vBulletin note
 

Found out something interesting...apparently, www.vbforums.com, a Visual Basic user group and *very* high-traffic subsidiary of www.vb-world.net, uses vBulletin also. Just thought it'd be cool to note that we're on a quality piece of software here, and that if the Cellar ever does get to be high-traffic (Gods forbid, traffic and intelligence at discussion forums tend to be inversely proportional), at least the software could handle it.

Props to Tony for good judgement (or good guessing).

Also, what's this poll thing. It seems like it could be fun.

Visual Basic?
 

Mmmmm... if you say so.

Personally, I've always had serious reservations about Visual Basic as a "real" programming language, particularly from the standpoint of security. (That's probably not fair... but usually you see these things running on NT/IIS and they're never locked down properly. Buffer overflow, anyone?) Maybe it's because I'm a Unix geek from way back, but I've always considered VB a language for people who can't learn C or Perl. (Die, Microsoft! Die!!)

This vBulletin thing seems to work pretty well for a low-traffic site, though. Do you get the source code when you buy it?

I seem to remember Tony saying you do, whcih leaves it open for modification. At the same time i doubt that individual users are going to be adding the scalability to multiple servers and the like...Anything with vb in the name can't be that good =)

You do get the source code, and I think this is a good approach on the developers' behalf. One where you do have to pay, but you get the source. For forum software, I would not have gotten something where you didn't get the source. But their payment model seems to be working very well indeed.

The whole thing does scale extrememly well, which shows you the power of PHP + MySQL. (And if anyone needs PHP + MySQL consulting work, you know where to go... right here.)

Oh yeah, and pointedly, even though the forum is "vBulletin", it has no connection at all to the original VB, Visual Basic. I always thought vBulletin was a bad choice of name because of that.

VB cs. C-types
 

Visual Basic is a Rapid Application Development language. It's designed so that you can hack something together quickly, and use it. It's not designed to be uber-secure, or for really complex applications. Not to mention how secure can anything on WinX really be, think about it. C or C++ is hella more complex, and takes longer to develop, but is the better language. It's the typical Microsoft trade-off: give up power and security, gain ease of use.

And doesn't it figure, just as I begin singing its praises, it goes down. Ah well....