144 replies to this topic

[Olivier Turbis]

Dear vBulletin customers,

We are very sad to announce we have decided to stop supporting vBulletin. Even if we said earlier we were going to support vB 4.1, the expert who was going to join us declined a few days ago. Since vBulletin 4.1 came out today, it is clearly not possible for us to provide a good service to you: we don't have the staff (and the time to find staff) to handle it. We hoped it would come later, but it seems clear that we will not be able to find any vBulletin staff easily. We have been contacting various people over the past few months, and we have came to a conclusion that finding vBulletin coders seems to be less and less easy as time goes by.

However, as we felt it was clearly not fair to leave you with nothing, we have planned to offer customers who bought a vBulletin skin in the last 30 days a full refund of their purchase. For the others, we cannot provide any refund: it would not be fair as you have already enjoyed your skin for quite a long time: the skin's value is not only due to the updates, but also to the research, and initial development work.

All vBulletin customers who did not decide to go for a refund can convert their vBulletin skin to the IPB equivalent for free. We highly encourage you to convert to IP.Board for a lot of reasons, including the service they provide and the quality of the software itself. Our IP.Board skins are updated frequently and are always compatible with the latest version. We will also release more new products in the very near future. Please contact Sebastien Penet by PM in order to know how you should proceed.

We understand any frustration that this may cause and we would like apologize for this. If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to contact us.

[iBotPeaches]

A tough choice to make, but well worth it.

[ørret]

iBotPeaches, on 25 November 2010 - 09:17 PM, said:

A tough choice to make, but well worth it.

Yes totally. More time to spend on IPB products now. Yes! Good news to me.

[Raulin]

Hi, buy a vbulletin style with you less than a month ago, I require the return of my money, my account is paypay: raulin@live.com.mx

sorry for my English, I use the translator

thanks.

[Olivier Turbis]

Just replied to your PM Raulin.

[ceho]

Well, I know it doesn't change anything and I won't get a refund, probably not even any understanding. However I need to tell you this.

Looking for an alternative for extremepixels I found Skinbox and was very happy with the skins on a first view. I bought a skin including lifetime updates, intending to buy more!!! That was when the recent vB version was 4.05 I think. It was in July 2010. Suddenly you guys decided to not provide any updates until vB 4.1 was released. Which was more than worse enough, as if your customers wanted to use your skins they were stuck on older versions of vB, nothing like 4.0.6, 4.0.7 or even 4.0.8.

Now you don't give refunds for those who bought a skin before the last 30 days (as if ANYONE would have bought an outdated skin within the last 30 days from Skinbox....). Stating we "enjoyed" our skin for a long time is an insult and pathetic!!! WE COULD NEVER USE IT!!! And by the way: there was no service or support at all. So what about the lifetime updates?

Beside the arrogant and ignorant way of being treated at Skinbox (see the support forums!!) this is only the final disappointment. Thank you for understanding our frustration! I can guarantee you if you weren't in Canada I WOULD get a refund! You guys sold a product, you made a CONTRACT with your customers and you didn't keep anything! The LEAST thing you could have done is to offer a refund for everyone who got trapped by your wrong sales ideas buying a vB 4 skin! If you cannot because you spent the money elsewhere, it would be gentle to at least offer everybody a conversion of our vB 4 skins into IPB skins, even if we don't use it. At least we would have something for our money.

Besides all the crap that vB is definitely causing (and believe me I am heavily effected by that!) you guys should be ashamed of what you do to your "customers" as well!! I know you will not understand my position, but it's the truth!!

What a waste of time, energy and money!! Great business you do. I will recommend your company. NOT!

[ørret]

(guy over = funny)

[6FRGaming]

Wow, talk about disappointing. Soon as I seen the 4.1 public beta was released I came straight here to see when we would be getting our updated themes. That was one of the BIG selling points to me, was that when 4.1 came around, the vBulletin version would be made to be as cool as the IPBoard version. Talk about having the rug pulled out from under you.

Sure we got use out of our current theme, but it was also with the expectation or promise that ours would be updated to the better IPBoard version.

I also love how the suggestion is to just go spend $150 on some other forum software, as if we don't already have enough invested in to vBulletin. And now many of us probably have to look elsewhere to buy themes from, because we can't use old forum software ridden with security holes forever.


Well thanks for the quality theme...while it lasted. Very disappointed to say the least, though.

[Sebastien Penet]

@ceho: I cannot disagree with all the things you said. I would have hopped it would have happened otherwise. Believe me or not, we did our best to find somebody able to upgrade our skins. We even contacted our competitors. We found some unskilled guys - which clearly were not the kind of person we wanted to hire, I am sure they would have given up within a week or two - and only one of our competitor thought about our proposal - and eventually told us he was too busy, after a few weeks. We kept looking for somebody for a long time. We didn't find anyone, what can we do then? Having Olivier work on IPB+vB is not possible at this point. It would lead to a bad support for IPB and a bad support for vB. And Olivier (like every single skinner on earth) prefer by far working with IPB. Because it's easier to work with. Because it costs less time to update. Because IPB's staff is stable. Because IPB's code enables us to innovate more. Because more and more vB users are switching to IPB. So we ended vB support. That was the only way not to sink.

Although I understand your frustration because you cannot get a refund, you must understand the money you paid was used, for you. The skins were developed. It cost money. We hired a support operator. It cost money as well. We invested money in vB. We cannot just say "hey, this customer bought it, didn't use it for 5 months, we spent money but let's give him back his money and refund our salary for the last 5 months". It is not fair. Leaving you with nothing is not fair as well. That is why we give all our vB customers the IPB equivalent of their skins for free. Just send me a PM to get your skins converted. We believe everyone should switch to IPB now. Even the other skinning companies are giving up on vB... I understand IPB costs a lot and you invested in vB. We would have preferred to refund all the customers. But let's be realistic, it is not possible.

I hope I clarified our decision a bit.


@6FRGaming: I feel sorry, really. I hope you will find another skinning company which is able to provide a long-lasting efficient service. However, if you did not find the service you were expecting, even if I understand it is expensive, I would advise that you switch to IPB.

[ørret]

So you're not waiting for 3.2 to re-do/upgrade skins?

[Olivier Turbis]

ørret, on 27 November 2010 - 10:22 PM, said:

So you're not waiting for 3.2 to re-do/upgrade skins?

No.

[d3vlabs]

wish I had a knack for VB for I could help out

[6FRGaming]

Sebastien Penet, on 27 November 2010 - 01:28 PM, said:

@6FRGaming: I feel sorry, really. I hope you will find another skinning company which is able to provide a long-lasting efficient service. However, if you did not find the service you were expecting, even if I understand it is expensive, I would advise that you switch to IPB.

This is a pretty insulting response.

I'm a paying customer, who gave you money largely on the premise that the version I had would be updated to the MUCH better version that you already had for IPBoard, once the next major patch rolled around.

And your response is to buy another theme, or spend $200+ dollars on some other forum software.

What a way to do business.

What's even more surprising is that since you had decided that the main programmers would focus just on IPBoard, there was only a CHANCE that vBulletin would be supported if some other programmer decided to climb on board or not...and yet you still strung people along that vBulletin would be supported until the very day 4.1 was released.

[Olivier Turbis]

6FRGaming, on 27 November 2010 - 11:37 PM, said:

And your response is to buy another theme, or spend $200+ dollars on some other forum software.

That's not true. We are willing to do a skin exchange for free for all vBulletin customers. Please read the announcement on page 1.

[6FRGaming]

Olivier Turbis, on 27 November 2010 - 11:44 PM, said:

That's not true. We are willing to do a skin exchange for free for all vBulletin customers. Please read the announcement on page 1.

Only IF you bought a theme within the last 30 days, despite support and updates being promised for over 6 months now.

And even for those who do a template switch, that requires vBulletin users to abandon forum software that we've already invested $175+ in, and spend $200+ on software you've all of a sudden decided to support more than vBulletin.

[d3vlabs]

welcome 6FRGaming.

Olviier and his team has been providing support, patches, help over a year. these are also some of the best, if not the best vbulletin skins around....at 17-19$ a piece....including customer support on forums, live chat support. email support.ah yes they also admitting they not able to continue to provide QUALITY support for vb, so they offering refunds for last 30 days purchases and platform replacement skins


as far as upgrading to latest versions of vbulletin, there are tons of forums out there making it on their 3.8.7 installations.......no one is forcing u to upgrade to latest vb...and who knows, maybe skinbox will come back to VB skins when VB makes their mind up about skin templating their software (there has been at least 3 major revisions in the last year). lets hope skinbox business will continue to grow and not run themselves into the ground by offering refunds for all the work they put in last year and year before that. I'm grateful for one as I got skins for my VB forum that made it one of the best looking forums around. Maybe some of you should get refund from Vbulletin instead, and consider going with IPB who seems to keep the developers and customers in mind when releasing their software. Thank you for your hard work and dedication team Skinbox. Il be sticking around.

[ørret]

Buy IPB, convert, problem solved. Everyone is leaving vB anyway, it's just a matter of time before vB is history. I am a big IPB fan, but if you don't like IPB, I'd recommend Xenforo. When it comes to the money, I guess you bought vB long time ago, so you've been enjoying it for a long time. If you bought vB recently, well, then you can thank yourself, because then you went into the biggest and most obvious trap ever. You might want to do some more research before you buy a forum software next time.

[Olivier Turbis]

6FRGaming, on 28 November 2010 - 12:15 AM, said:

Only IF you bought a theme within the last 30 days, despite support and updates being promised for over 6 months now.

And even for those who do a template switch, that requires vBulletin users to abandon forum software that we've already invested $175+ in, and spend $200+ on software you've all of a sudden decided to support more than vBulletin.

No. Maybe we weren't clear enough in the announcement. The skin exchange applies for every VB customers, whether you have bought the skin 1 year or 2 days ago.

[strudinox]

I understand why you did what you did and it's disappointing but hell, shit happens. My only problem is when you tell us to switch to IPB for better service. For a lot of us including me, this is not possible. I rely heavily on google for traffic, and for my site to sustain itself with google ads/traffic. I've got tens of thousands of indexed pages with google, and changing to forum software, as easy as it might be, would change all my URLs and cost me. Just understand that some of us, even though it would be a better choice to switch to IPB, cannot.

[Cyrem]

Hahaha, these complaining customers are pathetic. Buy some glasses (if you already own a pair, maybe buy glasses for your glasses) and read the terms and conditions before buying things on websites (which apparently you already agreed to when purchasing/registering on this website.)