According to Wikipedia, the creators of vBulletin were willing to sell the rights to the product in 1999, but Infopop refused.

I was wondering, do you think this was a big mistake? Today, vBulletin is the most used forum software, unfortunately. Had Infopop purchased vBulletin, we would still have the prestige that we once had. Infopop had refused to rewrite UBB.classic in PHP. In 2001, Infopop bought out WWWThreads, and renamed the product UBB.threads. Prior to Infopop's purchase, there was both a PHP and a Perl version of WWWThreads, but since Infopop already had a forum solution written in Perl, the Perl version of WWWThreads was discontinued. For several years, UBB.classic and UBB.threads co-existed, but soon Infopop (now Groupee) realized that the products were internal competition. Despite UBB.threads being the more robust of the two forum software, sales of UBB.classic continued to cannibalize UBB.threads sales. With the majority of competing forum software now written in PHP and using a MySQL database, it made sense to discontinue UBB.classic rather than UBB.threads.

I am pretty sure that if Infopop had bought out vBulletin, the UBB name would still carry the prestige that it used to.

I for one, have never seen hindsight fail.

So much of that paragraph is factually incorrect.

LOL!

Yes, I understand that UBB.threads 7.x originally began as a project to replace both UBB.classic and UBB.threads, however, it ended up becoming the UBB.threads 7.x series.

Since it's on Wikipedia you can go over and edit the page David

I still find it funny that they admit that they based vb off of UBB.C; so you'd think that'd be enough to see that they're just little money grubbing... :AHEM:'s

"but since Infopop already had a forum solution written in Perl, the Perl version of WWWThreads was discontinued."

This is wrong wrong wrong.

Nav is THE person in the world who knows that... mebbe you can let us in on the reald deal so we can update the wiki? I posted something about it in the admin forum at UBBDev a while back - some wiki "facts" are a bit hazy

We discontinued the perl version because it was far less frequently downloaded, more difficult to maintain and install, and because it was far too much work for Rick to develop and maintain two codebases for the same product. Maintaining duplicate features for both the php and perl version took far too much of his time and stalled new development.

It had nothing to do with competing or not competing with .classic in any way. At the time they were separate and distinct products where decisions made to one did not necessarily have an effect on the other. We dropped the perl version to make life easier for Rick at the time.