Welcome to vBulletin FAQ

vBulletin FAQ is a free resource for vBulletin forum owners, administrators and moderators.

Building and running a successful forum can be a daunting task, but its much easier to succeed if you can benefit from the experiences of other forum owners. All of the content on this web site comes from people who have been successful forum owners, administrators and moderators. Their experience and expertise is here to help you.

Inside you will find articles and resouces for the vBulletin forum owner. Topics range from forum SEO (search engine optimization), ways to earn money with your forum such as through programs such as AuctionAds or Google Adsense, skins for your vBulletin forum to give your site a more custom look and feel, modifications you can download to enhance or add on to the features for your forum as well as advice from over 10,000 other vBulletin forum owners.

Come on in and join the leading vBulletin resource for forum administrators!

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vBulletin is a professional, affordable community forum solution. Thousands of clients, including many industry leading blue chip companies, have chosen vBulletin - It's the ideal choice for any size of community.

A little vBulletin history...

Back in 1999 John Percival and James Limm were running a forum community using Infopop's UBB.classic software. As their web site grew larger, they noticed that their UBB/classic could not always handle the number of online users they had.

Searching for a better solution, John Percival decided that it would be better to write their own software. Initially, it was designed solely as a rewrite of UBB, but using PHP and the database MySQL. Even though they wrote this software for only themselves, other UBB owners expressed interest in their solution. John Percival and James Linn offered to sell their code to Infopop, but were rejected. Limm and Percival instead created Jelsoft and released their work as a 'for sale' script, which became vBulletin 1.

After several minor releases of their software, the two decided to start working on a new version that would be more than just a rewrite of UBB: Rewriting the product from top to bottom, vBulletin 2 development began. The eventual release of vBulletin 2 proved to be very successful and made vBulletin Forum Software popular.

In December of 2002, vBulletin 3 was beginning development. Percival decided to step down as lead developer and product manager, turning his roles over to Kier Darby. vBulletin 3 was released in March of 2004. Recently, vBulletin 3.5 was released that addressed some of the shortcomings of 3.0 such as a better plugin system for easier upgrading and installation of modifications (hacks) and the addition of AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript and XML) to the software platform.

vBulletin is arguably the best forum software on the market today.

In July of 2007 Jelsoft was aquired by Internet Brands, Inc., a leading provider of automotive, travel and home-related sites and communities.

A few interesting tidbits:

• The name Jelsoft comes from the initials of James E. Limm and software. Percival apparently didn't get mentioned.
• The developers refer to the server where development takes place as the "Ninja Development Server."
• The "v" in vBulletin does not actually stand for anything.

Read on through the site. We have packed it full of alot of useful information for the vBulletin Forum owner.