Bye everybody,

Through 2001 I’ve tried various forum software to get my community off the ground, but was not content with what was out there. vBulletin 2.x was announced and on the radar. At the end of the year (literally 31st December) I was able to place an order and convert my site through the night. January 1st it was online and we received great response. It was soon clear that I was a fan, and I became an active daily poster.

Through the years I got more and more involved, including beta testing version 3, and before it hit ‘gold’ I was invited to join the team. I’ve been on the team until early this year. What I think or feel as a team member regarding company changes and product development is different than what I think or feel as a customer; I think that vBulletin is the marketleader in forum software, it is a good product, and has a big team that can work on it. Price and product changes as ‘good business’ is what I have always wanted. The product is worth more, and they should ask more for it. And if it is a full community package, that is great. As a customer it is not following the path I was hoping it would take, and with the old team not coding it, it just won’t feel the same to me anymore. That is a personal opinion, my personal observation. I am sure it does apply only to me.

What I personally find a bit of a shame (as a customer) is that the vibe on the web site has changed. Certain people are unwilling to be patient, and only willing to be very negative. That, and the different development path, and what I find vbcom community changes (such as stricter moderation) all contribute, that despite that I continued to post here 25 to 50 posts in a day since January, the desire to continue posting has simply faded - to me it has to be fun, and it now does not feel like it. I have been an active daily reader and poster on this site. But I want to let you guys (because I used to be here daily) know that I am going to take a step back and become an inactive user. I am still going to use this great product, and I am still going to read a lot, and I am sure this won’t be my last post ever. But I am going to take a step back and focus on other sites, blogs, social networks, etc.

But I did not just want to disappear as a customer, a user, a friend, former colleague. And (as a regular customer) I wanted to say thank you all for awesome years, I have enjoyed the conversations and meeting new people for many years. I am on twitter as floris and on skype as vbfloris, and mrfloris.com is my blog, and would love to stay in touch with a lot of you.

All the best,

Yes, it’s a fact, today my access has been removed from the community forums and company sites. So I can now also blog and tweet about it. February 2004 - February 2009; version 3.x of vBulletin. I’ve been blessed to have a great hobby as being part of the support team helping those with questions.

I’ve mentioned it before in another post, but now that I’ve confirmed it works for twitter I’d like to point out that if you’re on a public network, or you’re using someone’s wifi, or you’re simply security concious that you might wish to consider using https:// so the traffic between twitter and you is encrypted.

https://twitter.com/ works. So use it!

With MySQL v3 out of the way, and MySQL 4 and 5 being used everywhere now (and if you have not upgraded to the latest stable .. shame on you) I think it is time to point out that you can use MySQLi for your code, software and sites. This blog is to inform you about MySQLi and give you information so you can decide to upgrade and if you have already to perhaps use it on your vBulletin installation.

Bigger PHP applications, such as vBulletin can gain a lot of increased performance from running a PHP op-code cache/accelerator such as APC.

Here are some instructions on how install APC on various systems, my personal experience is with what appears the most common: 32bit CentOS 5 Server.