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.

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# Kerry-Anne Fri 17th Apr ‘09, 10:03pm
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Thanks for sharing guys

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.

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# eva2000 Sun 19th Apr ‘09, 11:34pm
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Thanks Steve for filling us in

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.

vBulletin is trying their hardest to drive me away as a customer.

Here is the whole vB4 details!

I started a thread that I titled ‘I hope you are joking…’

Then posted this image:

I have gotten six warnings (and counting now) from Steve for it too:

Apparently vBulletin didn’t want to discuss this on their forums. They just wanted to complain about Indians on Twitter.

And Steve, delete this shit. Give it your best shot.

Come on vBulletin. I’m paying you 160 dollars for the license and 30 bucks to renew for what? One new release every year and a half? Not cool at all.

I’m not denying that vBulletin 4 will be a great product, it’s just the development time for vBulletin has gotten worse and worse over the years it seems.

However, moving forward to vBulletin 4, I have (and have always had) every intention of moving to a system of semantic, well-formed markup with a hugely more extensive use of CSS for layout. CSS is now a widely-used and well-documented system and I am confident that both experts and novice webmasters alike will be able to handle it. I am still undecided on how to present the vast number of classes and id-based selectors that this system will require (clearly the current vBulletin CSS editor will not be up to the task) but I’m sure that the system we come up with will be flexible and user-friendly enough to suit just about everyone.

The thing that I was really glad to see was this comment by Kier regarding the amount of information released:

I am looking into methods with which to do a more structured and open information release than we have in the past. Right now efforts are all concentrated on 3.7 but as soon as that is in beta I’ll be putting something in place to help our customers stays apprised of what’s going on and what’s coming up.

One thing that has really annoyed me as a customer is how little I know about the new versions until they actually become available to download. It’s very frustrating because I believe that customers should be given a general idea at the very least in the direction that the software they are using is heading so that they can possibly voice concerns if they feel that is not going in a direction that they feel is appropriate or best for the software. Right now this is impossible to do because we are left out of this loop. I look forward to seeing if things actually change with the way vBulletin deals with customers after the 3.7 release.