There were more than 600 pieces of spam today alone, on a forum that isn't actually being used. I have more than 4500 spammer accounts to match my nine legitimate accounts. It is clear that vBulletin is not up to the task of handling the spam problem. I cannot invest an hour a day removing the various spammers which are destroying my google rank. The first three hits for my own domain on google are russian pornography; this is supposed to be a child-safe game site, and that's clearly no longer possible.

As such, this forum has been removed.

I may look for another forum in the future. However I cannot in good conscience continue to run a piece of software as ridiculously vulnerable or impossible to manage as vBulletin. The idea that I should have to visit nine pages to remove each spammer - fourteen if they've posted more than 50 spam - when I get something like 40 spammers a day is just obscene. When I asked vBulletin staff what to do, they referred me to a year old post about how to hack the codebase. The whole reason I bought this application was to have other people resolve these problems for me. When free software vendors outpace commercial vendors by this much, you know there's something deeply wrong.

At this time my only option is to refer people to my personal blog (which doesn't have a single piece of spam on it, imagine that).

I consider vBulletin several hundred dollars wasted. vBulletin is a startlingly poorly designed application with legacy problems the likes of which I've never seen in a web application. I have never felt this ripped off by a company putting absolutely no effort into controlling the spam problem. This is something which could very easily be prevented by design, much as is done with akismet; it's clear to me that the vBulletin team just doesn't have the chops.

Don't buy it.