In the beginning, John Percival and James Limm discovered their Perl-written software and flat-file database could not handle the number of users visiting their website. By February, 2000 the duo decided to write their own solution as they were unfamiliar with the Perl software code so they could not optimize its performance. Thus, the concept of vBulletin was born. Today's interactive social forums are thanks to vBulletin.

Initially Percival and Limm only used the rewrite of UBB for their forum. UBB owners expressed interest in the solution just a few months later. Jelsoft was released as a paid solution and became vBulletin 1. Minor releases of the software lead Percival and Limm to wanting more from vBulletin than just being a rewrite of UBB. The two wanted to turn the software into a solution for forums and development of vBullet 2 began. Limm was the managing director and Percival was the lead developer and new developers helped with the project.

Several versions were released thanks to the success of vBulletin 2. In August, 2006, the stable version of vBulletin 3.6 was released. The latest stable release was on November 4, 2008 and is called vBulletin 3.7.4.

Planned updates for the vBulletin 3.x series include:

• Social group categories;

• Social group discussion topics;

• Social group avatars;

• Messaging improvements ;

• Moving album pictures;

• Recently updated albums;

• Thread prefix permissions.

New features included in vBulletin 3.7, released in April, 2008, include:

• Inline spam management and prevention;

• Thread tagging;

• Thread prefixes;

• Cloud for search/tag;

• User friendships;

• Public messaging for visitors with conversation features on profile pages;

• User photo galleries with comment facility;

• Social groups can be created by users with invite only and moderated membership;-

• Extended profile pages for members;

• Profile pages can be customized;

• Inline editing of profile fields;

• Lightbox viewer for attached images;

• User change history;

• History for post edits;

• Notices system for navigation bar;

• Re-authentication for inline moderation;

• Social bookmarking integration; and

• Human verification systems including image verification, Q/A and reCAPTCHA.

More websites are adding social forums to boost their value and attract more visitors. Get in on this growing means of attracting traffic to your online business. Choose a green web hosting company with the reliability to host your interactive website. The addition of vBulletin social forums will give your website the attention it deserves with the security visitors want.

About the author David Tanguay David is the owner of Interactive Online, a web hosting service provider. He specializes in hosting and designing websites built using open source software and contributes to the Joomla, Drupal and WordPress projects.

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