The vBulletin system is popular for Internet forum installations, and comes ready to support two of the most used languages on the World Wide Web. Support for English and German come out of the box, but the system allows the generated content to be modified by the user. This means that, with a bit of patience, practically any language could be used. Naturally, this means that for those that needed such support, the program could be quite portable.
As the name might suggest, the original vBulletin stems from a Visual Basic website that was based around the UBB.classic Infopop technology. John Percival and James E. Limm were working with this popular forum in 1999, and decided that in early 2000, they would need to have a rewrite of the software code. They ended up developing something new from scratch, since they were unfamiliar with the actual way that the existing code was written. However, Infopop actually refused to purchase their new solution, but the pair created the Jelsoft firm and released the first vBulletin version through this branding. Both Jelsoft Enterprises and vBulletin solutions are currently considered to be party of Internet Brands.
Since the original version was among the first designs to have features similar to UBB that was developed using MySQL and PHP, it became extremely popular. The platform is still based on PHP and MySQL, but it wasn’t until the second full version release that the forum software began to look like the system that users are familiar with today. While it is no longer under active development, version 2 allowed for private messaging between different users of forum resources, unlimited nesting of different boards, user avatars and individual user control panels. These are many of the features that modern forum posters expect. This version also added in the option to attach polls to threads, which is vital for many casual forum functions.
The thirst release eliminated the hard coding of English text, and also added in a WYSIWYG editor that allowed users to write posts in the same manner that they used a word processor. There were numerous other additions at that time, including allowing administrators to require payment for access to certain site resources. The third release continued various developments for some time.
The fourth series was initially released at the end of 2009, and included the vBulletin publishing suite. This version has also been praised for the better search engine optimization options that it provides administrators with. Version 4.1.8 was released in October 2011. vBulletin’s fourth release is also notable for the blog functions that it featured.
The market share for the software is quite promising as well. There have been suggestions that around 1 in 5 online forum websites measured used the vBulletin platform, which means that many people will come across it at least several times in their Internet explorations. Other measurements have suggested that the number may be even much higher than that. Regardless of the real number, which would be extremely difficult to measure with complete accuracy, it is clear that many message boards use the program.
This illustrates that administrators still like the fact that they can trust the software to be reliable as well as innovative. As one of the leading bulletin board platforms, it is sure to receive a great deal of attention and support. While some administrations might balk at the idea of paying for this sort of software, they perhaps do not realize the great return on investment that they receive from this venture. Those who are ready to make the plunge certainly won’t have any regrets from it.