From vBulletin 3.8 website
vBulletin gives you an instant community that lets your visitors interact, take part in discussions, ask questions, give answers and express opinions.
vBulletin is a professional, affordable community forum solution. Thousands of clients, including many industry leading blue chip companies, have chosen vBulletin - It's the ideal choice for any size of community.
Making your site a hub for information and discussion encourages visitors to return again and again. It's also a highly effective way of improving your service to customers or users of your website. Our dedicated development team constantly strives to keep vBulletin at the forefront of new Internet innovations, while always keeping an eye on security and performance.
Key features include:
- Fast and efficient database back end
- Template driven interface
- Powerful search engine
- Language system
- Custom user fields
- Extensive admin control panel
- Unlimited forums/posts
- Inline moderation
- Flexible plugin system
vBulletin History and Context
vBulletin is edited by the Jelsoft Enterprises Limited company for more than nine years (started in 2000), and, step by step has been completed by many additional features and evolve with the Internet. We could notice, on the Big Boards website, that 8 forum on the 25 most used Internet forum are using vBulletin, which proves that you could rely on this software.
Prices
The company which develops vBulletin sells two kind of software licenses:
- Owned License ($ 180): Allows you to run the software on your site indefinitely. One year of free updates, and $60 to a new year of updates.
- Leased License ($ 100): Allows you to use the software on your site for 1 year and gives you access to products updates for that year. After 1 year, you must renew your license or remove the software from your site.
More information about vBulletin pricing...
The vBulletin software only supports the MySQL database backend, but it supports it well. This means that using the direct PHP/MySQL functions and optimizations is always better than using a third-party wrapper, because it allows using MySQL hints.
However, it could be installed on any operating systems that support PHP on a Web Server.
vBulletin has an incredible list of features. They are not all useful, simply because any installation of vBulletin never requires the default huge features list it provides. However, everybody will always fulfill their needs, generally without installing any additional plugins.