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Webbstre

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Hello! I'm curious if there will be a vb5 version of the Dragonbyte MMO theme and vbDownloads any time soon. I'd like to avoid buying vbDownloads 1.5 times if I can buy it just once for vb5.
 
We're currently still focusing on the vB3/vB4 market, so we don't have a firm ETA on when we'll be porting more of our portfolio to vB5. Sorry I couldn't give a more definitive answer :(
 
That's ok, that's the kind of straight answer I was hoping for. Now I'm regretting not buying vbDownloads when it was on sale! Hoping for another sale this holiday season ;)
 
It's been a while and I'm wondering again if there is any chance of seeing more vb5 versions released any time soon. Specially vbDownloads ;)
 
Still no immediate plans for vB5. It's still not commercially feasible for us to do vB5 ports at the moment since the mods require complete recoding and the current market is so small. We lose money on every mod we port to vB5 at the moment, sadly.
 
I see your current point about losing money with each and every sale. But some of your customers might be in an even worse case. As you see some older PHP versions are EOL, and when our host upgraded to PHP 5.4.x we ended up with some strange errors when editing articles in the CMS, and we are unable to resize any attached images in the standard way. It seems to be time to upgrade to vB 5, we already have a licence unless there is a product that can fix problems with articles.

We would like to keep the shoutbox and the downloads section on the site, both are dragonbyte-tech stuff. As you see you offer the shoutbox for vB 5. And it is nice, but I think we would have to pay again for it (some coadmin of mine bought a pro version for lifetime before). But for downloads we would have to disable it entirely.

Also some other mods we used before (vBadvanced stuff) are EOL as their developer went out of bussiness, so we would have to replace them with vB 5 sitebuilder. I know that vB5 market is small, but I also know sooner or later people will be forced to move. And if they plan to move to vB5 when that happens (instead of any other forum / CMS suite) a lot of them would appreciate if they can stay with the products they own. While vB5 market is small, there is a market who still uses vB4 version, but considers what will come next. And those customers often choose between 2 vB4 versions based on what they would expect for the future.
 
I see your current point about losing money with each and every sale. But some of your customers might be in an even worse case. As you see some older PHP versions are EOL, and when our host upgraded to PHP 5.4.x we ended up with some strange errors when editing articles in the CMS, and we are unable to resize any attached images in the standard way. It seems to be time to upgrade to vB 5, we already have a licence unless there is a product that can fix problems with articles.
You always have the option of upgrading to vB 4.2.3 (at the time of writing, this version is in Beta 2), which contains multiple fixes for PHP 5.4/5.5 issues :)
 
In that case, I suggest reporting the error messages you receive to vBulletin via their Jira bug tracker, so it can be fixed for future versions :)
 
Done that, they changed priority to low, as soon as they learned that we can still format images with HTML even if the normal system doesn't work.. As I don't want to give HTML permissions to everyone, and the existing workaround to use HTML code for images isn't the best as we can't use lightbox, etc. I think. And even then, some functionality would be lost. So we would have 2 distinct options.

If there would be a way to stay with vBulletin 4, we would stay. But this would be possible only if the image formating options would be replaced. I think it is easy to improve upon original vBulletin functionality if you would be able to add galleries, etc. to articles. If there would be replacement products for vBadanced links directory and vBadvanced Dynamics, it would be easier to stay, and I am sure there could be a market for items like that.

Otherwise there is a strong / compelling reason to move on. As it would be time to replace vBadvanced products there are "no better times" to replace everything. One option would easy: Upgrade to vBulletin 5. That is why upgrading items are important. The other options? Kunena forums, Joomla CMS and a lot of extras.

By the way: If we have some Dragonbyte tech products for vB4 is there a way to upgrade to the vB5 version, or is that like a brand new purchase?
 
Thanks Cosmic and Fillip H.. I do sympathize with Gergely though. I am not forced to change php versions, but it does feel like with the older versions reaching end of life it would be prudent to upgrade, but it's not really an option yet. I'm not about to upgrade to vb5 right now, since it's a lot of work to prepare and it's not viable without vbDownloads (and some of your other products) available yet.
 
Thanks Cosmic and Fillip H.. I do sympathize with Gergely though. I am not forced to change php versions, but it does feel like with the older versions reaching end of life it would be prudent to upgrade, but it's not really an option yet. I'm not about to upgrade to vb5 right now, since it's a lot of work to prepare and it's not viable without vbDownloads (and some of your other products) available yet.
Obviously this forum doesn't utilise every piece of vB4 Suite's functions, but we're on the latest version of PHP 5.5 and will be upgrading to PHP 5.6 once it's released in a stable form in cPanel/WHM's EasyApache configuration tool. We aren't experiencing any problems just now, and we don't have error suppression on.

I'm not trying to say "it's fine", just that in our experience it isn't universally broken :)

By the way: If we have some Dragonbyte tech products for vB4 is there a way to upgrade to the vB5 version, or is that like a brand new purchase?
The cost of replacing a vB4 licence with a vB5 version is 25% of the cost of a new licence (unless it's expired), or to have a Dual Licence where you get a new vB5 licence but keep your vB4 one is 50% of the cost of a new licence.
 
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