Hello vBSEO Friends and Customers, we are happy to announce that vBSEO 3.6.0 Gold is now Gold and is available to all licensed users for installation on production servers with full support. You may download vBSEO 3.6 now from the downloads area for any active license.

Featuring the Likes Tree, updated Social Bookmarking System, Universal CDN Integration + MaxCDN Promo!

NOTE: Please read this announcement completely and carefully, as there are certain restrictions, changes to rules, and other important items that you should know about before jumping into 3.6. Pay special attention to the *Important* flag.

vBSEO 3.6.0 Gold Highlights

1. A full featured “Likes” system: A “Social Graph” for your community
The long-awaited Likes Tree integration is now available! Made popular by Facebook, and now making its way to forums and social web applications everywhere, the “Likes” system allows your users to effortlessly provide feedback to one another on the content they find most useful. Most importantly, this activity creates an underlying layer of data that works as a “Social Graph” for your community, opening the doors to a myriad of USEFUL features that have the potential to alter the way we interact with forums in different ways. One of them is enabling people to find the site’s most useful content more efficiently (see our “Likes Tree” feature below). Another powerful use for this data is the ability to surface the most popular and/or relevant content for search engines, be it via Search Engine Friendly pages that list this content, or by using it as priority multipliers for your Search Engine XML sitemaps (coming in vBSEO Search Engine XML Sitemaps 3.1).

2. The vBSEO “Likes Tree”: Redefining the way people interact with forums
It gives you (and your users) an instant “birds-eye-view” of the “Likes” distribution in a thread, allowing you to *quickly* identify the most useful/important content, no matter how long the conversation is. This new feature represents a new paradigm as it allows people to extract more value out of forums in less time.

3. Updated Social Bookmarking and Sharing system
The vBSEO Bookmarks system has been highly improved. It now appears as a pop-out link in the post bit to save space and better fit the postbit layout.

Important: With this update, the format for custom urls for your Social Bookmarking Icons has been modified. CURRENT CUSTOM ENTRIES WILL NOT BE CONVERTED. You will need to manually edit any custom rules.

Old Format:
Bookmark URL,Icon URL,”Bookmark Thread” Text,”Bookmark Post” Text

New Format:
Bookmark URL,Icon URL,”Bookmark Thread” Text,”Bookmark Post” Text,”Bookmark article” Text

See this post for more information on what formats to use.

4. CDN integration and MaxCDN Promo! – Faster Sites = Better SEO
Now for the first time ever, it is easy to set up your vBSEO-powered vBulletin forum to work with a CDN. Search Engines will love you and your users will love you too. It has been proven that sites that load FASTER, rank HIGHER. vBSEO has partnered with MaxCDN to bring faster load speeds to our clients. *New licenses* will receive an account at MaxCDN, valid for 1TB of bandwidth or 1 year of usage (whichever comes first). The package is valued at $39.95 and is being made available for FREE to vBSEO users who *purchase* a new license or *renew* an existing license (limited to ONE 1TB account per-customer). vBSEO 3.6.0 now features an easy (Universal) CDN integration via our dashboard settings panel.

Important: Certain restrictions Apply. Please read the following carefully.

1. 1 trial account per customer, regardless of how many licenses you have. You may use a single account for multiple sites though.
2. Details on how to claim your MaxCDN account will be presented to you at time of your FIRST purchase after this promotion goes into effect on your confirmation page. Print or write them down.
3. Important: You must follow the steps AT TIME OF ORDER ONLY. No exceptions.
4. Important: Staff cannot assist you with your MaxCDN account creation if you forgot to do it, or did it incorrectly. Your account will be marked as a CDN account holder and, any other new order will NOT invoke the promotional item again. Please do not open any tickets about this, as there is absolutely nothing we can do to change this. It is one-time, at time of order, only. If you get stuck or have problems, leave your purchase confirmation window open, launch a new tab/window in your browser to open a ticket/thread with any questions you may have BEFORE closing your order confirmation page.
5. Important: MaxCDN is a subscription-based product which has it’s own billing system outside of the vBSEO ordering system. You will be prompted to enter a credit/debit card, or PayPal* account to put on file with MaxCDN. Credit/Debit card users will NOT be billed. PayPal Customers will be charged $0.99 to cover the PayPal minimum transaction amount.
6. *NOTE: The PayPal payment option will not be available until mid-day Monday, 3/14/2011.
7. If you do not agree to these terms, you are not required to participate and can simply navigate away from the order confirmation page. If you accept these terms, please be aware that after your 1TB of bandwidth is used, or 1 year of service (which ever comes first), you will be billed by MaxCDN based on this payment information per their terms of service at their current regular prices at time of billing. If you do not wish to be billed, you may cancel your CDN service at any time before your 1 year or 1TB of transfer is used up. MaxCDN will contact you previous to the expiry of your PROMO period indicating when it’s going to expire, allowing you enough time to cancel the service shall you desire to do so. All MaxCDN account-related items are available to you in the MaxCDN dashboard: MaxCDN Control Panel.
8. If you are a current MaxCDN customer, you can still take advantage of this free promo item, however, you must make a new account via our ordering portal flow. Your current account will not be converted.
9. Past purchases, including those made just minutes before this announcement, unfortunately do not apply. A new purchase with our back end system in place is required in order to automate the process. You can renew for the future year even if you are not expired to obtain the free promotional item. All future-date renewals apply to the date of expiration, not order date.
10. MaxCDN is solely responsible for the CDN service and their servers. Our support will only offer help on problems with integration of the service in their vBSEO CP. Any technical issues with the CDN itself should be brought to the attention of MaxCDN through their authorized support channels.

The Free MaxCDN account promotion may be offered for a limited time only and is subject to termination without notice.

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Here is some info from vBSEO along with a couple screenshots.

When we first introduced the Likes Tree concept a few weeks ago, it was a vision, a dream… something that seemed cool, and perhaps useful for those seeking to browse threads more efficiently.

The title of the original thread was: The “Likes Tree”, finding a forum’s most useful content will change forever…. and, although I do agree this title is accurate today, I was in for a surprise to the feature’s TRUE *usefulness*.

In a nutshell, I believe this feature will REDEFINE the way people interact with forums. It has done that for me, and I’m happy to announce that as of right now, all vBSEO.com users will be able to experience it for themselves!

While conducting our initial tests (admins have had the feature enabled for a few days now) we quickly realized the underlying data was SO powerful, that it would be a waste not to put it to work in areas other than enabling the discovery of a thread’s most meaningful content. That is the long way of saying that some really powerful stuff is coming from vBSEO, and the “Likes Tree” is *only* the first of those features. SEO is at the core of these enhancements, and that’s why this feature is 100% relevant to vBSEO.

The *first embodiment* of the “Likes Tree” now includes filters that enable users to:

1. Find a thread’s “Top” liked posts in chronological order
2. Find “All” liked posts in a thread, by author, i.e. the “Likes Distribution” of a thread
3. Find the distribution of likes within “This Page” (a singe page of a thread)

The final implementation is quite different to the original iteration, due to both, technical limitations and performance considerations, as well as a number of *extra values* that became obvious to us during the initial testing phase.

Below two screenshots, the first is for the initial feature as spec’d:

… and here is the final implementation, after a number of closed dev iterations:

This is still in the early beta stages, but vBSEO has announced they release it to the pre-release team, so I’ve applied for that and hopefully it’ll be running on General Forums soon!

If you’re a vBSEO customer is this something you’ll enable on your forum? If you’re not than is this something that would help convince to you that vBSEO is a quality product and a vBulletin forum shouldn’t be started with out it?

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Miko Magni started vBStyles.com late 2003 after designing skins for UBB (Perl) forums. VBStyles quickly grew and gained an exceptional reputation for quality coding and design services. Today vBStyles is listed number one in Google for the top keywords; vbsetup, vbulletin styles, vbulletin skins.

Miko has since sold vBStyles and is on to bigger and better things. He now runs ThemesInc.com which can be used to display several frameworks and not limited to vBulletin like vBStyles was.

He is currently working on the newly released forum script called xenForo. The script is still in the early beta stages so there hasn’t been a lot of time yet for anyone to play with the layout much. From what I’ve read on their official support forums, this is going to be a “modern forum”. It’s been named as the vBulletin Killer, I think there is room for everyone but only time will tell.

Here is a quote from Miko “We are working hard to produce the most sophisticated skins you are likely to see for XenForo community forum.”

I have no doubt that Miko will build another impressive empire for design enthusiast. I strongly suggest for everyone to bookmark ThemesInc right now, this next year is going to make or break the xenForo community. We will see amazing things coming out of all the eager designers and programmers wanting to say there were part of something great. (Official Facebook page, Twitter profile)

Have you had a chance to play with xenForo yet? I have a few friends that have purchased the script so I’ve been able to see the admin side. What are your thoughts? I know a lot of vBulletin people read this blog, are you thinking about importing your vBulletin forum to xenForo?

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As some of you know, I recently sold a website dedicated to helping vBulletin admins. On that forum I had two sections, one that listed off all the clients I had worked with (that approved to be mentioned) & one that listed several of the testimonials from those clients. At the time of selling that forum I had worked on over 300 vBulletin sites. This was over a 3-year span & many of those admins would need repeat work (vB upgrades, new sites etc..). When I sold the site I built a new “vBulletin Services” page on this blog. Right around that same time that I sold the site, I picked up a great job with the state – I’m still very happy employed and loving it. I knew that I wouldn’t be taking on as many jobs as before, so promoting the services back on this blog wasn’t a priority.

I’m starting to clear up some time and thought I might as well take care of this so I can mark it off my list. I’m going to re-post all the clients I had worked with, a general outline of what I did and a link/screenshot to their site. I’ll setup a category for my clients and testimonials. I also have the option with the current style to display 9 featured client sites. I think it says something about webhosting right now, and you might see the screenshots displayed across the top, those will be changed soon, I’m hoping to have everything transferred over by the end of this next week. I may not end up using this green style you see, I want to have an option to show featured post on the home page, like my IPB vs vBulletin post should be on the front, it was getting a lot of comments, as well as a few others that have a high comment count.

So this is how I’ll continue to build my brand, by showing the work I’ve done and what my clients say about me. In the 3+ years I’ve been doing this, I’ve never had an upset customer with problems that we couldn’t resolve. Usually it’s a communication error, and that’s one of the reasons I like to talk on the phone with clients, but I request all site requirements done via email. That way I have a solid copy and know exactly what a client wants. It’s best to be clear and concise and keep good documentation of the work at hand.

In short, all my subscribers will get a few updates with a dozen or so post it in, I’ll try to get through them as fast as possible so it’s not so annoying for the subscribers.

Thanks as always for all the support!

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I couldn’t stay away from the backend of a vBulletin forum for long. With the vBulletin Services that I offer, it’s very helpful to have a site setup to tweak  settings. The dev server wasn’t cutting it and I’m not really fond of vBulletin 4.0.

I’ve always said I wouldn’t start a vBulletin forum without vBSEO, so when a pair came up for sale at a decent price, I had to snag them up. So now I had the script, now what type of forum should I run? Well I’m not interested in another webmaster type forum, I’ve thought about starting several different niche forums but I defiantly don’t have time to manage all that, so I’ve decided to try a “general forums” type forum. Finally it was on to search for a domain; I scanned all over the webmaster forums trying to find a short brand-able .com but wasn’t having any luck. The domain I found has a hyphen it in which I’ve never been fond of, but I think I found a pretty good one considering the site I’ll be running.

I picked up www.General-Forums.com from godaddy.

My plans for this forum are to actually merge several smaller forums into it. I’ve already picked up a small database that has been imported. I’ve put a few bids down on some at digitalpoint, if you know of a quality (no warez or spam) database and/or site, please contact me and send me a link to the auction page.

I’ve been blessed enough that a few people that saw me tweeting about this have offered to help out! I truly have great friends and appreciate every one of you!! If you would like to help than what I would suggest is to register on the forum and shoot me a PM or email and I’ll set you up in the contributors group so you can see the forums as we piece together all the databases.

Once I have a good selection of forums & content put together (shooting for 500K post) and well organized, I’ll open everything up for spiders, guest, and open up public posting for registered users. I’ll than put together an email newsletter to blast out to all the members of the forum. This will be a reminder for everyone across what may be upwards of 20+ sites/databases.

I’m looking forward to seeing this site grow as much as you are.

Do you think it’s wise to start general forums? Would you ever start a forum on such a broad range of topics?

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What are your thoughts on the new 4.x series so far? I like the forums; I think they could use some fine tuning. I haven’t tested the blogs but from the quick glance it didn’t seem like they changed much. I don’t really care for the new vBCMS. I don’t like the fact that you can’t place your CMS in the root and forums in a subfolder. It just seems rough around the edges but what better what to get feedback than to release the product to the masses if it works like advertised or not.

I’ve been playing around with IP.Content on IPBSetup.com and it isn’t sold as a CMS, but you can make one with it pretty easily. That’s what I’m using on the home page, and here is a demo page I had made a few days before testing things out. Right now I’m just using a free CSS template I found on google, but you can see I’m able to add blocks (like the recent post feed on the right hand side of the home page) I can make database pages to, I need to play around with it, but I like that you can just past HTML into an editor and make a page. This is another thing the new vBulletin CMS is lacking.

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If you know anything about me, you’ll know that I ran a vBulletin powered forum for many years and just recently sold it. I’ll try to outline a few of the reasons why I “switched to the dark side” and setup an Invision Powered Services forum. The number one reason I would have even considered sticking with vBulletin is the vBSEO product. IPB does have SEO mods but they just don’t seem to match up to the power that vBSEO brings to the vBulletin platform. With that being said, I made a thread on the IPB support forums titled “How to SEO our IPB forum” I’ve picked up a few tips which I’ve implemented on my IPBSetup forum, but there has to be a few more options I haven’t found yet.

I didn’t have a problem at first with the buyout of Jelsoft to internet brands, but after seeing all the old developers leave and the drastic changes that have taken place; I see why people were getting so upset over it. I like how Invision actually uses their CMS for their homepage, vBulletin just has some generic html pages up which do look good, but it’s not showcasing the ability of their suit when they are pushing hard for sales. I had a chance to do some early beta testing on vBulletin and boy did it have a lot of bugs. I know it was in beta but I would of thought some of the major issues would be been fixed in development, it seems they just want to push something out and make it appear as if they care about the end forum user. I think they are really just interested in their own network (iNet) but I could be wrong and I hope I am because I still have a lot of friends that use vBulletin for their forums.

One thing I really like about IPB and wish vBulletin would consider adding this to their lineup is the search box in the admin control panel of IPB. You know how on yahoo if you start typing something you’ll get a dropdown box with suggestions? You’ll find the same thing in the IPB admincp area; it’s been very helpful for me since I don’t know my way around IPB yet.

I don’t think it will be long and IPB will be the #1 forum software for professionals, especially the way iNET is running Jelsoft. I do wish everyone the best, I still love vBulletin but IPB is climbing up with every chance I get to mess around and figure things out. My next big purchase is going to be IP.Content and I’ll have a tightly integrated CMS that will match my forum. This is something I had always wanted from vBulletin and even with the new vBCMS, it just doesn’t fulfill my needs like IP.Content will.

What are some things you like about vBulletin over IPB or IPB over vBulletin? I look forward to your comments. This is a dofollow blog, so search engines will spider your links.

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I’m not leaving the forum scene all together; I had purchased IPBHelp a few months back when I was thinking about expanding my services to IPB. I got a job with the state shortly after I purchased that license and URL and didn’t really have time for it. I still don’t have a lot of time, but enough to tinker around with it once a week. I’ve already added a WordPressMU to the root as well as IP.Converge which will allow users to login to the forum and their blogs with the same login (email & pass). I don’t have it working 100% yet, but it shouldn’t take me much longer. I’ll always love vBulletin, but doubt I’ll ever own another vBulletin license unless I win the lotto and free up all my time, which I don’t even play so that’s not likely..lol

Everything else is going great; Leo is crawling and getting close to walking. I’ve been busy “baby proofing” the house because Leo likes to open the cabinets and any drawer he can reach. He is finally sleeping through the night which is AWESOME! It only took him 7 month but his mother and I are very grateful for the added hours of sleep.

Well that’s a short update of what’s going on, I plan to post a disc golf blog post at some point, so that will probably be the next update you see on this blog.

Have a good one everyone, and thanks for reading this blog post. Please Retweet it (if you’re on Twitter) or share the link with your friends. Word of mouth is the best form of advertising.

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Anyways.. Life has been good for me, Alissa and I are getting the house cleaned up to get ready to show/sell. We are looking for a house with more room and a bit newer then the one we are currently in. School is cruising along fine, I’m still passing and looking forward to spring break! We are working with cisco switches, it’s pretty interested stuff, at least for me it is.

What have I been working on ? The end of last year I got a call from a past client in Cali asking me if I wanted to fly over for some website meetings.. Of course I said yes! It was awesome and warm! I think I’ll be going back sometime, this time with Alissa. I’m currently the head Marketing Coordinator for the Crowdgather network.. I’ll let you know more about what crowdgather is when we official go public. All I can say is this.. Currently I’m in charge of 20 forums and I have to make sure they are optimized for search engines, as well as monetize all the forums so my boss can start making some money. We haven’t added ad’s on many forum yet, I’ve just been working on getting the site optimized and posting some links around the web back to it.

With that said, the vBulletin Services work that I was doing during the week, I don’t have near the time for.. I’ve created a vBulletin team that is composed of about 20 vbulletin programmers and designers that I’ve been pushing the work off on to.. It’s worked out for everyone because I asked that the vb team help on the forums, especially if they are making money off vBulletin Setup.

Other then that, hasn’t been to much going on. I’ll try to update this more often now that I have the magazine style template setup.

cheers
-Brandon