vBulletin is a proprietary

Internet forum An Internet forum, or message board, is an online discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages. They differ from chat rooms in that messages are often longer than one line of text, and are at least tempora ...

software package sold by MH Sub I, LLC doing business as vBulletin (formerly Jelsoft Enterprises and vBulletin Solutions). It is written in PHP and uses a MariaDB or

MySQL MySQL () is an open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). Its name is a combination of "My", the name of co-founder Michael Widenius's daughter My, and "SQL", the acronym for Structured Query Language. A relational database ...

database server. Similar products include XenForo,

WordPress WordPress (WP or WordPress.org) is a free and open-source content management system (CMS) written in hypertext preprocessor language and paired with a MySQL or MariaDB database with supported HTTPS. Features include a plugin architectu ...

Joomla Joomla (), also spelled Joomla! (with an exclamation mark) and sometimes abbreviated as J!, is a free and open-source content management system (CMS) for publishing web content on websites. Web content applications include discussion forums, ...

Drupal Drupal () is a free and open-source web content management system (CMS) written in PHP and distributed under the GNU General Public License. Drupal provides an open-source back-end framework for at least 14% of the top 10,000 websites worldwid ...

, MyBB, and

phpBB phpBB is an Internet forum package written in the PHP scripting language. The name "phpBB" is an abbreviation of ''PHP Bulletin Board''. Available under the GNU General Public License, phpBB is free and open-source. Features of phpBB includ ...

History

vBulletin was first launched in 2000 by James Limm and John Percival. Its successor, vBulletin 2, was released in 2001. A third version was launched in 2004. Internet Brands acquired the product from JelSoft in 2007. vBulletin 4 was released in late 2009. The StyleVars system was added to draw CSS variables directly from the vBulletin Template code. In July 2010, the BBC reported that there was a serious flaw in vBulletin software that allows anyone to easily access the database username and password. In October 2010, Internet Brands sued three former employees, just as their new competing software XenForo was to be launched, as well as a second lawsuit in the United States claiming

breach of contract Breach of contract is a legal cause of action and a type of civil wrong, in which a binding agreement or bargained-for exchange is not honored by one or more of the parties to the contract by non-performance or interference with the other part ...

copyright infringement Copyright infringement (at times referred to as piracy) is the use of works protected by copyright without permission for a usage where such permission is required, thereby infringing certain exclusive rights granted to the copyright holder, ...

, and misappropriation of

trade secret Trade secrets are a type of intellectual property that includes formulas, practices, processes, designs, instruments, patterns, or compilations of information that have inherent economic value because they are not generally known or readily ...

s. In May 2011 it was announced that vBulletin had abandoned an attempt at preventing XenForo doing business, and in 2013 the claims were dismissed. vBulletin 5 was released in 2012. In late 2017, a post by Technical Support Lead, Wayne Luke, confirmed that vBulletin 3 and vBulletin 4 were now considered to be "End of Life" software, with no further development of the series planned.

References

2000 software Internet forum software PHP software {{software-stub

History

See also

References