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Interview with John Percival, creator of vBulletin
(Click here to view the original thread with full colors/images)
Posted by: OTS Staff
<b><font color="#FFFFCC">EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH JOHN PERCIVAL</font></b>
<i>Original Creator and Head Developer of vBulletin
<font size="1">Conducted on June 9, 2001</font></i>
OTS: Tell us your background. Who are you and what do you do?
John Percival: I am John Percival. I have worked with Jelsoft for about 4 years now - I came on board about a year after Jelsoft was started by James Limm. Initially, I got involved because of my interest in Visual Basic, and back then Jelsoft was running the VB World website and selling a few Shareware products. VB World grew incredibly, and we soon moved onto bigger and better servers to handle the added traffic, particularly in the discussion forums, which have now grown into the vibrant community that spawned vBulletin, just over a year ago.
In my pre-Jelsoft years, I had dabbled a little with BBC Basic (my first computer), various other forms of BASIC, and also a little Z80 assembly.
At Jelsoft, I was introduced to the internet, to Perl, and finally to PHP, which I instantly fell in love with. The rest, as they say, is history!
OTS: Tell us a little history of vBulletin, like what made you decide to create it and what factors led to the creation of this forum script?
JP: I'll try my best not to stand on anyone else's toes here!
In June of 1999, I wrote my first major PHP application, which was the content manager system that runs behind VB World (and still does for that matter!). It came around to Febuary 2000, and VB World was getting busier than ever - the decision was made to write some new forums software in PHP, based on MySQL, with the idea of closer integration between the VB World site and the forums.
And so vBulletin was born, on 18th of Febuary 2000, I began work on these forums. Drawing on the concepts and ideas that I had gained from my work in creating the VB World content manager, I started from scratch to create something bigger and better then we had seen before. The forum was deployed onto VB World a few weeks later, and since then we have not looked back. The new software was soon noticed by various people who were into the 'bulletin boards' community, and they urged us to further develop vBulletin and release it. And so we did, and on 18th April 2000, the first version of vBulletin was released.
OTS: What do you think makes vBulletin better than the competition?
JP: One thing that I have learnt from this very competitive industry is that you can never be everything to everyone. However, we have tried our hardest to include as many people as possible by having an option or setting for almost everything, and also complete HTML templates covering every last little piece of HTML that the user sees. So I think that is the first main advantage of vBulletin - its customisability (what a word!). Many people are happy just changing the images, fonts and header/footer, but if that does not satisfy them, they have the option to edit the templates, and even create their own custom templates.
The main reason that vBulletin has so many options is the number of features that we support: speedy search engine, comprehensive private messaging (verging on an email client  ), user control panel, moderator's control panel, user group based permissions, to name just a select few. The user group permissions have been found to be a great plus for some people - private forums are simple to create, and you can control exactly what a user can and cannot do, on a per forum level. Since you can also create subforums (and sub-subforums, up to an infinite depth), these permissions are inherited from parent forums. I mentioned the moderator's control panel earlier - I'll expand a little on that now: it is a small area, separated from the main forums where moderators can go and exercise limited administrative duties. Things such as banning troublesome users, validating posts before they appear in the main forums, make announcements, and that sort of thing. The moderators, of course, are limited to what the administrator has let them do - these permissions are set up in a similar way to the user groups, and cover a similar amount of depth.
The other thing that people like about vBulletin is the speed. We have optimised the default vBulletin templates so that they are fully HTML 4.01 compatible, ensuring that they will render as well as possible in all 3rd generation browsers and later. We also apply built in page compression that allows a 90kB HTML page to be compressed to about 20-30% of that size. This is all done without the end user knowing anything, and will only be used if the user's browser can support it. This lowers the bandwidth cost for the webmaster, and speeds up the page loading for the end users: a win-win situation. vBulletin has also shown itself to be very scaleable, limited mainly by MySQL ability to lock and update tables. Webmasters have quite happily run with 600 users online on fairly run-of-the-mill hardware, and there are boards around in excess of 1 million posts - one has even recently broken the 2 million post marker. This is due to the fact that PHP and MySQL provide a very robust and scaleable base on which to build vBulletin. We also employ caching techniques, and regularly profile our SQL queries to look for possible optimisations.
vBulletin also has a very large friendly community surrounding it, which is always available to provide suggestions and answers to tricky support issues, and configuration questions. In addition to this community, Jelsoft also runs a ticket based online support for those issues that cannot be solved in the community. This is included free with the product, and we will happily log on to people's server to fix problems.
The vBulletin community forum has been the key part of our development of the product: it provides us with a place to get true feedback on what people like and dislike in what we are doing. We can listen to what they want and implement that, and correct things quickly when they go wrong. That is why we now have some many comprehansive features and excellent performance, because that is what our users asked for.
OTS: How hard is it to develop a script like this?
JP: To create a forum script on its own is no big deal - all you need is a way of displaying messages, and a way to post new messages. This is shown by the huge number of message scripts that pop up every day - many of them following our lead of using MySQL and PHP.
However vBulletin is much more than that - it is a complete community solution, packaged in such a way that almost any web-savvy administrator can install is and any web-novice can pick up how it works. We see a new forum script almost every week, but very few of them can boast the depth of features, level of optimisation, and corporate backing and support that we can.
In short, to create a forum script is easy. To create a forum script like vBulletin requires 1000's of developer hours, much experience with using databases in a real-world environment, and a stable company to support the product once it has been released.
OTS: What do you think about the other forum scripts that are available out there? Do you sometimes wish you had a feature on your forum that is visible on theirs?
JP: While we are aware that there are a lot of other bulletin board programs available, we don't evaluate other products for new ideas or features - we have plenty of ideas on our own! Most new concepts are suggested by our users. We will then take each idea through the usual development procedure, until we are ready to start coding!
OTS: What do you think of vBulletin's script-hacking community. Do they significantly help you improve your script?
JP: The script-hacking community, in many ways, is what makes vBulletin so popular. If the feature x is not available in the main vBulletin code, then you can go to the community and enquire whether a hack exists, and whether one can be made. Many of the best features in vBulletin are based on the concepts created by hacks and hackers in the past. We will usually rewrite the code so that it fits and integrates well with the rest of vBulletin.
We thought that we might inadvertantly squash the hacking community with our recent release of vBulletin version 2.0 which includes many of the most popular hacks for vBullein 1.1, but they have still found many ingenious ideas and hacks to write. We actively encourage users to make the most of the opportunities for hacking, since we do provide them with the source code, they had might as well use it to its full potential.
OTS: Will you be sticking with the current programming architecture of your forum script, or have you got something big planned for it? If so, how about giving us a hint?
JP: The current base code for vBulletin has just been rewritten for version 2.0, so we are unlikely to change this significantly in the near future. In the longer term, we will be considering widening vBulletin into a complete website and community solution - flashes of online web mail integrated with content publishing, integrated with chat, integrated with forums appear in my head when I think a few years away, but the internet is still changing so fast at the moment that it is hard to tell.
OTS: What part of vBulletin would you have re-done or improved if you had the chance to do it all over again? Are you planning any further enhancements and/or improvements for the current version of vBulletin?
JP: Ah, hindsight, such a great thing! If you had asked me this 6 months ago, I would have had a field day - vBulletin 1.1 was not particularly optimised, and we made some huge gains in vBulletin 2.0 . At the moment, it is the template system that is bugging us a bit - we are looking to simplify it so that it is easier to use, while making it more powerful. We are also looking to fill out our existing features, and add in some new ones for the upcoming vBulletin 2.1, while also improving performance even more.
OTS: What do you do in your spare time, if you have any?
JP: What is spare time? Haha, only joking!
When I'm not coding vBulletin or answering support questions, I like to get out of the office for a cycle around the local woods to keep myself fit - and to prevent the onset of "coder's waistline"  Having said that, there's nothing that I enjoy more on a Sunday afternoon than to sit down and enjoy watching a good Formula 1 Grand Prix.
OTS: If you were asked to describe your forum script in one sentence, what would it be?
JP: Hmm, that's a tricky one...
vBulletin is a scalable and fully customisable forums and community solution for your website.
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Many thanks to John Percival and the Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd for this interview.
Visit Vbulletin.Com for more information on their great forum script.
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