Wedge

Oh sure, but in vB's case, I've noticed an abnormal trend towards fanboyism, moreso than I see from the other forum systems.

That used to be really apparent, and I mean REALLY apparent. But these days there seem to be a lot of IPB fans and XenForo fans as well. And quite a few vB fans have been turning into fans of other forum software.

No problem... But if you could keep your farts to yourself it'd be appreciated!

Pete, I hereby suggest that we release a special Wedge package. For $5.000, you get the free Wedge package, as well as free installation on a server of your choice. And a free T-shirt. (Well, when I mean free... That's $5.000 plus postage fees, of course.)

You can always put a price on free software.  8-)

When I was looking at forum software the assumption in my mind was that vB would be best purely because the others were free. I imagine most people think like this in most aspects of life e.g. I used to have a market stall selling perfumes and cosmetics. We were selling a mascara for 65p and it wouldn't shift - I increased the price to 95p and it sold out quickly. Why? Because people assumed that a 65p product was cheap & nasty but a 95p product was quality NB these are 1980s prices!

Also the expression "Nobody got sacked for buying IBM" rings true here. When we switch over to SMF 2 there will be plenty of pseudo-geeks spouting how I should have chosen vB (because it's the best), or xenforo, IPB etc. Whilst it would be easy to defend vB against SMF ("SMF if just free software so not as good as vB") it's less simple to defend SMF ("I did many hours of testing and found SMF to be the best in these features 1...... 2...... 3...... ").

Finally, vB only allow you to look at their product for 24 hours so whilst you have time to find the faults on SMF and phpBB, you may miss them on vB.

Then we should find some other ways of competing with the big boys; price isn't everything.

What I do know is that if you go for the paid systems, they *do* have a better track record of providing support because they can pay people to provide support.

That said, a decent amount of the problem is in building it right in the first place; how many of SMF's support questions are manual related?

I'm also seeing an awful lot of encoding issues lately, which is something else we've already tackled.

My farts are open source... :P

VB has made more advertisement than chrome, and the fact that when it was released was actually something pretty cool, it doesn't mean it still is...

I mean, all themes are just a variation of default, it has a big amount of updated plugins (or mods, I don't know how do they call them) and constants updates... But it's not a innovation anymore.

Otherwise we'd all be using just the one software...

As a former vB user I'll admit my decision was purely based on "you get what you pay for" so free wasn't so appealing at the time. for over 2 years a friend over-advertised the hell out of SMF to me and frankly I just didn't wanna hear it for the most part. The fact though that i was running a rather simple community means I didn't need about 50% of the fluff built into vB, so I decided to give this SMF thing a shot.

I don't doubt at all that some people just want that peace of mind that comes at the price of paying for something.

That ties in with what I said before about support, actually.

There are companies I've worked alongside that love the idea of unbundling themselves from the rather expensive MS licence costs for Office in favour of OpenOffice, have no hidden technical requirements preventing such a move - and yet once it goes up to the board, it gets shot down pretty much unanimously because "how can it be free?"

I did, once, actually manage to get to sit in one of these meetings and defended it to the very best of my abilities, but I did feel like I was trying to convert the heathens, futilely at that.

It's just the mentality that free things can't be quality, and no matter how much you try to change it, it seems engrained in people.

Yesterday, I had a repeat client bring me their computer that their teenage son had (again) gotten infected with numerous viruses.  The last time I worked on it, I suggested Avast free, because that's what I've used for years, and it's always done its job well while not having a large memory footprint and pretty much staying out of the way.  I tell my clients, most of whom are unaware that there is free Antivirus software available, that the free stuff is every bit as good as the pay stuff, and they always look at me weird.

However, this client told me that he wanted me to remove Avast so that he could install Norton to stop these infections from happening.  His perception is because Norton costs money it will do a better job.  I tried to explain that the problem was not his antivirus software, but his teenage son's downloading habits, but I was unsuccessful in convincing him.  So, I removed Avast for him and he's going to install Norton when I give it back to him.

I wonder what will happen after he's paid $70+ for Norton's software and has to bring the PC to me again in the next 6 months with the same problem...   :whistle:

Avast and Norton is probably *the* poster child for how free stuff does it so much better, -sigh-

Yep.

The funny thing is, this guy admittedly knows *nothing* about computers, and I am well recognized by many in our very small town as THE guy to fix your computer when it breaks.  Even our IT department here where I work refers all of our employee's personal home computer problems to me!  Yet people will still choose to waste their money, even though I warn them otherwise because, "it must be better because it costs money!"  Simply amazing.

My Avast! didn't detect anything...

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