Looks like vBulletin now has their own tools for phpBB and Xenforo migrations. The catch is that you have to purchase a vBulletin cloud subscription, so you can't migrate to self hosting unless you purchase a self hosting license. Not only that, but you have to pay $119 on top of paying for the hosting for migration so it's not free. Wonder why it took the devs this long to make a migration tool... I also wonder if anyone here is going to move to vBulletin from phpBB or Xenforo. I doubt it though lol.
Sounds like vBulletin is a little desperate. It is cute that they think people are going to go from XF (or phpBB for that matter) to vBulletin. I don't know if they've improved at all but from what I've heard they haven't had a good reputation for quite a few years.
They've had ImpEx since the vB3 days, but they made it less of a priority over time. Guess they're playing catch up now. But no thanks, I'm good without vB
I don't completely loath vBulletin because there's functionality within the core product that makes a lot of sense to me. However it's still riddled with bugs and has a long history of issues in terms of security so I would never use it again and I highly doubt many owners using Xenforo would migrate to it. I guess they might get a few takers from phpBB forum owners.
In reality vBulletin is finished in terms of being a viable commercial product and here are some figures to put perspective on that.
Xenforo has a 51.8% relative share of the commercial forum platform market compared to vBulletin which has 12.6%. The remaining percent is split between Invision, Burning Board and Discourse.
vBulletin's 12.6% of the market share comprises of version 3.8 at 33.9%, version 4.2 at 36.3% and the current version, 6.0 at a paltry 4.9%. The small percentage remaining is split between obscure versions that are all obsolete.
I'm confident those figures are accurate at the time of posting because I've taken them directly from DigitalPoint's cookie search tool: https://tools.digitalpoint.com/cookie-search While I'm not so confident with my maths I believe 4.9% of 12.6% equals approximately 0.6% and that represents vBulletin's only market share providing any revenue.
