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Old 2009.12.16, 10:13 AM   #4
Glathannus
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2.) I don't think the video improvement on its own, would be worth paying for. But it's one of many new features I more than approve.

2a.) They're really amped up the CSS in vB 4.0. More/all the buttons will be based on text and gradients rather than on fixed images - which will make updating a lot more painless throughout 4.x with whatever custom template we'll have.

2b.) Better late than never.

2c.) There's been fierce competition between vBulletin and Invision Power Board in the past few years. Those are "The Big Two" right now, for serious communities. I've seen a lot of communities migrate from phpBB or Invision Power Board to vBulletin, but I (almost) never see anyone migrate from vBulletin to those other systems. The main reason anyone leaves vBulletin, has been for bandwidth or performance concerns - the owner either doesn't have a very good server, or their server is almost dedicated to something else (like emulating a corporate MMORPG server).

I still keep an eye on IPB to see what we're "missing", and mostly what I'm seeing is vB and IPB copying each other. vB copies mainly the social networking features from IPB, while IPB copies mainly the utility from vBulletin. When it comes to the innovation of original features we've been using for years (Reputation/Attachments/etc.), Invision Power Board didn't get in on that until more recently, and they charge extra for some of what always has been or recently is part of vBulletin's core package.

I'm sure the back-and-forth copying will continue between both systems (I wouldn't mind if there was a system that included all the great features from both), but it's better for a smaller community like ours to have the utility first and the social networking later - instead of the other way around. That's why we moved away from Invision, instead of undergoing the more natural progression of InvisionFree to Invision Power Board. InvisionFree was a shithole that left some of us with some bad aftertaste, and we wouldn't be able to completely shake off that feeling in a paid version of Invision. I won't dispute that phpBB would have been better than InvisionFree, but that's not really saying a lot.
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