vBulletin 5 Connect Beta Released

Nothing ridiculous about it, Gaza or Gaz is short for Gary, A nickname I often get called.

 

Quite, except it was "Cheesy Beans" when I posted that.

 

Yes, it took me ages to track it down, what with it being in your sig and everything.

 

Who's Cheesy Beans? :rofl:

 

Wow! What in the world did they do? It feels confusing and buggy.

 

Wow! After reading many replies on VB5 feedback, I see the general excuse for all the many concerns is that it's BETA.

I'm sorry, but...back in 3.x days I recall beta being run live on many forums. And I had always run their betas on a live site despite being told not to. The fact that I trusted the code, as many others did, was enough for me. Kier, Mike, etc. certainly knew how to code...as was seen on XF (despite the current lack of XF development now). If memory serves correct, they showcased updates on their own live vb.com forum back then. Not a separate demo.

Even IPB showcases their updates on their own forums before releasing it out to the majority of customers. They are not afraid to run their own code live! That speaks volumes!

Therefor, I do not understand the excuses of BETA being used here with VB5. They should be showcasing new versions on the main VB forums. IB hasn't even used 4.x on all of their competing forums...lol...it's been years already! They still mainly run 3.x! Makes you wonder why they don't trust their own developers. It's ok for customers to run it, but not their competing forums.

VB5 will change all your urls and use redirects (temporary redirects currently...not permanent!). Well, if one is going to lose all their urls spread throughout the internet then you mind as well look at alternatives nowadays. There goes your google rankings! All those backlinks worthless! Using redirects does not save your ass completely. I bet you won't see IB's competing forums doing this with all their forums. They aren't that stupid. They love 3.x! So, if your urls are going to change anyways and use redirects...well, maybe you should reconsider comparing all features with all the major forum platforms out there and just make a decision based on your site's needs. VB5 is not an upgrade...it's more like an import to a knew platform.

After revisiting the VB5 demo, it appears a little less confusing to navigate the forums since Wayne changed the homepage. But, there are so many bugs (I don't do Jira! So I won't be reporting any.) and confusing bits when it comes to everything. Everything runs together and doesn't feel like separation of content is apparent. Once they make content types different from that of the forums, I think it will look better. And once they add all the missing features and then iron out all the bugs, the outrageous queries, and the hefty underlying code...well, it might not be so bad. That's if they get to it sooner rather than years later....

I do like the bland style since I prefer to create my own without having to delete a bunch of 90's orange/blue pillow puffy shadowy crap from a bunch of files and stylevars. And I like the idea of content types sharing...but with a clearer separation on the front-end.

Some other downfalls are the way they are marketing this similar to that of 4.x but with a beta demo instead of just mockups, the fact that there are many features not even available (4.x had a few missing, but 5.x is missing a ton!), and the answer to all concerns being "it's BETA".

I do hope that the forum market will flourish. Competition is good for business and great for customers. And people want choices! Therefor, I do hope that IB can actually produce something worthwhile.

 

First look:
- design - OK. Better than the other versions, they were pretty horrible.
- slow - by god it's soooooo slow.
- price - phew, yet another kick in the butt for the people who have purchased older licenses. I mean I paid 175 bucks for VB4 (as an upgrade) and am expected to pay 200 bucks AGAIN for this upgrade ... not gonna happen ...

 

Looks like database usage in vB5 is biggest problem for those I know that use vB to run their forums. Most cheap shareds here limit DB usage by defining hourly or dialy quotas for for DB queries. It took five minutes after update to vB5 for one forum to hit query limit and kneel for a day.

 

It's unfortunate. I expected them to learn from their past mistakes and really wow me with vB5.

As of right now, it looks like I will be sitting on vB4 as long as I possibly can. I finally have several of my sites looking how I want, which is a far cry from how vB4 looked coming out of the box so I'm good but I am terribly disappointed.

 

Has anyone here installed and tested this yet? What are your opinions?