vBulletin Licensing Options
vBulletin is a commercial product, and you must therefore buy a license before you can use it. To offer site owners the greatest possible flexibility there are two licensing options to choose from:

• Leased license

• Owned license

Leased License
Purchasing a leased license will allow you to run vBulletin on your server for one year. During this period you will be entitled to technical support and software upgrades.
After this period you will either need to purchase another license or discontinue using the software.
Currently a leased license cost $85 a year. At the end of the lease period you can either renew the lease for another year or purchase an owned license.
Second chance
If you choose a leased license option, you will be given a short opportunity to upgrade your license to a fully owned license with no additional financial penalty you just pay the difference in price between the two license types!

Owned License
Purchasing an owned license will allow you to run a copy of vBulletin on your server for an unlimited amount of time and allows access to all updates released for one year. After the year you can purchase a renewal of this access.
Currently an owned license costs $160, with yearly support and new version download access costing $30 for subsequent years.
Choosing a License
Choose carefully between the two making the wrong choice can end up costing you money in the long run.

If you want a short-term forum or you want to try vBulletin out for size, then a leased license is the way to go. However, three years of running vBulletin at leased license prices costs more than an owned license with yearly support and upgrade options would have cost you (and you still won't own the software).
Leased versus owned
As a general rule, unless you are pretty sure that you aren't going to be running vBulletin for a third year, upgrade to a full license at the end of the first year.
For further information about vBulletin pricing or to purchase, visit http://www.vbulletin.com /order.
Example vBulletin Sites
By now, if you're not already using vBulletin, you're probably ready to see it in action! If you are reading this article because you're looking to be persuaded to purchase vBulletin or you're getting ready to buy a copy for a project soon, then in the meantime there are a number of good examples of vBulletin discussion boards in action on the Web. Here are a few of the most popular:

• http://www.vbulletin.com Official vBulletin site. The support and discussion forums here use, not surprisingly, vBulletin. This site gives you a very good idea of what vBulletin looks like pretty much 'out of the box' from the end-user perspective. If you want to see and test-drive vBulletin from an administrator's perspective, then there is an 'Admin demo' available at http://www.vbulletin.com/admindemo.php.

• http://www.vbulletin.org This is the main site for information on hacks and tweaks for vBulletin. This site is an excellent example of some of the things that it is possible to accomplish through modifying and tweaking (collectively known as hacking) the vBulletin code.

• http://forums.offtopic.com This is a massive forum and serves as testament to just how big you can make a vBulletin forum. This forum is made up of nearly 2 million threads, which are made up of well over 30 million posts. As of present it has nearly 150,000 members (this is regularly pruned to keep it manageable) and usually has over 1000 members on the boards at any one time. This is a truly massive forum!

• http://www.photopost.com This is a commercial add-on for vBulletin that adds a photo gallery to the forum.

• http://www.vbadvanced.com On this site you will find a free product that adds a CMPS (Content Management and Portal System) to vBulletin. This will allow you to quickly and easily include different options from your vBulletin discussion board on your site's homepage. It also allows you to easily create and manage new pages in which you can use settings other than the default.

More vBulletin boards
If you want to see more vBulletin boards, then use your favorite search engine to search for vbulletin you will find literally thousands of examples! Some will be basic while others will be highly customized.
Summary
This article has been a quick tour outlining some of the benefits of using the vBulletin discussion board software as well as providing the background to its development. For the many readers who are already making use of vBulletin or who have seen it in action, we have provided a brief glimpse of the hidden power of this widespread and popular software.
In the next article we're going to be shifting our focus to the installation and configuration of vBulletin.

More vBulletin boards
If you want to see more vBulletin boards, then use your favorite search engine to search for vbulletin you will find literally thousands of examples! Some will be basic while others will be highly customized.
Summary
This article has been a quick tour outlining some of the benefits of using the vBulletin discussion board software as well as providing the background to its development. For the many readers who are already making use of vBulletin or who have seen it in action, we have provided a brief glimpse of the hidden power of this widespread and popular software.