vBSEO, please do IPB...

This company that took over for jelsoft is killing me. Especially since my licensed recently expired, and seeing as my life is very busy, I haven't had the time to renew...and now for me to renew, I'm going to be paying MORE than what a new customer would if they were to preorder it today?

The only reason people are sticking around for vB are because of you guys. If you switched to IPB, I'm pretty sure you'd see all of us do the same.

Helo Justin ,

We are sorry to hear that you feel you've been treated unfairly. We currently don't have any plans to make vBSEO compatible with IPB as we still believe in vBulletin as a product and we are sure Internet Brands will turn around things to keep their customers more happy. However i'll bring your suggestion to staff attentions but as i said our official word currently stands that we will continue developing for vBulletin.

You don't have to upgrade to 4.0. I personally am not. I'm still on 3.7.2 and will be sticking there for a while. It works. Why fix what works? There's nothing new or ground breaking in 4.0 that my community is going to suffer by not switching to.

IPB is not that great either, still missing some important features and the eye candy design is over the top. Most people would need a graphic designer to customize it. I would stay with vb and wait what vb 4 will bring us.

Originally Posted by Mert Gökçeimam

Helo Justin ,

We are sorry to hear that you feel you've been treated unfairly. We currently don't have any plans to make vBSEO compatible with IPB as we still believe in vBulletin as a product and we are sure Internet Brands will turn around things to keep their customers more happy. However i'll bring your suggestion to staff attentions but as i said our official word currently stands that we will continue developing for vBulletin.

That's stupid.
Not only would your company make a killing with having your software compatible with IPB, but you'd also be supporting a much more superior forum software.

IPB has been out for years. In fact, I think it's been out longer than vBulletin. Both vBulletin and IPB are superior forum software platforms.

Why you would stick with one is ludicrous. If you had support for IPB, I'd probably buy ten more vBSEO licenses than I already do. I really like IPB's platform; most people don't choose to buy or use it because of it's SEO incapabilities. Forums run by IPB rank horrendously. Imagine your company and the opportunity at hand working with IPB.

Sticking with vB is the only thing that makes sense at this time for may reasons.

-vbseo has over 4 years of development time invested into vbuletin. Getting and IPB solution together is at least a year off if started today, and we had resources for it, which we don't.
-None of our staff is familiar with IPB enough to support it.

We chose vb, and for now, we're sticking with vb. It is still the #1 product on the market. That may change in a few years, who knows.

If you like IPB, feel free to convert to it.

For now, there is 0 plan for us to make an ipb product.

Well Brian if you guys were good at what you did you would support IPB. Recruit more people. Once you support IPB you'd have the market, period. You'd be making so much money you wouldn't know what to do with it.

"but you'd also be supporting a much more superior forum software."

Gtfo man, i tried both, i know this is simply not true. At this point I would still go for vb over any other forum software out there. There are enough reasons, seo being one of them.

Originally Posted by EGS

Well Brian if you guys were good at what you did you would support IPB.

We ARE good at what we do. And what we DO is build a product helping SEO factors on vBulletin forums.

Recruit more people. Once you support IPB you'd have the market, period. You'd be making so much money you wouldn't know what to do with it

The long and short of it is that more people without immediate sales costs money. Lots of money. People don't work for free. It would likely cost anywhere from $500,000 to $1,000,000 to get a team of developers together, train our current staff, and bring in more staff to get an ipb system together. While I'm not involved with the company's financial data to say we can or cannot afford it, it's very easy to see that it's a HUGE cost and a big investment. At this point in time, we don't see it as a viable business expense. That's 33,000 licenses at our current prices for vbseo for the low end of the spectrum. PER YEAR. And that's to break EVEN. After year 3, we've had to have sold a license to all of the 122k members of ipb forums. The numbers don't add up.

Originally Posted by Brian Cummiskey

The long and short of it is that more people without immediate sales costs money. Lots of money. People don't work for free. It would liekly cost anywhere from $500,000 to $1,000,000 to get a team of developers together, train our current staff, and bring in more staff to get and ipb system together.

That's fair enough. I must admit I'm thinking of jumping the Jelsoft ship, not due to the money but how it reflects on their customer approach and the recent devs have been a bit meh. Takes me back to how I left ubb years ago as they lost their way.

Not tried IPB for a few years so I'll have a look.

Originally Posted by sdebank

That's fair enough. I must admit I'm thinking of jumping the Jelsoft ship, not due to the money but how it reflects on their customer approach and the recent devs have been a bit meh. Takes me back to how I left ubb years ago as they lost their way.

Not tried IPB for a few years so I'll have a look.

This.

I could care less about the money issue right now...and if they are going to release vB5 12-18 months after 4, then I feel they are only wanting money out of people and nothing more. I want a good product, but as Brian has said, might as well stick with what works.

Trust me, I understand your frustrations. But, it's simply out of my/yours/everyone's control.

My site works with vb3.7 + vbseo.
My users are happy.
My search traffic is outstanding.
My ad revenue is good.

Why change to a different product and face the unknown?
That goes for both vb4 and ipb/all the other software companies.

Until what I have doesn't work for me, I'm not interested much in moving to something that may or may not be better. I'm going to sit back and watch what others do and how they fair on 4.0.

You all understand that the new IPB has the option built into it to display urls very similar to the way vbseo does for vbulletin, right?

In regards to stating that they are not very good at what they do, I think that is rediculous. That would be like telling a football player he is not very good at what he does cause he does not know how to play baseball.

Originally Posted by jbartle

...and if they are going to release vB5 12-18 months after 4, then I feel they are only wanting money out of people and nothing more.

I believe Ray meant starting to work on vb5 after 12-18 months, not releasing it. So if you have a new release every 2-3 years it's about the same like updating the OS on you computer.

Originally Posted by dieselpowered

You all understand that the new IPB has the option built into it to display urls very similar to the way vbseo does for vbulletin, right?

It will be very basic I believe. Probably still multiple url's for the same content etc. vbseo of course is also more feature rich and more flexible.

Right, the IPb url's are very basic from what i've seen.

last i looked,

/thread-title-123/
and
/thread-title-with-otherstuff-123/
both take you to thread 123 without a proper 301.

IMO, that's WAY worse than just using dynamic urls.