VBSEO needs to go to IP.Board

[BamaStangGuy]

You've lost me as a customer for new licenses for the simple fact I will never purchase another vBulletin license. It continues to go down the drain while IP.Board continues to put out phenomenal new features to their product such as this: Invision Power Services -> IP.Board 3.1.0 Development News

More and more people are going to abandon vBulletin. I wonder why you advertise 'The Most Powerful Community Software' in your header, when at very best it is simply too close to call between IP.Board, especially now. vBulletin 4.0 has been released to meet a financial end of year goal for Internet Brands and it shows in the terrible quality of code they have released.

I love the product but hate how you have entrenched yourself into only vBulletin.

VBSEO is the only thing keeping me from converting Mustang Evolution to IP.Board. I simply can not afford to lose my urls that I have worked so hard to get indexed.

[Rocket 442]

I'm also in the same boat. I've kept muttering to myself about how I'd move if only there was a crawability option for SEO in IPB.

It's clear that InternetBrands is here to push things out far too fast to get some quick sales, but I won't go into that. IPB just looks and feels much more polished and they're continuing to push out new features (full features - not alpha features that have no purpose in a live forum).

I've always backed vBulletin and its not that I hate it, but when you take the vBulletin glasses off and look at IPB you cannot say its an inferior product at all. The only thing holding me back is vBSEO. Maybe iNet is paying you guys to stay on board so that they don't lose more of the share of owners they already have this past year.

[AWS]

You will not lose your indexed urls if you switch. I didn't lose any rank or indexed urls on the 3 sites I converted. There are steps during and after the conversion to follow and IPB has the tools needed to redirect old urls to new urls.

[BamaStangGuy]

Did you have VBSEO installed previous to convert? How is traffic afterwards? How do you like IP.Board for default SEO structure?

[Brandon Sheley]

I've had no problems with the built in "SEO" url's that IPB has
but with that said, I would still like a vbseo version just because I know you guys are the best.

[Lian]

Interest++

We are considering switching to IPB, too

[Mike54]

When I was using vB, I spent a lot of time tweaking things and was fairly pleased with the results. Then I added vBSEO and it was as if everything got just that much better.

I'm not disappointed with the IPB SEO structure, but I can't help but think Crawlability could make things just that much better.

If Crawlability elects to avoid IPB, that's not going to be the end of the world for me. I've no need to be renewing any vBSEO licenses down the road, that much is certain. And vBSEO isn't going to be enough attraction to ever draw me back to vB Solutions. But if there was a Crawlability SEO package available for IPB, I would be purchasing four licenses today.

I guess I shouldn't be too bothered about it, because the money gets to stay in my pocket, right?

[Globus]

Hmm.. Actually i have converted my boards from IPB for all the same reasons above ))
And I believe I am not the only one new and happy exIPB VB client

[AWS]

Did you have VBSEO installed previous to convert? How is traffic afterwards? How do you like IP.Board for default SEO structure?

Yes vbseo was installed. I followed the uninstall instructions that are posted here and changed the rewrite rules to work with the structure I used. I then installed IPB and imported the forum. After import I locked the converter. I uploaded the files that came with IPB to redirect the old vbulletin urls to the new IPB seo friendly url's. The rewrite redirects took care of the rest.

I do like the default IPB rewritten url's. It's a bit harder to customize them if you want to change them, but, once you get them right they work great.Didn't lose any traffic. It took about 2 weeks for all the old 301 url's to be replaced in Google, but, my traffic didn't suffer because of them. Now a couple months later my traffic has increased 4 fold and user participation and new user signups are way up. The best part is I haven't had one spammer register. The built in spam service is good at stopping the spammers.

[Brian Cummiskey]

I assure you, the staff is monitoring this thread.

[Mike54]

Thanks Brian, I appreciate the fact that Crawlability is listening. I think several of us posting in this thread have purchased more than one vBSEO license in the past and we are willing to do it again to re-gain the Crawlability edge. As I said earlier, if the product were available, I would purchase four instances today. I've set up a fifth site with one of my old vB licenses and if that site decides to take off, I'll move it to IPB as well and would want yet another copy.

While the market may seem small at this point, there are others that would be interested. Based on that, I should think it is something to keep on the table.

@Globus - please do try to have an enjoyable holiday season. Remember it is a time to spread joy and happiness.

[AWS]

To all above. Could you please just pack up and go??! You’ll be more than welcome at IPB! IPB is full of people like that. Perhaps there you can also set the avatar from anime scheme for yourself as well. Don’t you realise, that nobody even bother to reply to you here, only VB newbie’s like me bother. Period

Can this idiots post be removed from this thread? This person is obviously too stupid to comprehend what we are discussing.

Back on topic. Brian I am glad that you people are looking in on this and listening. I also would buy multiple licenses tomorrow if an IPB version was released.

[Brian Cummiskey]

It certainly is an un-tapped market, but there's a lot of 'business' involved in it, namely ROI.

I speak here as myself as I view the situation.

It will take many man hours of development time, many man hours for the staff to train on ipb and learn it inside and out like we know vB to support it, + our licensing costs, domains, servers, etc, and then sell it. There's 125k members on ipb. i'd guess half are active/still run ipb boards (many left after 1.3 free =>2.0 became a paid product) => 67k. of that, how many would buy a license? 1/4th? 1/5th? = > 15k. at $100 a pop (just throwing this price out for ease of math), that's $150k of potential license revenue revenue, as a best guess. That covers 2 full time devs at 70k a year (again, just throwing numbers out here...). what's left to pay the support staff? And that's if we sell to all 20-25% in that first year. And worse, that certainly won't be a lump sum... it will trickle in over time, which means serious up front capital needs be involved. Renewals won't provide any revenue for a year. upgrades/branding/install/services are a much smaller market share than licenses and renewals.... possibly offsetting 1 support team member. Further, renewals are roughly 1/5 the cost of the license itself, so what happens in year 2 if we've sold to that 20-25% already? The revenue simply won't be there to afford the developers.

Then, there's the time factor. We're all pretty much booked working on and supporting vBSEO. We'd need to bring on more staff to handle the ticket load and forums monitoring. cost++;

Then, there's the what-if's. If we are 90% done and IPB announces a built in program in the next version that actually works well, the market share just dropped by 99% in one email. It ends up on a lot of wasted money, time, effort, and all the rest.

So, it's certainly something that if we are going to consider seriously, a lot of business speculation and accounting needs to happen first and weigh in a certain favor by a serious percentage. It's not something that will just be jumped in to, and likely won't start happening until vb4 is solid and vbseo 3.5 is solid and our work loads slow a bit.


And of course, this is just how I see it. I like the idea. I wish we already had a product for it. But, when it comes to 'putting the money where the mouth is', I'm just not sure it's there....

[BamaStangGuy]

I reported it but it still is there.

I believe IPB is growing fast and with INET continuing to be in control of vBulletin it will only grow faster. I'm almost to the point of making the decision to abandon vBulletin right now. When/If I do I will become as active on IPB as I have on here and vBulletin.com to do what I can to improve it.

My biggest concern now is what I am going to do for a gallery. I have established my gallery and do not want to lose any traffic to it.

[TheComputerGuy]

photopost 7 just came out?

I'm looking into Invision, but I'm afraid my uses would react negative to the switch.