I don't have a problem purchasing vBulletin modules when they are beneficial to this Community so I would purchase the Blog capability if necessary, the price is certainly inexpensive. I recently visited the vBulletin site to try and catch up on the 3.7 upgrade and all of the new features, I could be wrong but I thought that the Blog and Picture Gallery features were included in the new upgrade which is expected to be released in just a few more weeks.
There are two pages of new features that are being added, many are major new features that I'm sure will be enjoyed here. The Picture Gallery is probably the most requested feature we know of and will be the most costly to provide possibly doubling our bandwidth bills here and eventually requiring another server to handle the data traffic. Even if we limit picture gallery access to Contributors it still means several hundred people will be building personal picture galleries here so the cost to host will be significant.
We will definitely upgrade to the new vBulletin 3.7 but which new features we are able to make accessible depends on our ability to fund them or their impact on our server. The cost to provide some features will be near zero and others we may never be able to afford. Remember we are a huge Community that sees over 750,000 hits per day and climbing so adding just one new feature could strain our resources so we have to be careful and choose wisely given our budget restrictions. I don't know how many photo hosting web sites I have seen start up and go offline in the last few years. Most public forums don't host pictures at all or if they do they dump threads automatically after 90 days.
Our Contributors have been generous this year but they can't provide for 10,000 Members here so how much we will be able to provide depends on our ability to secure some kind of advertising revenue. I am hesitant to spend money I don't have in hand so we will just have to wait and see. The process may take some time.
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Originally Posted by Keith Outten
