Vbulletin has gone Gold again. This time, it is iteration 3.7.0!!! You must all have noticed the above icon often. If I guess right, it is most likely the most active and successful forums that are using Vbulletin. It is being actively developed.
In fact, what does gold mean? According to wikipedia, it is the final version of a particular product. You read it the right way, the most stable and most likely to have the least possible bugs. 😀 (that is what is most desirable).
I Have used Vbulletin in some occasions, and my advice, it is the best. As it claims to be. About three years back, I can still remember, it was the best and so is it today also. 😉 Fully packed with the right set of features and community contributed add-ons, it is no other that an unbeatable package.
This time it has come back with more powerful and useful features.
- Inline spam management & prevention
- Thread tagging
- Search cloud / tag cloud
- Thread prefixes
- Reciprocal friendships between users
- Public visitor messaging on profile pages with ‘conversation’ feature
- User picture galleries with user comment facility
- User-created social groups with invite only and moderated membership options
- Extended member profile pages
- Customizable member profile pages with admin-controlled styling abilities
- Inline editing of custom user profile fields
- Lightbox viewer for attached images
- Viewable and comparable history maintained for post edits
- Extended re-authentication for inline moderation actions
- Notices system for navigation bar
- Multiple human-verification systems including reCAPTCHA, image verification and Q/A
- User change history
- Social bookmarking integration
Comparing the set of presented features with previous versions, I can say “Yes major improvements have been made”. In fact, these are the new additions (features) and the most basic ones. Customisation takes you beyond the average ones.
You might also want to take a look at vBSeo, its specialised SEO package. And this one really works. 😀
Tempted to download? 😉 So am I, but it is a commercial package. Costing $150. But, overall comparing it with all the open source forums software and IPB (Invision Power Board), it is worth investing.