINST the changes. Sometimes, JELSOFT/US telling a customer that this deal is overall a good deal for customers doesn’t carry as much weight as when fellow customers express positive opinions FOR these changes on a public thread.
*Now, I guess this would only work if we have drawn up a very honest pro and cons list of the effects of these changes to customers and the honest result is that pros outweigh the cons.
It won’t work if cons outweigh the pros and customers will very quickly see through this eventually.*
I agree announcement threads should be closed to non-customers as non-customers have the pre-sales forum for their own comments, concerns etc which hopefully with an updated and more indepth KB FAQ for customers would answer their questions and concerns.
As to the most vocal complainers, I guess they keep reposting the same complaints over and over as their perception of it is they don’t think we’re hearing them out by not implementing their suggestions etc. Shutting them out from the feedback process would worsen their perception even more I guess.
One idea would be maybe incorporate their feedback/questions/suggestions and rephrase that into a question for the new indepth FAQ to *formally and officially address their concerns on vBulletin.com web site* whether it be an answer of ‘yes’ we intend to implement such and such or ‘no’ we do not intend to implement such and such at all or ‘no’ not at this time and maybe a brief reason why. This would serve to hopefully shut up those repeat vocal complainers in a nice way via the FAQ so as to say – ‘yes we heard you and here’s our official response in writing’.
6. In the current global financial climate, it’s going to be tricky regarding pricing/licensing structure shake up, we’re not going to be able to please everyone or even come close to it. But personally, from business point of view, price increases were long overdue for a calibre product such as vBulletin
Now first thought that comes to mind for the large vB forum customers is, how are you looking after us questions – the #1 pain in the backside for large vB forums is the search functionality and mysql table locking. I think from the large vB forum customer’s point of view would be how is paying more for vB going to help us with large vB forums struggling with the search ?
TECK, has been working on a commercial paid sphinx search addon for vB http://www.yqed.com/sphinx-search-20…etin-released/ which he’s tested very sucessfully on Alex’s disboards.com with 30+ million posts and no slow downs and given their existing db server new life without need for upgrading. Another forum using this sphinx search posted a video too
The large vB forum customers have massive user and visitor bases and basically walking advertisements for vBulletin product to 100,000s of potential new vB customers!
Basically, what I’m saying is a reminder – *if there’s plans to tackling large vB forum search head on – it would be specifically mentioned and highlighted in the pros and cons FAQ*.
7. Yeah was wondering about if there’s an upgrade path from vB forum only to vB product suite ?
That’s all I can think of off the top of my head.. I’m sure there’s more to come.
So I got banned from vB.com because they were dumb enough to give the entire vBulletin community access to their admin area which had the release date for vBulletin 4. So I thought it’d be funny to post the actual release date in the vBulletin 4 prediction thread. They deleted my post and banned me for two weeks for doing it.
vBulletin is trying their hardest to drive me away as a customer.
I’m glad I’m not the only one that didn’t know who the hell Leonard Nimoy was after watching The Big Bang Theory’s latest episode tonight. Being involved in running a few web sites I’m no stranger to Google Trends. In fact, I might be some what addicted to it. A part from loving the internet, I’m fascinated by the behavior of people and getting inside people’s head to see what they are thinking. When it comes to the internet, Google Trends is the hands down best way to do this. Continue reading
Well, a lot has happened since my last post. I’ve moved off into my own apartment, started up a new site (F-Series Trucks) and visited a few new places in this world.
I’m going to do my best to keep up with this blog and make it worth your time to visit. I’m going to see about ditching this theme since a ton of sites use it and get something custom. I also want to add a photo gallery to it as facebook sucks for large photos and I also want my pictures to be with my blog.
Well, it’s 5:30AM. Time for breakfast… then bed…. yep.
I like Digg for the most part, you get a lot of good information that gets tossed to the side on major news networks. Lately though it’s become an Obama circle jerk and it’s really annoying going to the site and seeing the main page littered with articles about why Obama rocks or why McCain and Clinton suck. I don’t want to block the entire political categories because I do have an interest in politics. Digg users complain the mainstream media censors news yet the only Presidential candidate Digg currently promotes on Digg is Obama. So, Digg, please…. give us an option to block stories by a word so that I can begin to enjoy Digg again, minus the Obama nuts.
Anyone that knows me knows I’m big on politics. I’m actually a HUGE fan of Ron Paul. He’s a stand up guy with a lot of very sound beliefs on how this country should be run. I believe this country would be a better place if he were elected President. What I am not a fan of is a select group of Ron Paul fans who just don’t get what being reasonable, polite and professional means. They are incredibly rude, hot headed and sometimes out right insane with some of the things they accuse people of. There is the whole 9/11 Conspiracy theory bull that is lead by Alex Jones. I’ve heard supporters claim that Ron Paul actually believes the government was behind 9/11 he just won’t admit it in public. It’s these kind of conspiracy theories that put people off on such solid and good people such as Ron Paul. If you claim yourself as a supporter of Ron Paul then your actions speak louder than anything Ron Paul can say at any debate or any stance he takes on any issue in this country. If you act rude towards people who disagree with your opinion then you are not helping the cause that you believe in.
DailyPaul.com is a favorite stop for me but lately I’ve been put off reading the comments on that site. People make outrageous claims and are down right rude. It really puts me off and is a terrible reflection of the candidate that you claim to support. The recount issue is a hot topic over there right now and the comments are filled with conspiracy theories and rude comments toward individuals involved in counting the ballots in New Hampshire. In their minds a conspiracy exists whenever Ron Paul doesn’t do as well as expected. Here is the thread if you want to take a look: New Hampshire Recount. You can also check out a blog post on the official Ron Paul site asking people to be professional: Remember: Voters Judge Dr. Paul by Your Actions.
Please consider what your actions say for Ron Paul. Let’s stop giving people even more reason to not vote for a candidate that is working for some of the most drastic changes to come to this country since the days following World War II. Change doesn’t happen over night. Stop doing things to make it even harder to achieve.
My largest site received a tremendous rank increase in Compete for last month. Took a screen shot to compare it to my two biggest competitors. Total uniques last month was right at 190,000!
I made a post a few weeks ago on Seobook about how my main site was receiving basically no traffic from Google, even though I had a forum that was active and a content site that was full of useful content. Yahoo was sending me 500+ referrals a day and Google was sending me less than 20. Aaron replied, which I did appreciate greatly, but I have to disagree with his assessment of the ads killing my site. The ads had nothing to do with my bad Google referrals. Over a year ago I was running Digital Point Co Op and selling text links on my site. I made a mistake by listing on my site advertising page that I was selling site wide links. Google picked up on this whether it be manually or with their algorithm and penalized my site. Matt Cutts commented on my post and gave me a run down of what he saw on his side of things. Two days later my Google rankings returned and my traffic shot through the roof. My earnings are up and registrations are up.
I had a friend point out that Aaron made a new post using my site as an example of sites that were being overly aggressive with ad placement and it was killing them in the process. I’m going to have to disagree with him to an extent. Having those ads under my navigation has not prevented me from landing on Digg.com, Autoblog.com and Jalopnik to name a few. In the past week I have been covered 2 times by Autoblog on news items I have written. If you have good content that people want to link to then the majority won’t care about two ads above the fold. As each year passes people are upgrading their monitors to support higher resolutions which will allow them to view more of the page without scrolling. I use 1920×1200 and have no problem seeing the content on my site (Example). While I understand there is still a large amount of people on 1024×768 and even 800×600 the trend is not moving towards more people using these resolutions.
Here is a screen shot of my current Google referrals for a day:
and my uniques for the month:
This month is my best month since I started the site in 2003 for revenue and traffic.
I don’t have any problem with him using my site in his video. It’s his opinion and he is generally right with the assumption that over zealous ads can kill sites. If you have the content to back up the ads then the impact the ads will have on your traffic are minimal. That’s at least what my experience has found running my web sites.
