Is vb5 almost there now

Others have commented on this, and those that do are usually not in the UK, where Marks server is, I get a bit of the ajax spinning, but not 60secs worth.

It doesn't even take that long on my forum, and the server for that is in Amsterdam

 

This was on the vbulletin forum
Marks test server is good and fast
Never had any lag with that when posting bug reports or uploading images to test bugs

 

That just tells me that vB5 doesn't scale well. if it's a low traffic site, you're fine.

If you're a high volume site, expect things to break...and all hell to break loose.

 

Good thing to come out of it, I finally get to use my vb4 licence that's been covered in dust is 2009
VB4 was bad when it was first released, vb5 they have surpassed themselves with making the software stable

It makes you wonder where the bottleneck is
Reply to a thread and you blink a couple of times at most and its done
Create a new thread and you can do things whilst you wait
So if you have a low traffic site that has a lot of content, would the problem still be there

At the moment, I cant see them pulling it out the bag with 5.1.3
It would need a mass of improvements to make it anywhere near usable

 

Well, with 130+ queries to render a single page, it is no wonder. Is it?

Scott

 

The admin settings for setting up a forum in vb5 is a big improvement over other vb versions
Im playing with the test vb4 at present (even that is an outdated version 4.2.0)
Some features in vb5 are certainly more user friendly like the site builder feature
Click a couple of buttons and you have a new logo added
Click a couple of buttons and a new page is added and added to the navigation tab

 

Personally I don't think VB5 is aimed at the Admin with a 1000 plus members, of which a couple of hundred may be online at one time, those days for new forums are gone, for me VB5 is aimed at smaller forums, of up to 300 or so members where only 10-20% may be online at anyone time, if that's the case then it works.
I feel it is also aimed at the inexperienced admin, the sitebuilder works and adding forums is just a matter of a couple clicks, plus it has useful tips built in, AFAIK no other platform holds your hand in that way.

Maybe if more people looked at it through the eyes of a first time user, and without the knowledge of coding some of us have, it would then be a much better product.

 

My target age group is not the kill aliens and destroy your brain cells with loud music range whilst texting your mates about your latest conquest
Showed one of the young at heart 70 yr olds a vb4 and vb5 forum
Look wise, they preferred the vb5 version

The two vb4 sites were on custom skin sites and the vb5 was marks, out the box with a few standard skins test forum

 

vB5 doesn't scale well but that issue is compounded by the odd server setup vBulletin have on their support site. I believe they use some kind of VPS structure.

Personally I doubt vB5 was designed that way at all. It's inconceivable that you would deliberately set out to design software with such limitations. You might have a design philosophy aimed at a particular subset of your target audience but you would never implement a design that falls over when a set number of concurrent users is reached. Those kind of limitations are dictated by hardware.

 

Personally i believe there was an aim, but now i believe you get whatever they end up with after each new release, as they don't know whether it will work as should or not ..

 

I realize that not every forum owner has the goal of growing their community to something big, but why would someone pay such a relatively high price for a software, if their goal isn't to grow? I personally would consider the forum owner not wanting to grow their forum and pay for vB the rare case actually. And being that kind of customer is the outlier, the main customer vB should, and had always targeted, was the customer who wanted more than say, a PHPBB3 or MyBB. Big forums on vBulletin also were always the "brand ambassadors" and as such, a great complimentary marketing tool.

And now, customer of vB5 can't get more than OSS versions and grow their forums, because vB5, the high priced premium software, is only made for "small, just beginning" communities? That is a pretty good joke actually. I really don't think anyone in their right mind, except for the occasional outlier mentioned above, would purposely buy themselves into a dead end online community software, which means one of two things. People won't buy it or people who do buy it, because they didn't know better, will be seriously disappointed with it, when they do grow to a point, where vB5 starts to dog out on them.

That situation is a really, really bad proposition for any online community product and there is no way vB5's poor performance can be rationalized as anything other than a really, really bad condition for its own sales and something that needs serious attention (if sales were a prerogative). Yet, you don't see it happening and thus, you see very little growth in vB5 itself (poor performance being only one reason of many).

So the rule is simple and I would say, indisputable. An premium online community software must have the power to grow to a very large community.

Scott

 

I'm not saying that they don't want their forums to grow, but the expectations of membership is less than it was say five years ago, Facebook is having an effect on forum membership.
I'm not expecting my forum to grow that fast, if I have 20 regular posters this time next year, that will be an achievement, any more would be a bonus, but if you ask me why I chose to spend $249 on VB it was because it was a more professional looking platform than phpBB3 or MyBB, and no I can't put my finger on the difference, but it is there.
Then when VB5 came along I liked the look of it, clean simple lines, with the backup of VB, I just had to give it a go.

So there are people out there like me who are willing to spend $249 on something, if they think it's the right thing for what they want.

 

Good point Jack. I really, really, deep down in my heart, believe we as online community owners shouldn't have that kind of expectation at all. Online communities are the absolute better social networks. We just need to learn how to work with each other, instead of against each other. We need to have that sparkle in the eye again and the wisdom at our calling to understand, we, as maintainers of knowledge and the support for others, have the power to do great things with our online communities. If we can do that, as a group, I am absolutely certain we could blow the likes of Facebook and Twitter and the rest of other social networks out of the water.

Scott

 

I personally detest facebook.
Why should we have buttons promoting them on our sites, when they don't do the same back

 

Because Facebook has the 1B+ users, we should be getting attention from. But as you say, getting that attention out of Facebook is, to only Facebook's advantage, an expensive proposition, which doesn't even really work well. That part of Facebook I really don't like either. They double dip on the content their own users create.

Scott

 

One thread that caught my eye was this one, where someone has both a 3.8 forum and a test 5 forum running with a backed up databse
http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/foru...10927-upgraded-from-3-8-and-lots-of-questions

 

Now its been said its not fully php 5.5 certified
http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/foru...8-and-lots-of-questions?p=4116968#post4116968

Which might be part of the problem on 5.1.3 taking so long on coming out of Alpha