vBulletin – How did it get started?
In the late 1990s, John Percival and James Limm were running VB-World, a web site dedicated to Visual Basic developers. The site was very popular and their message board, powered by UBB, was having great difficulty dealing with the workload. That workload continued to increase and in 2000, they decided to write their own message board using PHP and MySQL.
The intent behind vBulletin was simply for use on their VB-World web site. A number of their users liked what they saw and convinced them to market it. A daring move at the time, given that UBB overwhelmingly dominated the market. The move proved to be the right decision and vBulletin became a huge success. This in itself was amazing, in that the only marketing that was done was by word-of-mouth, and both John and James were taken totally by surprised at the success of vBulletin.
The fact that users are able to modify the source code, and create styles and hacks have contributed greatly to vBulletin’s success. As well, vBulletin continues to add more and more features both for the end user and administrators alike. Despite the fact that there has been more and more forum software entering the market, a lot of it open source, vBulletin continues to gain in popularity.
vBulletin was designed to be fast, efficient and has the ability to fit the needs of all forums, from the smallest right up to the largest community, without any scaling issues. Some vBulletin forums have handled 1100 users online at the same time. There is at least one vBulletin powered forum out there with as many as 170,000 members and another with over 3 million posts.
Jelsoft was aquired by Internet Brands, Inc. in July of 2007 however, vBulletin is here to stay and if past history is a guide, it can only get bigger and better.
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