As promised, I’d like to bring everyone up to date on the current vBulletin team, which is the largest in vBulletin’s history. All together, we have a solid hundred years or so (yikes!) of engineering expertise on the team, with a experience over a huge variety of software projects, including decades of experience working on vBulletin. The support team has similar depth of experience.

First, I’d like to introduce the newest new guy, Don Kuramura, who will take the lead on vB Product Management. Don will be responsible for all things marketing – the 4.x series roadmap, new product initiatives, product marketing and business development. Don’s social media expertise comes from both big companies (Sony Pictures, American Greetings Interactive) and entrepreneurial startups. He will be the primary one to work with the community to develop requirements for future vBulletin releases.

On the dev side, we are deeply appreciative of the work of all of the original vBulletin developers, including those still with us on the core team – Freddie, Darren and Jerry.

Here’s the whole team roster:

Management

• James Limm, Jelsoft Founder
• Ray Morgan, General Manager
• Don Kuramura, Product Manager

Engineering

• Kevin Sours – Kevin has been with IB for three years now. Prior to joining the vBulletin team, Kevin worked with several of IB’s vBulletin sites as lead developer for the Travel and Leisure group.
• Darren Gordon – "You all know our best developer, Darren…" Okay, Darren wrote that, but in all seriousness, he’s been part of the core vB team and is the chief architect of the new CMS.
• Ed Brown – Ed got degrees in Mechanical Engineering (there weren’t degrees in programming then). We won’t say when, but it was before Bill Gates founded Microsoft. PHP is currently Ed’s favorite language. Ed works on the new search engine and CMS system, including all the widgets to date.
• Freddie Bingham – With vBulletin since almost the very beginning, there’s hardly a piece of vB that Freddie hasn’t had a hand in.
• Jeff Greenberg – Our newest engineer and lead UI guru.
• Andy Huang – Andy is one of the developers from Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd. and has been working on vBulletin code since 3.7. He spends most of his time working on bug fixes, but also works on some of the new features. Andy also supports vBulletin China.
• Jerry Hutchings – One of the old-time vB developers, still responsible for Impex development.

Customer Support

• Steve Machol – Steve has been a forum owner and Administrator since 1995 staring with Matt Wright’s WWWBoard script. In 2001 he switched over to vBulletin and soon afterwards was added to the vB staff and promoted to Customer Support Manager.
• Wayne Luke – Wayne started with Jelsoft after being the administrator of the Sitepoint Community Forums for several years. Over time, he felt that working directly with the software being used to power large forums would be more beneficial. As such he has provided sales and service support since January 2001 and helped pioneer the telephone support services in use today.
• Carrie Anderson – Carrie has been on the vB support team for the past year, before which she was a moderator on vBulletin.org since 2006.
• Colin Frei – Support team member since 2005, as well as developer of a lot of Jelsoft’s back-office systems.
• George Liu – George (aka eva2000) has been on the vB staff since July 2001. Based in Australia, he is the in-house server ‘guru’ and has been providing help with server questions and optimization requests ever since then.
• Jake Bunce – Support team member since 2002.
• Zachery Woods – Support team member since 2004.
• Kerry-Anne Peters – Support team member from January, 2007 through June 30; thanks KA!
• Marlena Machol – Marlena Machol joined Jelsoft in March 2007 and has been working behind the scenes on link submissions and maintaining the links pages.
• Marco van Herwaarden, vBulletin.org
• Xiaoyu Huang, vBulletin China
• Scott Molinari, vBulletin Germany

But wait, there’s more…

In addition to this core team, we have other key players like Jennifer Rundell (VP of Content at IB) and Michael Anders, who runs close to a hundred of IB’s vBulletin sites.

We also borrow as needed from other internal engineering groups, and these have included Chris Holland, Michael Clifford, David Bonilla, Prince Shah, Tully Rankin, Andrew Elkins, Pritesh Shah, and James Pestridge.

Last but not least, Team vB also enjoys the help from IB’s internal QA team – Allen Lin, Meghan Sensenbach and Fei Leung.

Please be aware that there is currently a problem with the email server and most of the forum and licensing emails are not being sent. For some reason customers are getting emails for replies on support tickets, but those seem to be the only emails going out at the moment.

Until this is fixed no password change requests (forum and licenses) are going through. If you have purchased a new license and have not received your info, please fill out a sales contact form here:

http://www.vbulletin.com/go/sales

Otherwise any other requests will need to wait until the server issue is resolves. I apologize for any inconvenience this has caused.

By way of dev update, there are two major tasks remaining before we release the vB Forums for alpha testing:

• Finish porting the new vB4 style into templates. In terms of developer-hours, this is the largest single task of the project, and because of the natural flow of development, it happens to come at the very end.

• Pre-alpha regression testing. The alpha release is the earliest point at which a build is usable without major problems, so this round of testing is to make sure that the release doesn’t just fall over as soon as it’s installed.

Alpha will proceed in two phases: Forums first, then the full Suite. Beta will probably also be phased, but we are leaving ourselves the option of starting beta for Forums and Suite at the same time if it makes sense to do so.

Also, thanks to the hundreds of you who have applied to participate in beta testing, and especially for following the application instructions so closely. (For those who have tried email, voice mail, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, carrier pigeons and smoke signals, you get props for creativity, but please help me out and see my previous post.)

In answer to a few FAQs:

When will pricing and licensing be announced?

When all of the details are worked out. (I know it seems like it should be easy, but trust me on this, it’s harder than it looks.) This will be near the time of the gold release.

When will that be?

As soon as possible, but my best estimate at the moment is August, hopefully early in the month. Yes, we were hoping to be able to release before the end of Q2, but while everyone has been working hard and fast, we’re committed to take the time necessary to get it right before releasing. We know you expect nothing less.

Hurry up! Move Faster! No, wait, take your time! Make it better!

There are currently more people working on vBulletin that at any time in the product’s history, and the pace is intense. We are moving as fast as a software project of this size can move.

In parallel with the template porting describe above, we have decided to also take some extra time to beef up some aspects of the CMS, which we feel is a wise investment of time.

More to come as events unfold…