Community | Forum Insider: Community | Forum Insider -> Interview with vBulletin's Kevin Sours and Don Kuramura

I'm pleased to say we've now got our first interview with members of the vBulletin team. Thanks to our contact with Joe from Internet Brands, we've got an interview with Kevin Sours, lead vBulletin developer, and Don Kuramura, vBulletin's Director of Product Management.

Here's what they had to say:

Answers to the first three questions come from Kevin Sours, lead vBulletin developer.

Can you tell us a little about your background, and what you’re interested in outside work?
I’m interested in the usual computer geek stuff -- computer games, board games, reading, RPGs. I also like getting out to hike or ride my bike.

How did you first get involved with forum software?
I've been a regular poster to a vBulletin community since 2002. I worked on vBulletin sites a great deal as a developer in Internet Brands’ travel group, which is where I worked before transitioning to the vBulletin team. When the opportunity came up to work on vBulletin full-time, I was thrilled.

What in particular interests you about forum software?
I like that forum software truly connects people. I know people around the world who I will never get to meet physically. It’s pretty amazing.


Answers to the remaining questions come from Don Kuramura, Director of Product Management at vBulletin.

What would you say is the most commonly requested feature by your users in 2009? and what do you expect it might be in 2010?
Throughout 2009, our customers consistently asked for some sort of content management system to enhance their sites. We found that our customers were very satisfied with our forum software, which had enabled many to establishing thriving websites. But many wanted to take their sites to the next level, with a proper front page and other fully built-out, integrated content features. This resulted in the vBulletin CMS that we built from scratch and introduced last month in vBulletin 4.0 Publishing Suite. We’ve heard great feedback on the CMS from our customers.

In 2010, I think we’ll hear louder requests for a Facebook Connect/Open ID feature, as well as custom content-types and photo galleries. We’re working on all of these features now, and plan to introduce each at some point during the 4.x series in 2010.

What feature or features added in your most recent release are you most excited by?
Well, I’m very proud of the CMS, which I think turned out very nicely. If I had to choose one individual feature that particularly excites me, it would be the “Promote to Article” functionality we introduced along with the CMS. This feature lets admins surface content by promoting an individual post or thread of posts from a site’s discussion forums directly to the site’s homepage. This allows interesting content that previously might have been buried to be seen by more people. We think content discovery features like this are extremely valuable, as they help organize and showcase the huge amount of content present on most forum sites.

Can you tell us about any upcoming features? Anything you think will particularly interest your users?
Two major things we’re working on is enhanced mobile capability and an activity stream. We plan to make mobile access a major part of vBulletin, and will be making enhancements that will improve the admin and user experiences for those accessing vBulletin sites from mobile devices. The activity stream feature will be similar to Facebook’s news feed – users will be able to see what other users are doing and saying on a vBulletin site. This will not only enhance content discovery, but it will also enhance member discovery, making vBulletin sites even more social than they already are.

Who do you consider to be your biggest competitors at the moment? and is there anything they are doing at the moment that interests you?
I think our major source of competition comes from free and open source software, since customers can easily get basic functionality using free offerings such as phpBB or Drupal. At vBulletin, it’s on us to provide a compelling, innovative product that customers value and are willing to pay for. The competition from free and open source software drives us to continue to innovate at a rapid pace and produce the best software we possibly can for our users.

If you could go back change one thing about forum software before it became the de-facto standard, what would it be?
Forum software is inherently linear and silo-ed, with information contained in a very rigid structure. This limits content discovery, and in turn, knowledge discovery. Perhaps a less linear structure would have allowed forums to become more valuable and seen as true knowledge bases much earlier in the history of the Internet. I think content discovery features like the “Promote to Article” feature in vBulletin 4 are a great step forward, but maybe we could have gotten to this point much sooner if forums as we knew them were much more non-linear in structure from the beginning.

I also think that even after all these years, all types of forum software have only hit the tip of the iceberg in terms of permissions. I think there is a huge opportunity for innovation in content co-creation and community management coupled with next-generation permissions. It’s something we’re hard at work on – stay tuned.


Thank you very much to Kevin and Don for the interview, and to Joe for organising it for us! It's nice to see what the vBulletin team are looking at in their future, and to see that they're not going to be resting on their laurels now that the first 4.x release is out. It's also disproved for me the assumption that the new team don't know much about forums themselves, which is refreshing. Hopefully we'll see some good solid competition for between them and IP.Board once again.

As ever, if you have any questions or comments about this interview, or for the participants, please drop them in the comments below and I'll do my best to make sure they are seen and answered.