Recently an issue over the vBulletin license arose over an animation site that an agent of Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd. (the company that owns the vBulletin forum software) reportedly found distasteful. According to the email text, a man named Howard G. Spinks of Pirate Reports, a company that investigates unlicensed software use for Jelsoft, told the animation site's administrator, "having seen the content of your forum and some of the depraved comments that obviously it is time for you to moderate the forum to avoid a likely revocation of license." At that, the site's actual content became a background issue -- the real question in the minds of many forum administrators was, "Can Jelsoft demand editorial control or censorship of my site just because I use its software?"

The advantages of vBulletin

Why use vBulletin when there are so many competing free software or at least less restrictively licensed Web forum packages out there? Rather than try to get an outside expert to answer this question, I'm going to choose to answer it myself, as someone who has maintained Web forums for several years, using a variety of packages including vBulletin:

• Scalability: vBulletin scales up perfectly in terms of users, posts, and overall traffic. Adding more of any of these does not choke any part of vBulletin. None of the other packages I've used (SimpleBoard, MamboBoard, phpBB, SMF) can scale as well -- they lose the ability to search when the database gets too big, or after a few thousand posts they become slow.
• Efficiency: It's fast -- no long page load times, no unnecessary database calls (that I can detect), and uses very little bandwidth (about 104k per monthly unique visitor on The Jem Report Forum).
• Good search functionality: If you search for something using the search function, you will find it quickly and easily. Try saying that about virtually any other forum software.
• Search engine friendliness: URIs generated by vBulletin can be configured for search engine friendliness (no dynamic URIs). You can also generate barebones thread summary pages and a sitemap to make your forum even more attractive for search engine spiders.
• Heavily featured: No matter what you want to do in terms of messages, users, and usergroups, you can do it with vBulletin. It has features that I've wished for for a long time, like automatic thread creation via RSS feeds and banning users by IP ranges.
• Secure: According to Secunia, vBulletin 3.x has had only 12 security vulnerabilities with 0 left unpatched as of this writing. Of those 12, most were not serious flaws -- only one was listed as "highly critical," which is a severity rank of 4 of 5. Aside from knowing that your forum won't be easily erased or hijacked by script kiddies, this fact means that there are infrequent patches and updates, so you can spend more time posting to the forum and less time trying to keep it secure. There is also a patch warning push feature in the admin control panel in vBulletin. This checks your version number against the most recent release, and informs you of patches and upgrades when they become available, along with an explanation of what has been fixed or addressed in the patch or upgrade.
• Import from anything: Jelsoft provides free database import tools from virtually any other forum package to vBulletin. It's not always perfect from some of the tier 2 or tier 3 forum packages, but it gets all of the important data (and most people use tier 1 bulletin board packages anyway, so it may not be a concern at all). Jelsoft even has staff members that can assist you with particularly troublesome migrations.
• A predictable back button: One of the biggest user gripes I've seen about forum software is that you never really know what your browser's "back" button will do. Will it go back to the message you just posted? Will it erase the text you typed in the previous page? Will it update thread and post information, or will it revert to the outdated information? Well, vBulletin always does the most desirable thing in all these situations -- at least from my frame of reference as a frequent and long-time forum participant.
• Easy to install and configure: Some forum packages can be a real nightmare to install and configure. vBulletin can be installed over FTP (no SSH access required), and the installation process is heavily documented. If you still can't do it, you've got commercial support options available to you, including professional installation.

I'm sure some people will disagree with my assessments, but they may not be in the same position as I am with my forum. If you aren't making money from your forum or if it is not part of a network that you have a financial interest in, then you may not need many of the above-listed features. I don't want to mess with the software, I just want it to work correctly right now with as few hassles as possible, and I want it to stay that way well into the future. vBulletin is among the few software packages on my server that was easy to set up and is simple to manage in the long term.

Open but not free

For years the Free Software Foundation has insisted that the terms "free software" and "open source" are not the same. Having access to the source code and having some ability to modify it for your own purposes does not imply any other rights. vBulletin is a perfect case in point: You purchase or lease a vBulletin license and are allowed to modify the source code, but you may not distribute it, use it on more than one site (without further license payments), or use it for illegal purposes (it is not clear as to which countries' laws this refers to). To many, these are acceptable terms to abide by, especially since the software is not prohibitively expensive and Jelsoft seems particularly responsive to customer needs through email and through its vBulletin support forum.

The entire license text is online for those who would like to see its exact wording. The part that applies to the situation discussed in this article -- referred to as the Acceptable Use Policy or AUP -- is not there, though, and I was unable to find it anywhere in my own vBulletin materials or through the vBulletin Web site. Since the license clearly states that it "constitutes the complete statement of the agreement between you and Jelsoft," one may assume that there is no separate valid AUP.

Statement from vBulletin

Concerned that Howard Spinks' comments portended site censorship and forced editorial control over the sites run by Jelsoft's customers, I attempted to contact Mr. Spinks and Jelsoft to ask them what their intentions are in this arena. Spinks refused to reply to messages sent to the contact address listed on the Pirate Reports Web site, but Jelsoft responded immediately with a canned response copy-and-pasted from at least one vBulletin support forum thread topic on the matter:

Please note that we are not going to discuss the hongfire.com situation at this time. There is much more to this than you know and what hongfire.com is claiming and this issue is not open for public discussion at this time. When and if we have a public response we'll will post it publicly on our forums. Thank you for your understanding. :)

The issue, however, was not with a specific site or its content, but with the possibility that vBulletin customers might have to edit or censor their Web sites in accordance with the whims of Pirate Reports and Jelsoft employees, their friends and family members, business associates, etc. If it is acceptable to revoke a vBulletin license for one site because of its content, then it becomes much easier to turn this one exception into a regular practice. What starts out as a license revocation for sexually suggestive cartoons may become license revocations for atheists, civil libertarians, gay people, abortion supporters, black people, women, or any individual whom Jelsoft's extended family might disagree with, dislike, or would otherwise silence. In the interest of clarifying Jelsoft's licensing policies regarding site censorship, I pressed further and got in touch with business manager Ashley Busby.

If a vBulletin customer prints or publishes information that you, a Jelsoft employee or owner, or a Pirate Reports agent finds objectionable or offensive, is cancelling this customer's vBulletin license a standard response? If not, is it a valid response from your frame of reference?

Ashley Busby: I am sure that you are aware that there are many vBulletin forums with varied content; indeed you have your own vBulletin forum. We do not police content.

Have customers complained about vBulletin licensing terms in the past? If so, what seems to upset them most? Could the vBulletin license, as currently worded, give Jelsoft the ability or the right to censor its customers' forums or Web sites?

AB:Our license agreement has not been a cause for complaint and it clearly points out that we are not responsible for the content of any messages posted on a vBulletin forum. We deal with many queries and in all cases, we aim to maintain our high standard of customer service. It would be misleading to suggest that these levels are met in every instance, but the intention is always for the best and your concerns about your license should be laid to rest.

Living on a thin line

It is possible that when Howard Spinks reportedly said, "having seen the content of your forum and some of the depraved comments that obviously it is time for you to moderate the forum to avoid a likely revocation of license," he was referring to something else. Perhaps an illegal copy of vBulletin was being distributed as an attachment in a forum post. This could be one of the background issues that the initial Jelsoft representative alluded to. That does not match up with this Digg comment from someone named "PirateReports" that speaks in the first person about dealing with this situation. The post claims the issue is primarily about removing content that has been judged "not normal" per an Acceptable Use Policy that does not appear to exist. Whether the content is illegal or not is not for Howard Spinks or his company to determine, and it is certainly not for him to enforce. By what right does he act as an Internet cop in this instance, if a so-called "pirated" version of vBulletin is not the root of the problem?

So Jelsoft does not in fact police customer content according to a manager at the company. That suggests that Howard Spinks, if the quoted email text and the Digg comment post were indeed authored and sent by him, was either badly mistaken or grossly out of line. Not long after Ashley Busby replied to my questions, I noticed that the supposedly objectionable site had come back online with a message stating that Jelsoft had decided not to revoke that customer's license. There may well have been other, less visible issues relating to license violations that were amicably resolved behind the scenes, but since no one will talk about it, there's no way to know. One wonders, however, what would have happened if there had not been a post about this on Digg, and so many people had not questioned Jelsoft's licensing and customer service policies. Would the outcome have been the same? After all, other companies do police customer content according to their own puritanical beliefs, so the issue is not new or unusual. If you do a Google search on "acceptable use policy" you'll find a lot of ridiculously restrictive rules for a wide variety of services.

In any case, the software options for top-tier forum packages are limited and for the time being vBulletin is the king of the hill. Hopefully this was a grievous error that will never be repeated, and not the start of a horrid licensing problem that will come back to bite all vBulletin customers in the future.

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Copyright 2006 Jem Matzan.