Unlike most of the candidates (except nsx, who posted just above), I actually have sat down with Internet Brands and brought up this very topic.

First, let me say this: Internet Brands is very pleased with FlyerTalk and is very happy to leave us pretty much alone and let us do what we want. That's good; there really hasn't been any orders sent down from the top to do things a certain way against the FlyerTalk community's wishes. Most of the IB-initiated projects come in the form of additional bolted-on products like TopFlyer that really don't affect the core of the FlyerTalk forum itself.

I laid it on pretty strongly to IB, though, that our technology platform felt out of date. IB didn't disagree; vBulletin 3 (what we are currently using) came out in 2004, and it definitely feels like we're still in 2004. This was brought to a bit of a head recently with the introduction of MilePoint running the vastly more modern XenForo forum software product. (No reason to dance around the issue and pretend MilePoint doesn't exist.) Frankly, I'm not proud that we're still stuck in 2004, but the IB tech guys are hesitant to move us to vBulletin 4--there are still a lot of bugs with that product, and IB values (probably rightly so) stability over look/feel/functionality.

Truthfully, though, I'm not all that unhappy that vBulletin 4 isn't ready for us. vBulletin 4's look and feel and functionality is not all that different than vBulletin 3 and is still not really competitive with some of the alternatives out there--like XenForo. My hope is, though, that now with the existence of a modern alternative forum software, vBulletin's development team will be spurred to significantly improve their product. Will it happen overnight? No; the scale is going to be measured in years, not months. But as one of the larger forums in Internet Brands' portfolio, we can keep the pressure on them to keep improving their forum software.

Other things like improvements to the mobile app, the return of the premium (ad-free) membership, and a replacement FlyerTalk merchandise store are in the works, as are other bolt-on additions (in the manner of TopFlyer) that have the potential to be engaging, although even if they aren't, they won't interfere with the forum itself.