First of all, as a person who has his share of running companies that provide software and hardware for specific purpose, I think you have likely made the right decision to insure both the forward success of UBB and of your obligations to your family.

For those now looking to jump ship, I have this to say.

I know what VB looks like in operation. I am not impressed. Our own forum has jumped from no place to tied for the most active in our genre in less than 8 months. Part of this success is based on the look and feel of UBB compared to the look and feel of other and competing forum software bundles.

Except for our own mistakes, UBB has been rock solid even in the face of hacker attacks.

Look and feel is important. And UBB is king of the hill in terms of the ability to project a look and feel. We have a professional graphics artist as one of our founding members, and she has very specific requirements on the software package, requirements we were unable to find in other packages.

We do need more features and I have listed them in the suggestion box. I am perfectly happy contracting to SD or Gizmo to provide those features and was simply waiting until v8 to see what was still needed.

We currently average over 600 posts a day and during the busy season, we handled more than a thousand. This make us a player by any measure especially considering that we went live in September of last year, (at least in our genre). Even during the off season, we continue to grow and we credit part of that success to our rock solid forum package and the look and feel.

We just had a record time when more than 90 members and guests were active at the same time.

For whatever it is worth, we just ran out of disk space with our current hosting provider and posted a trouble ticket. Rick answered within 15 minutes with a suggestion which we have turned on. I dunno how you get better service than that.

Guess you could say we are sticking with UBB because it is our best interest to do so. The task of switching forum packages is also a consideration that has to be answered. It is not that simple as to just make a decision and do it.

Larry