Nathan - welcome to the site!

As I mentioned to you some time ago there are a lot of questions about vB4 that remain to be answered. While I've applied for the beta program I've received no response and therefore have not had any opportunity to view what's under the hood relative to how bolting in products and extensions will be handled. I know that a lot of things will have changed so we'll have to explore what will be required.

In general our products have a number of touch points that we'll have to port but I hope that the majority of code will come over without issue. In the case of ShowCase the functionality that supports the ability to build different showcase types has very little, if any, dependency on vBulletin so that should migrate quickly.

The other thing that we will be looking for is how quickly site owners will transition to vB4. If they use any plugins, addons, or modifications I suspect that all of these will need to be ported to work with vB4. This could take some significant time depending on how quickly the authors of those mods migrate. With most of the sites that we are working with I've been surprised with how many mods they are using. To see these sites quickly migrate to vB4 will be a challenge because of these.

Obviously I want to see our products quickly be supported on vB4 for those customers that do migrate or start new communities. The only problem I see with getting there quickly is how active Internet Brands is in getting a beta or release version out there so we can start working with it. Right now with no information forthcoming on getting access to the new version I can only guess at what will be involved. If we can get access to vB4 and dig into it I suspect that our products will be some of the first to support it.

As for Vendor Tools pricing I think it is the right change to make. Until we had the product ready to release, our video demo online, and potential customers checking it out we were only running on the data that I had available to us...my experience in building the revenue streams on my site with the product. In the feedback received, not only in my calls with site owners but here in this thread, it became apparent that the way I leveraged the product and my business practices was somewhat different and not representative of the market as a whole. Going forward we still want to share our experiences so that owners can get the most out of the potential of the software. That said we realize that each site will use our products in different ways and we want to support them however we can.

I'll also note that this pricing strategy change came about through our interest in trying to fit the customer needs with our needs to support and grow our business. This was accomplished with some offline conversations with other members of the site, existing customers, and a LOT of internal conversation around Vendor Tools.

While never pleasant for either us or the potential customer I have an appreciation for the process and that we all are working to something that works for all parties. Hopefully most people will find the new pricing structure more workable.

Thanks again for joining the site and I hope we can work together soon!

Best regards,

Mark

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Mark Ferguson
President - Drive Thru Online, Inc.
Drive Thru Online – Helping Turn Your Passion into Profit