Developers of vB 3 left the company and started new forum software named XenForo. They were then sued by Internet Brands (vB owners) for IP theft - IB claimed XenForo was next vBulletin. In court hearings we’ve learned that IB plan for vBulletin development was to fire all but lead dev, and have this lead dev only delegate and review work to outsourced devs in Asia. We’ve also heard that „only developers care about quality of code” and trying to keep code good is „waste of time”.

And then vB 4 landed and turned out to be insanely poor launch - forum index was plugin based, but it was very easy to end with index page that did 700 mysql queries, which took forever to execute without relying on full page cache like varnish.

Today its supposedly much better, but Internet Brands uses internal version of vBulletin 3 (3.8) to run their sites instead of v4 or v5.

It’s just the feeling! :-)

vBulletin 4 was also okay in the end, but I always thought vBulletin 5 was trying to be too many things at once. It’s just too modern! I understand, of course, that the online community landscape has changed since back then and vBulletin has to adapt to remain competitive.