Freeforums/proboards

[synpastel]

I've noticed proboards (now goes by freeforums I believe if I remember right) has really fallen off as of late. Used to be a popular alternative to Invisionfree/Jcink but now I noticed it's fallen off the wagon as of late. I'm assuming it's due to the poor UI, skin designs, as well as overall staff with Proboards but not entirely sure. Anyone have insight on this?

 

[Arantor]

Nah, it's chugging along as it always has; the super-snide dismissive insular attitudes so prevalent within the Jcink clique are more likely relevant in practice. It's gotten worse of late how dismissive and monocultural it's become.

 

[vbgamer45]

Proboards in the last year has sold out to VerticalScope Inc, I know there next version was cancelled that they were working on.

 

[NeoMetallix]

Proboards in the last year has sold out to VerticalScope Inc, I know there next version was cancelled that they were working on.

That's unfortunate. They were one of the old guard as far as free hosts go.

 

[vbgamer45]

I am still around with mine lol.

 

[Ravenfreak]

I don't think it's gone downhill much, in fact I know there's a few popular forums that use Proboards as their host. You've got @Paul's Funjoint, The Sonic 3 Angel Island Revisited modding forum is hosted by Proboards and it's very active, as well as the Lost Media Wiki forum. It does suck that version 6 was cancelled, and I'm not really sure what Vertical Scope is going to do with the platform but here's hoping they pick up version 6 again.

 

[Arantor]

Proboards in the last year has sold out to VerticalScope Inc, I know there next version was cancelled that they were working on.

VerticalScope could afford to buy them? They (VS) were slowly drowning in their own debt last I heard.

 

[vbgamer45]

VerticalScope yes public company has lots of money to burn from investors. I follow their public stock disclosures. Which is very enlightening They over paid for threadloom in my opinion which includes the other admin forum. And had a stake in tapatalk as well. That's my belief on most of their acquisitions over paying.

 

[Arantor]

There was a lot of speculation they were trying to buy XF out, and the eagle eyed watchers over there were gloating over how much VS stock had tanked so there was no risk of them screwing up XF.

 

[vbgamer45]

UK firms are interesting as well you can glean some information from the fillings. I don't think it would be that expensive. I looked them up a few weeks ago and was see how much money they had at the end of the year. My only thought is they have been bought before and did not like that experience with vBulletin and likely do not want to sell unless they all want to move on to something else.

 

[Paul]

I'm in my 21st year with them and while we were most active in 2005/06, right now is close to that but one thing I have noticed in the last few months, proboards themself mainly on their support forum is virtually dead. They used to have hundreds online a day on that but now only 50-60 daily and not many posts. Still enjoying it myself but probably does help by mine being active with 12-15 thousand posts a month.

 

[zoldos]

I've noticed proboards (now goes by freeforums I believe if I remember right) has really fallen off as of late. Used to be a popular alternative to Invisionfree/Jcink but now I noticed it's fallen off the wagon as of late. I'm assuming it's due to the poor UI, skin designs, as well as overall staff with Proboards but not entirely sure. Anyone have insight on this?

Yes, because ProBoards was junk in the year 2000, and still is.

 

[Arantor]

UK firms are interesting as well you can glean some information from the fillings. I don't think it would be that expensive. I looked them up a few weeks ago and was see how much money they had at the end of the year. My only thought is they have been bought before and did not like that experience with vBulletin and likely do not want to sell unless they all want to move on to something else.

The filings for XenForo Ltd are… interesting to me given what I know about UK accounting practises. It makes me suspect that XF is not nearly as remotely healthy as they appear, or something *very* strange is going on.

Guarantee Kier won’t be a fan of being bought out again after the way Jelsoft were screwed over by Internet Brands, and VerticalScope behaves just as badly and for the same reasons.

The real question will be if they force folks onto their Fora platform.

 

[vbgamer45]

Yeah that was my take away from reading them as well... Makes sense. They need more cloud users...

 

[Arantor]

Did a bit more digging on the ProBoards situation. The mothballing of v6 did not go down well, but it really does set the stage for them deploying Fora everywhere, which will go down even worse. While it will fix some of the more minor things that v6 would have fixed, the mass deployment of Fora will upset a lot of people a lot more.

I wonder if the delay is about them building enough functionality in to appease the folks who do customisation on PB because what I understand of Fora, the functionality in its admin for customisation is limited compared to PB's (because I believe they don't expose the full underlying XF templating system, but I may be wrong about that)

On a random different note, vB is claiming 40,000 active licenses (which is a huuuuuge drop from the previous claims of 120k), but if we take DigitalPoint's cookie tracker as a guideline, that suggests the XF userbase is 4x the size of those still using vB, which would imply 160k active licenses but not necessarily *recently renewed*, esp with the 2.3 delays. If say a quarter of them are active, that would be a revenue stream of £200k/year which for their costs isn't great but workable, and would imply the sorts of numbers on their filings.

Forum business is not so lucrative, it turns out.

 

[vbgamer45]

Overall I would agree, not sure the salary of developers in the UK but that would be pretty low for renewals, and hard to keep developers on full time to the project, without then working on other projects.

I think IPB is doing well, mainly do their early cloud hosting and going have enterprise customers.
I have multiple XF licenses but haven't renewed them. And in general this is an issue with software that is not an automatic subscription, people are fine with the version they are on.

 

[Cedric]

Overall I would agree, not sure the salary of developers in the UK but that would be pretty low for renewals, and hard to keep developers on full time to the project, without then working on other projects.

I think IPB is doing well, mainly do their early cloud hosting and going have enterprise customers.
I have multiple XF licenses but haven't renewed them. And in general this is an issue with software that is not an automatic subscription, people are fine with the version they are on.

IPB is doing way better in that regards. But mainly because they focus on business, not hobbyists.

 

[Arantor]

that would be pretty low for renewals

Given the 3 year gap between big feature releases, there's been a lot of noise about people not renewing until there's something to renew for. AFAIK the only full time devs are Kier and Chris, with a couple of folks on the side as some kind of contractor, not sure if full time or part time though. Also UK dev salaries are lower than US ones for sure.

As for IPS, the change to licensing is an interesting one - that if you are on the new terms, you *have* to renew every couple of years otherwise your licence is forfeit. I get the thinking from IPS on the subject - that otherwise someone could be happy on the version they're on, skip upgrades for 3 years, then renew to get the latest features without having invested in the dev cost in the interim, but I'm not *entirely* sold on the justification - plenty of other companies manage to do this just fine.

This is why with pay-to-keep software you *have* to give people a compelling reason to upgrade; this is why I pushed so hard for more features in SMF 2.1 because the same logic flies: people will hold out on what they have if it's good enough.

Which, to bring it back on topic, is even more interesting for ProBoards because it was clear that v5 *isn't* good enough for an increasing number of people, which means shelving v6 is a problem for them unless they're going to do a v5.5 - or just go to Fora (most likely)

That's one of the interesting things about the hosted space: as long as people have everything they need (and can get by otherwise), they'll happily play along. ProBoards users seem to expect more from the offering than the Jcink users, which I find deeply interesting given how much relatively-equal functionality there actually is there.