Major feature updates are currently not possible?

Good day, I had recently installed the Lite version of vBShout on my site and was considering a purchase of the Pro version. However, I notice on the store page a message that indicates "Major feature updates are currently not possible due to design decisions taken by Internet Brands." I'm unclear on what that means, exactly? Does this mean that the product is not going to be supported going forward? I don't want to sink cash into something that you're not going to be developing for in the future.

Hi there,

If you are interested in running custom modifications on your forum, I would strongly recommend avoiding vB5 at all costs.

The short version is that we're not currently planning any major feature updates for our vB5 products due to the fact that it is very, very difficult to develop for vB5 compared to vB3/vB4 or XF. That's not just us, you don't have to look further than vBulletin.org: vBulletin Modifications - vBulletin.org Forum

Notice the difference in the amount of vB4 mods vs vB5 mods? Literally no-one is currently actively developing for vB5, based on those numbers. The reason for that is, it doesn't make financial sense for any company to invest time in vB5 at the moment.

To re-iterate, if you want to run vanilla vB5 and you're happy with that experience, by all means stick with vB5. Otherwise, you might want to consider vB4, or XenForo, both of which have thriving development scenes from ourselves and others

Fillip H. said:

Hi there,

If you are interested in running custom modifications on your forum, I would strongly recommend avoiding vB5 at all costs.

The short version is that we're not currently planning any major feature updates for our vB5 products due to the fact that it is very, very difficult to develop for vB5 compared to vB3/vB4 or XF. That's not just us, you don't have to look further than vBulletin.org: vBulletin Modifications - vBulletin.org Forum

Notice the difference in the amount of vB4 mods vs vB5 mods? Literally no-one is currently actively developing for vB5, based on those numbers. The reason for that is, it doesn't make financial sense for any company to invest time in vB5 at the moment.

To re-iterate, if you want to run vanilla vB5 and you're happy with that experience, by all means stick with vB5. Otherwise, you might want to consider vB4, or XenForo, both of which have thriving development scenes from ourselves and others

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Ah that's too bad, I had just recently upgraded my forum from 4.x to 5, not knowing there was a dearth of add-ons for it. I would be curious to know why things are like this, but understand if you're constrained from speaking about it. It's probably too late for me to roll back to vb4, but I'll look into XenForo.

Ozymandyus said:

I would be curious to know why things are like this, but understand if you're constrained from speaking about it.

Click to expand...

We've signed no NDA, so I have no problem sharing my personal experience with trying to develop for vB5.

In the beginning, it was physically impossible for us to replicate any single addon we have, literally any of them, except for AJAX Threads. The issue that blocked us from even attempting to replicate any of them was only fixed a year later. That's a year when it was impossible for us to earn any money whatsoever off vB5.

Even to this day, I still receive updates from their bug report tracker where they are either reconfirming that issues I highlighted back in 2012 still exist in the product, or they resolve one or two of them. There's probably about half a dozen or a full dozen outstanding.

For me personally, that upsets me to the point where if 100% of issues were resolved tomorrow, I would have absolutely no motivation to bother with vB5 since I feel like the management at IB does not care about addon developers at all. That's just my personal opinion, though.

Fillip H. said:

We've signed no NDA, so I have no problem sharing my personal experience with trying to develop for vB5.

Click to expand...

Thanks again, Fillip! I truly appreciate the information...I'm not an active developer, so I'm not very plugged in to these developments. Until you responded to me I was not even aware of the Xenforo effort. It appears to be the true successor to the original vBulletin system I signed onto many years ago. I'm very regretful now that I did the vB5 upgrade, as it appears there isn't a native importer for it and I'm loath to go back and lose two weeks of posts on my forums to roll back to my last vb4 install. If nothing else, I am happy in the attempt as it led me to your vBShout software, which I have been enjoying.

Hello Ozymandyus,

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