Frequently Asked Questions

You can order vBulletin at any time by going here.

We accept PayPal, Credit Card and Wire Transfer.

Once your order has been processed, you will receive an email with your vBulletin customer number and password - this login information will give you access to our online members area, where you will be able to download the software.

You will receive your license information once your sales transaction has been completed. The length of time that it takes your transaction to be completed depends on your method of payment.

When ordering by credit card, some orders need to be manually verified. This process can take up to one business day.

When you order via Paypal, if you have funds available or instant funding source, your purchase should complete shortly. If an eCheck is used, it may take up to 5 business days for the transaction to complete.

Wire Transfers can take up to 4-8 business days to complete.

Please contact our sales team regarding Bulk Purchases: sales@vbulletin.com / 1-877-326-6444

Yes, vB5 demo is currently available. Please visit the main page of our website and click on "Try it".

We do not currently offer any discounted prices for non-profit/charity/academic organizations. We do, however, offer our software at a low and affordable price so that such organizations can easily attain it through purchase.

For vBulletin 5 Connect:

Minimum Requirements: vBulletin is designed to run on every server that has PHP 5.3 or greater and MySQL 5.1.5 or greater installed. You must also have mod_rewrite, URL Rewrite or equivalent and you must upload the included .htaccess to your server.

It is recommended to use PHP 5.4, or later and MySQL 5.5 or later.

For vB4 Forum and vB4 Suite products:

Minimum Requirements: vBulletin is designed to run on every server that has PHP 5.2 or greater and MySQL 4.1.0 or greater installed.

It is recommended to use PHP 5.2.6, or later and MySQL 5.0.19 or later.

The software has been successfully installed on several different flavors of UNIX, as well as Windows 98/NT/2000/XP, and the Mac.

Note: We recommend you contact your hosting provider to verify that they have the correct versions of PHP and MySQL installed. If you administrate your own server, PHP and MySQL are available for free download from PHP.net and MySQL.com.

Also you will need full permissions to the database in order to install and run vBulletin

vBulletin Mobile Suite Requirements

The Mobile Suite applications are compatible with:

vB5

vB4 - 4.1.10+

vB3 - 3.7.5+ (will need to install a plugin that we will provide)

Facebook App Requirements

The Facebook App is currently not compatible with vB5.

In order to implement the Facebook OpenGraph API, your server must also have cURL with SSL support, or openSSL compiled into PHP in order for FB Connect to work. In the second case, cURL is not necessary. If you are having problems with the FB functions in vB, check your phpinfo to see if you have either cURL with SSL support or openSSL. If you have neither, you will need to recompile PHP with that support.

You can read more about this here: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/api

It is very easy to create a new page using our Site Builder. This is a front end admin tool that was created to make managing your pages easy.

Yes. You may access the Site Builder and easily change the layout and add system created modules to your page. Some of these modules include Active Users, Ads, and Videos. You may also add HTML directly to the page with an HTML module, or add PHP using a PHP module. You may also create your own modules which you may add to any of your pages very easily using the Site Builder.

You can easily add your own tabs to existing pages or your own pages using the Site Builder Navigation Bar editor. You may also add submenus to your Navigation tabs using the Navigation Bar editor.

You can easily change your logo using the Site Builder also. The header and footer are easily accessible in the Site Builder and you may easily change your logo or add ads to the header as well as change the links in your footer.

Yes, we have redone our URL structure to make vBulletin SEO Friendly.

Your users will now be able to easily upload several photos at a time and add them to their albums. They will be able to add captions to their photos also.

It will cost $209 to upgrade your vB4 license to a vB5 Connect license. You may upgrade here.

For vB4 licenses purchased on or after 6/1/12 that are upgraded to vBulletin 5 Connect by 12/5/12, there will be an additional $35 discount, for a net upgrade cost of $174.

A 'branding free' license is available at a cost of $169 per license, in addition to the cost of the license itself. Once you have purchased this option, you will have the right to remove all references to vBulletin from the vBulletin design templates. Note this is for one license only and is in addition to the cost of the license. Otherwise, all copyright messages (both in the software code and templates) must be retained and visible. Also, please note that you must retain all copyright notices within the actual product programming code (these notices do not affect any visible vBulletin pages). Note also this does not allow you to rebrand the software with another name. It only allows you to remove the vBulletin copyright information.

The vBulletin branding-free license concerns the removal of visual branding. The branding-free package available from the members' area does not remove comments or variable names within the program code that mention vBulletin.

You may change the logo without purchasing this option.

For complete information, please read the vBulletin license agreement. If you require any further information please contact our sales team.

Yes.

No. You must hold a valid vBulletin license for each individual installation of the software (regardless of whether the two installations are on the same domain name or server). For example, if you wish to install one copy of vBulletin at http://www.yourserver.com/forum1/ and another copy at http://www.yourserver.com/forum2/, you will require two licenses. Please note that the license agreement specifies that you must submit the URL where your vBulletin license(s) are installed (via the online members area). For complete licensing terms and conditions, please click here.

For testing purposes, you are allowed to have a second installation of the software but the test forum must be password protected, and not made available to the general public at any time.

We currently only charge VAT to customers in the United Kingdom.

Our VAT ID is GB975108406, registered to vBulletin Solutions Inc.

Your problem may be caused by a firewall. Temporarily disable any firewall software prior to accessing the Members Area. Then try the download again. Once you have the file, re-enable your firewall. Please contact support if you continue to have issues.

If you wish to speak with a vBulletin sales representative, please call our US toll-free number: +1 877-326-6444. This service is available between the hours of 9am to 5pm Pacific time (GMT-8), Monday to Friday.

Note: In order for us to offer the best level of customer service, the operator will request your name and email address prior to transferring you to a vBulletin representative. Your contact details will be used to send you a summary of your call, and/or any information requested by you during the call. Your email address and telephone number will not be added to any list, or provided to any third-party organization.

You do not need any programming skills with PHP or MySQL to use vBulletin.

If you want to do advanced customizations to the user interface beyond fonts, colors, borders and backgrounds then you will need to know at least basic HTML and CSS techniques.

We do not offer this service. If you need to learn HTML and/or CSS please visit http://www.w3schools.com for tutorials and exercises to learn these.

To be able to post in the support forums you need to be a licensed customer and register for Priority Forum Support. To do this, please visit the Priority Forum Support form.

Enter your email address (the one you used to register on the forums) in one of the boxes. You'll need to have your customer number and password to access that page.

Unlicensed customers can ask questions in the Pre-Sales forum.

The instructions for moving servers are here. If you have further support issues please start a support ticket, or post in our forums with your specific problems.

To alter the contact information assigned to your account, please contact the support team.

After we've verified your request the contact details will be updated.

If you would like us to resend your customer number and password to your registered email address, please visit the lost password page.

If you no longer have access to your registered email address, please contact our sales team with the following information about your order:

1. Your name
2. Registered email address
3. Billing address
4. Payment method
5. Date of purchase
6. Type of license ordered

While we are currently only offering the English version of vBulletin 5 Connect, several other languages will be added to our offer within the coming months.

We do not support importing into vBulletin 5 at this time. However you can import into vBulletin 4.2.0 and then upgrade to 5.0. Our import scripts support: Invision Power Board, SMF, phpBB3, UBB.Threads, and others. To see if your software is supported, contact us.

We will support the CMS in a future version of the vB5 Connect software. We recommend that any site that heavily uses the CMS wait to upgrade until the feature has returned.

You will be able to upgrade to vB5 directly from versions 3.8.7 or 4.2. For versions earlier than these, you should first upgrade to one of these two versions and then upgrade to 5.0

vBulletin will work on any server platform that can support PHP and MySQL - which includes almost all Windows and Unix based operating systems. For complete information about PHP and MySQL, please visit PHP.net and MySQL.com.

At this time vBulletin is only compatible with the MySQL database system.

At the moment we do not offer an Active Server Pages version of vBulletin (for use on NT/IIS servers). If you wish to run vBulletin on a Windows based server, you can download Windows versions of PHP and MySQL from PHP.net and MySQL.com.

vBulletin does not provide a hosted solution at this time - when you purchase a license, you will be able to download the software and install it on any server that meets our system requirements.

For more information about vBulletin hosting options, please visit the community forums.

We recommend that you have at least 100 MB of hosting space to install vBulletin.

With vBulletin there are 2 different types of disk space usage:

Web space - For the PHP scripts and images of vBulletin.

MySQL database space - Which is separate from Web space, and you need to make sure your host gives you enough space in that department.

When you use vBulletin, you have to take into account both web space and MySQL database space. The vBulletin software consists of PHP scripts and image files in the zip file you download. You will need 60 megabytes of space for the files in vB5 Connect.

vBulletin versions 3, 4 and 5 all support PHP version 5.4

Make sure that you're accessing the AdminCP from site/admincp and not site/core/admincp. Also make sure that the Site URL setting under Settings -> Options -> Site Name / URL / Contact Details has /core at the end of it.

Make sure that you have mod_rewrite (Apache) or URL Rewrite (IIS) enabled on your site. Upload the corresponding .htaccess or web.config file found in your upload directory.

If those do not resolve the problem, make sure there are no spaces or hidden characters in your /config.php. These can cause PHP errors that confuse the vBulletin Routers and prevent redirects from happening correctly.

Unfortunately, you will need to find a new hosting provider.

Delete them.

We do not currently support other webservers. Please view the community forums as there may be community supplied solutions to other web server configurations.

You need to access your vBulletin 5 forums from /site and /site/admincp not site/core or site/core/admincp

You can try updating your .htaccess file with the following change: Find - RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php/$1 [L] Change To - RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?/$1 [L]

You will need to find hosting using mod_php.

See the previous two questions.

Javascript is required to use vBulletin 5.

This is by design.

This is by design. The style will adjust to the screen viewport available. Unfortunately on smaller screens this requires fewer interface controls and options.

This is a known issue and we are working to resolve it.

At this time you need to start the process over.

We do not support localization at this time. This will be available in a future release.

This is a known issue and we are working on a fix.

Please make sure the Product System is enabled under Settings -> Options -> Plugins/Hooks.

These are not supported in vBulletin 5.

These are not supported in vBulletin 5.

Paid Subscriptions are not supported in vBulletin 5. They will return in a future version.

The CMS/Article System is not supported in vBulletin 5.0. It will return in a future version. Your articles are being kept safe in a hidden channel and will return when the CMS is released.

The infraction system is not supported in vBulletin 5.0. It will return in a future version.

The FAQ System is not supported in vBulletin 5.0. It will return in a future version.

There is no member's list in vBulletin 5.

Post Icons have been removed.

A number of features in the Admin CP no longer work. These can return error messages. Open a Support Topic or Ticket for further assistance.

No, we do not have a complete list at this time. Please open a forum thread about the feature you're missing and we will help.

The short answer is that you cannot do this. However you can set permissions so that end users cannot see these features. Please open a forum thread for assistance in doing this.

You can't. However you can disable the specific tab, rearrange the tabs and change the default tab. Please see the community forums for assistance.