As a vb license holder I remember the whole thing up to the beta releases of vb5. The original thrust was that the vb platform needed more social media integration since many of us were using plugins and hacks to make that happen, but because of the codebase of vb3, it was going to need a rewrite, which was vb4. Unfortunately vb4 did a lot of what the FT new style did--upset users wholesale. So vb3 and vb4 were kept in development until vb5 was released, which was supposed to be the bomb.

Meanwhile, between vb4 and vb5, many of the original, long-time vb developers and staff left. Eventually, they started a new company and were going to release a new forum software to compete with their old product. The forum community was split on which was better--vb5 or xenforo, and that's when I stopped looking at it since critical features I need were not even on the map in either product.

Fast forward many years later and as a forum user myself, I've found that a lot of the forums I really like in terms of speed and navigation are xenforo-based and many that were on vb have switched. I myself will be revisiting moving my own forum to the xenforo platform if it can have all the same functionality as my current platform.

And I'm sure to a certain extent this is where FT is on the whole thing. I've actually met the VP of IB before and they look at forums in a really serious way, but also in a business way. Many forums were hobbies that grew into something--it takes a lot more than that hobby start to make them into a viable business. And IB has that challenge in front of them while trying to keep their user base happy as well. It's a hard balance to strike as I've learned even through my own forum, but if it can't survive as a business, it won't survive. I can't tell you how many forums I posted on in the last 15 years that simply don't exist today. (Makes me sad too because I posted a lot of good information in some of those forums that I didn't have anywhere else )