UBB.threads PHP Forum Software Community Forums General Off Topic Groupee/UBB.threads and the economy

We all know that Infopop was once the market leader in online forum solutions. Unfortunately, those days are long over. After WWWThreads was acquired by Infopop, I personally think that the biggest mistake Infopop made was to market and develop two internally-competing forum solutions (UBB.classic and UBB.threads), and thus we began to lose so much market share to competitors. Had Infopop put all its resources on one product (UBB.threads) right after the WWWThreads acquisition, we could have still been the market leader today.

Now that UBB.threads is far down the list in market share, I am concerned about what will be the future for Groupee and UBB.threads in this current economic environment. I really hope that we can win back some market share with UBB.threads 8.0.

You make some pretty solid points there. As a silver lining to the low market share (at least for me, probably not so much for Rick), it's nice having quality scripts that not everyone else and their mother have.

Well, here's a little tidbit. I'm not too concerned with where we stand as far as market share goes. Keep our current customers happy, pick up a few along the way, and that's fine.

After 8.0 is out with redesign styles and modifications should be much easier to create and allow for much more flexibility so our customers will have more to choose from. Will probably have a dedicated site for themes/skins with previews, download stats, etc.

Anywho, that's always been the way I looked at it, clear back when I first started. Don't really care if we're the #1 forum out there. If we can keep our current customers happy then we'll naturually pick up some new ones as well.

Since I don't soley rely on UBB.threads for income, even if we were to get down to 1 new license purchase a month, you'd notice no difference in how things go here. It will still be developed just as it is now, so nothing really to be concerned about

Loving your attitude mate

I second driv comment. That's totally the way to look at how things work.

People tell me to advertise my online services and to do things to make tons of money. I just turned down a dedicated server customer right off the bat cus I didn't like the content of the site. I do not rely in hosting customers to pay my bills but just love making servers and racks.

I too do not rely on the "internet" business to make my money to live and survive. It's just like a big expensive hobby that keeps me out of trouble as my other hobby was street racers, LOL. Like I said was....

i'd like to have the design open up to allow for hooks in ubbthreads.php..

ie: now we have the pre and the run functions... for each $ubb value (or close to it)...

would be nice to have some means to add what i'd call hooks that would allow developers to make plugins or extensions or whatever you wanna call em.. that wouldn't interfere with the stock code, but give added functionality..

sooo hooks could be flexible enough to specify things like template, wordlets, pre_pre, post_pre, pre_run, post_run

etc etc... then we can have a 'plugins' directory and put them there...

this would entice developers to make some nice plugins... it would also not scare customers so much away from new things, because they would maintain compatibility...

the admin control panel could then simply have a nice feature where it has 'install plugin' -- 'remove plugin' -- 'upgrade plugin' and all goes on from there..

wordpress does this, joomla does too...

i've already done it to some extent myself, just to keep my uber-mods from colliding with the new releases... my directory is called sd-mods and i have a modified ubbthreads.php to handle it..

Well, there where talks of adding hooks into ubb.t7 when it was to be closed source (zend or ioncube endocded)

That's definitely something I want to get in SD. Just need to figure out the best way to accomplish it and allow for the most flexibility.

would be nice to handle it like wordpress does - don't even have to use a separate ftp client anymore

exactly allen.. and also having the FTP layer removes ALL the questions about 'CHMOD' for directories and files as well..

i'll bet 70% of the 'problems' i run into are just permissions

of course, that means i make less money doing 'CHMOD' for customers, but oh well

You'll make the same amount installing the plugins for them, trust me - there's a lot scared to click 2 buttons

Or even one at times hehe...

hahaha