DragonByte Technologies

Company Information
Staff member
Company Info
As long-term customers will know, we have been internally debating when to enter the XenForo market for a long time now. The number of customers telling us they’re moving to XenForo and asking us to support the platform has started to grow significantly in the past few months, and we felt now was the time to make the plunge.
We have been fans of XenForo, and Kier & Mike’s work in general, for a long time. We purchased several licenses on launch to support them and we think the platform has a great future, as well as a great present. We’re excited to be developing for it again.

The first product is our Shoutbox, which has about 95% feature parity with the vBulletin version. This required it to more or less be recoded from scratch. As a result of the required investment of time, vBulletin licenses will stay vBulletin licenses, and XenForo licenses will be XenForo licenses. In the event that you switch platforms we will try to accommodate you with discounts to ease the transition, though. Unfortunately it’s simply not financially feasible for us to give free XF licenses to vB customers. We would quite literally go out of business if we did.
We will be porting more and more of our products to XenForo over the coming months. Exactly what role we will play in the wider XenForo community remains to be seen at this point, but at the very least our modifications will be available and supported fully via Dragonbyte-Technologies.com.

Don’t worry, vBulletin customers, we have absolutely no plans to stop developing for vBulletin 4. We’re not abandoning the platform by any means and our vBulletin customers are extremely important to us. By porting mods to xF and getting new feature requests from users there we are likely to get great ideas that we can port back into the vBulletin versions. The aim is for vBulletin and XenForo products to have as much feature parity as possible. Whatever features are added to XF versions of the mods will also be added to the vBulletin version.

This does mean we won’t be making any more modifications for vBulletin 5 any time soon. The platform is broken and the developers are unwilling or incapable of making the changes needed to allow it to properly support modifications. We tried, several times, to make suggestions for how to resolve issues, but the team appears to place an extremely low priority on making the platform modification friendly.

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