Can't believe the strong-arm tactics of VBSeo

I am a paid customer of vbseo.

VBSeo runs on www.ford-trucks.com/forums

Today we set up a test domain so we can test upgrading our site to the newest version of VBSeo: test.ford-trucks.com

I test the forums and get a message that vbseo is not a legit copy on test.ford-trucks.com.

Fair enough, I disable it and figure I'll contact VBSeo support to see if they can enable it for the test domain so I can finish testing the upgrade.

Well... my LIVE forum, with a paid copy of VBSeo is now dead. My forums displays a message to our users (360,000 registered) that essentially implies that we stole it.

I can understand not allowing to run it on a test domain, but shutting down legit copies remotely? What the heck are you doing ON MY SERVER with your software? This is freaking unbelievable, its paranoid, strong-armed and it goes too far.

Replied to your support ticket. There's really no reason installing a test instance would disable your live site at all.

Issue resolved via support ticket.

nice site

Originally Posted by ford-trucks.com

What the heck are you doing ON MY SERVER with your software? This is freaking unbelievable, its paranoid, strong-armed and it goes too far.

I'd like to know this? Is using vBSEO on your forum somehow contacting the vbseo servers remotely? Or are you able to turn off forums using vBSEO, remotely?

No, vBSEO doesn't contact the home servers other than on the initial install to retrieve the license key. Once that is done, the key is saved in the config file and no further communication is needed.

In older versions of vBSEO, if the key was missing or incorrect, the software didn't handle it as nicely as the current version, so it would show an error message.

This particular error was caused (we think) because the site's forum URL had been changed in AdminCP, making it no longer match the license key that was saved in the vBSEO config file. Once the forum URL was put back, everything was fine.

Hi everyone,

Remember (as Keith noted), your vBSEO license key is tied to your domain. We do allow you to create test instances and change your forum URL to another (a complete new forum if you choose).

However, if you want to do this, please make sure you open a support ticket and get confirmation from the team before proceeding.

In this case, the forum was operational but displayed an "unregistered" message. Obviously, this is undesirable for any of our customers.

Apologies for the inconvenience Ken. I'm glad to hear that you are back up and running.