I always preferred vBulletin for my forums but after I purchased the upgrade for vBulletin 4.0 for couple of my forums I never upgraded them to vBulletin 4 because I never liked it.
I will mention few reasons why I do not prefer vBulletin 4.0 any more
- Theme development were (and may be is) a headache. If you want a single color change you may first have to search it using vBulletin’s awful front end for CSS and then make changes at so many places. I do not prefer to do that. They have plans to better that in vBulletin 4.1.
- vBulletin 4 is not very stable and has so many bugs. One of them was as simple as Ads in vbblog does not work. I know this is simple but if you are releasing a stable product which is late by 2 years I expect less bugs. This bug I reported was even in vBulletin 3.7+
- I am not sure why but now vBulletin copyright in the footer is linked to vBulletin.com and not just plain text. I do not see a reason to do that.
- vBulletin 4 intentions as I could sense was concentrating on SEO and so I expected better SEO on it but apart from just URL’s everything for SEO was is crap.
- I need brand new theme for vBulletin 4 as old theme becomes almost obsolete.
- vBulletin is not only a forum but includes vBulletin CMS which is again complete piece of crap coding with tons of error. SQL are also not well written to say the least. Apart from that index.php file is not the default one for CMS and you are redirected to content.php and I could not understand why.
- Pricing of vBulletin as a whole is crap. They used to charge same (Not anymore) amount for old version upgrade as a new license. Why on earth would I upgrade if I could get a new license. I raised the concern in the support and it took several months to get it sorted and now I do not plan to go either with upgrade or with a new purchase.
As we had no better alternatives than vBulletin I was certainly thinking what after vBulletin 3.8 reaches end of life which is nearing soon.
Now I have the answer.
It is being developed by the vBulletin lead developer(s) and though it is still in alpha phase looks really promising to me. As I can see from the community it has all I want just in the alpha phase itself.
What are your views on the same? Share your views in comments.
But if you are not planning to subscribe through Email. Try subscribing to RSS.
I do lot of experimentation on new ways to internet marketing strategies for my web properties and like to share my experiences on ways to make money online @ IMTips.co. Read more about me 
{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
I think if vB can pull the act together and release a stable product by 4.1 there won't be much of xenForo migrate.
Now I need a a neat, fast, bugfree and stable CMS integrated Suite. Whoever provide that first will get my money!
Is xenForo available for End User / Developers to test it out???
No not yet. It is 48 hours only when the site launched.
Do you really think it's a fair comparison comparing vB to xF while it's still in alpha and not even released yet?
Yes and that is because vB or in real terms IM is not working on customer satisfaction but are more inclined towards their own sets of forums. I paid for vB 4 couple of license for more than a year now and I am not able to use them. Can you justify that.
I will agree with a lot of the points, but its too early to be recommended XenForo as its still in Alpha and still does not have the full functionality and mods availible for vB. Also IB has promised to improve vb in version 4.1..so lets see.
Yes I agree on that but as I have paid for couple of vB 4 license for quite some time and not able to use I have given up hope. Being a vB fan for 5+ years I guess the time has come to make a change. May be not for the older boys but for new forums I am not planning on vB anymore and was planning IPB anyway and so actually it may be either IPB or xenForo.
Some of the Xenforo Information thats been posted has been really useful and makes the product out to be a savior of online communities in the days of Facebook, and Twitter.
Personally I wont be using it until it comes complete with a CMS and other addons.