Anything? I went through a lot of time and hassle to work with you guys on this even setting up your own dedicated webspace/site with full host access. I know you had this big easy social project but I was assured from the beginning that EasyDiscuss was being actively developed and I put other options on hold to work with you guys in addition to the time and money I've invested.
I've been hearing about EasyDiscuss 3.2 since before I purchased from you guys but it has yet to materialize. Originally I was given a month estimate and that was many months ago. It all sounds even better if I could finally get rid of JomSocial but I'm afraid of this being more of the same and I still can't do what I wanted from the beginning which was to get EasyDiscuss working on my site with all of the data migrated.

Boy you sound frustrated I would to, but this situation sounds very familiar to me.....
Started 13 dec ?
Thing is, what you ask is that they spend time on a development that cost time and money. Import export isnt usually a big thing, but over 400.000 posts is gonna be a big headache.

Personally i would suggest you find a programmer who can fix it. And your probably thinking about what it costs. Thing is, you are probably the only serious user who wants this. If there were more, then you could all pay a few $$ and your done..

I didn't ask for this. I only got into this after other users were told that it was being developed. I would not have wasted my time or energies on it otherwise. I'm a paying customer who asked pre-sale questions and got assurances. Then after purchase got further assurances. I've wasted SO MUCH time on this. My time is worth way more than what I've spent to date. A 100% refund would not cover even a fraction of it.

Well it doesnt help much but this is how things can go. It happend to me to some years ago. I was angry but couldnt be pissed at anyone cause it was my choice. Sometimes we follow things and it can go 2 ways, the right was....and were happy...or the wrong way and getting frustrated all the way.

What i would do is contact Mark at: https://crm.stackideas.com (helpdesk) and talk about this and see what can be done.
Funny thing is, when so much time and effort is invested in a solution, it would be stupid to quit before the finish...

If you look back on this thread a vBulletin importer was promised v3.2 on more than one occasion. I purchased the product on the assumption the importer would be in the next version. Babylon...no one here asked for your 2 cents worth and there are many people that were looking for this importer. I have a forum with over 600,000 posts and 100,000+ members and was going to use this product based on the promises made.

I was going to renew and buy all products...but when you I get told something was going to happen and did not,...you lost my business and someone that would have been a loyal customer. In the future you should not make promises you are not going to keep...very bad for business and referrals for your products...because if someone asked me about your goods at this point, what I would tell them would not be pretty.

no one here asked for your 2 cents worth

Well thats the best about forums isnt it?
Anyone can reply.

there are many people that were looking for this importer

Where are they?
And why didnt you all join and come up with the $$ so you can let a programmer do the job?
You even get a cheap one from different countries...

Thing is, you are basically forcing this upon stackideas ,but if they manage to get it done it probably will when they have time..
If you look at current developments i wouldnt be surprised if they dont have any time left...

So its not smart, all who wants it should pay for it and your done....could be done in a week..

if you actually read the thread, you'll see that it was already suggested very early on by one of the interested parties to hire a programmer. Stackideas didn't like the idea and said they'd do it. I've been doing development for a long time. Any legitimate forum option has migrators and certainly any commercial forum software will have migrators. It is part of doing business and it is more in the interest of the developer than any single customer to have migrators. vBulletin has a couple dozen migrators. SMF (Free) also has multiple. Xenforo has migrators etc.

Even when I was invited to give input on the as yet not developed, easy social, I expressed my concern that they would not back burner development on the other products, while they launched the sexy new product and was told that they would not.

Honestly I don't see the point of your input here other than to cause problems or shill. You're adding nothing professional to this discussion.

Well...you may not like the reply.....or any reply at all. But nobody is obligated to do anything....simple said...converters dont make money.....cant believe you all waiting for almost a year....jeez..

converters do make money because it enables customers to transition from another solution. This is why the big money forums such as vbullentin have so many. pretty much every issue you have raised here has been refuted with facts and logic. What again is your purpose posting here? A philosophical debate? If you are all Zen that is great for you. But I'll pass on the Dianetics indoctrination. No sale here.

A business owner that does not keep promises made in public does not make money either and you are not helping this company out other than bringing it down further. Mark, you made this promise and you should keep it by hiring someone to do what you said would be in the next version. Do yourself a favor in the meantime, keep this Babylon idiot off your forums!

Also the statement that converters do not make money is farthest from the truth. EasyDiscuss has the potential to be the best forum software out there. Converters would sky rocket your subscriber base over time by allowing people like myself and Paul to convert from the big player to your platform. In forum software, the absence of converters for the major platforms...EasyDiscuss will go the way of the Titanic. vBulletin, PHPBB and IBP are huge and EasyDiscuss has the potential to be the biggest and the best of them all.

babylon wrote:
converters dont make money.....cant believe you all waiting for almost a year....jeez..

Hey guys,

Relax, there's no flaming necessary here. EasyDiscuss 3.2 which is currently at beta already has a migrator for vBulletin. I do apologize for the delays as something else came up along the way. In fact there's quite a bit of stuff that came along the way that delayed the 3.2 release. We will definitely work on something to compensate these delays.

@ ross, i never called you any names so lets keep this professional. This is a open forum where everybody can reply to thatever topic. In my opinion your just manipulative. Fact is that your flaming towards the owner to get what you want for free. And business or not, if thats something you understand you should know that development can be put aside when other things are more important.

What happens now is, that when the converter is released everybody will expect that it will be updated, supported, Who's gonna give the proper support when converting,importing fails? There are so many issues...But thats something you dont care about,as long as you get what you want

But vBulletin is commercial, and although they offer these conversions, imports...,its not well supported, looking at the errors people have...And when things fail the demanding starts...

The vBulletin forum shows that whtever converter people need, it doesnt always work. Then support is required...which means your pulling the support from areas that needs to focus on the main stackideas products.

vBulletin WAS a great product. It was the premier software for forums run on the largest forums. The company was sold and the new ownership has ruined it. It has a ton of overhead and the templating /style is ridiculous. In trying to make vbulletin into a CMS they lost the greatness of the robust, stable and secure, core forum. Some of the main developers left and started a new company Xenforo. Xenforo has a better future IMHO than vbulletin but still has a much smaller base and has a small development team. They are also talking about doing a Xenforo CMS which likewise would be a mistake. If I had to start from scratch, I'd go with Xenforo over vbulletin but currently I have multiple vbulletin licenses that I've purchased over the years and a lot of custom development invested.

That said, what attracted me to EasyDiscuss was the seamless integration with Joomla and JomSocial. What got me to actually take it seriously however was that they actually responded to support requests and had an active and professionally run forum. Then when Mark started talking about an alternative to Jomsocial it sounded like the best of all worlds for me who has multiple sites running joomla and jomsocial.

Having run a software team for 10+ years and been a part of the leadership and founders of several software startups, the lesson from above and in my own experience is that one of the greatest temptations as a developer is to try to do too many things. Once you do that inevitably, the things that led to your early success suffer and you end up either failing or supporting a product(s) that you no longer believe in because you've compromised so much over time trying to pursue the latest and greatest new thing instead of taking care of your core business. I hope that Stackideas does not create any more products and just focuses on supporting the 4 that could potentially be the best commercial components for Joomla. They are already great but that can and will change quickly. MyBlog was great too. Jomsocial was great at least in relative terms. Those who do not learn from the mistakes of the past are doomed to repeat them. I've done it myself, too many times. It takes a lot of maturity and restraint to do things right and achieve lasting excellence. When Steve Jobs returned to Apple which was just about dead and many had already assumed they were going out of business, he reduced their product line from 350 products to 10. They are now in the top 2 highest capitalized companies in the world. Not based upon building more products but as Steve said in his own words, allow his A-Team to focus on a small core of products and focus on their excellence.

Thanks for this awesome write up Paul We wouldn't be developing anymore extensions (as far as I know) and we will only be maintaining our main 4 giants

I wish I read this thread before considering EasyDiscuss as a possible alternative to replace my Vbulletin forum. The potential for a forum that syncs and integrate with a social group and a blog is enormous but it doesn't appear EadyDiscuss is ready..yet

Hello Philip,

Sorry to hear that. Perhaps, you can list out the potential integration between forum and social group in our voice page here: http://www.stackideas.com/voices/easydiscuss so that our developers will consider that to be included in the next major release of Easydiscuss.