Is it the software or their attitude?

He means Internet Brands, the company that owns vBulletin.

 

I cannot stand vB4, sorry. I've never been a customer so I don't even know about their customer service, but I just dread using it... the board icons even give me a damn headache.

 

Quite correct Sir!

@kevin: Sorry if what I wrote was confusing - I had to keep the description short in the poll field.

 

If vBulletin 4 had off been a great product, it wouldn't really have mattered to me that much how Internet Brands was as a company. All that would have really mattered was that I'd bought a great product from them that was worth the money that I enjoyed using. The rest matters not really.

I'm not that interested in the IB Politic's side of things. Just that I have something well worth the money and the best out there for use. At the end of the day that why you give them your money, and for no other reason.

 

From my prospective it's both the product and attitude. IB over promised and under delivered. Anyone with half a business brain knows you under promise and over deliver to end up with satisfied customers.

vB 4 was supposed to be a complete rewrite. What we wound up with is basically lipstick on a pig. The new style isn't all that great but it's passable. The price went up significantly for what amounts to a bug addled vB 3 with a couple new features and a broken theming engine. From where I sit it looks like IB added more bugs than features.

The attitude has just been horrible all the way around from the closing of alphas perhaps in some failed attempt to build anticipation, to not listening to the suggestions of their very own hand picked alpha team to pushing a product out the door with bugs and a borked theming engine.

The price increase and change in licensing structure isn't necessarily my beef anymore. In hindsight the job of any company is to turn a profit, if they can maximize profit more power to them. At very least release a good product that's on par with previous releases -- at best release an excellent product that exceeds expectations.

The way in which 4's release was bungled leaves with very little confidence in how future releases will be handled.

Right now vB 3 is where it's at. Heck the only thing marginally useful to me since 3.5 is private message quick reply. When 3.8.4 reaches EOL, I'll see where 4 is, if it's not up to snuff I'll move else where.

 

Hi Dan, how have you been?

I agree with what you've said, but one statement in particular really resonated -

I had been feeling the same way about vB. The package kept boasting more features, but they just weren't useful for my communities.

And now, I see people are getting their hopes up that Kier is possibly writing code for a new package. I do wish him the very best if that is the case. But when I consider Kier was part of the team coding all those whiz-bang, double-throwdown features into 3.6, 3.7 and 3.8, I couldn't see much sense is holding my breath and wringing my hands in anticipation of what Kier may (or may not) decide to release. The last 18-24 months I used vB, it was becoming clearer to me that vB was just not evolving into what I was wanting to see.

I will be the first to admit that perhaps Kier's vision was being stifled by I.B. and ~if~ he releases a new forum platform it may be the best anyone has ever seen. But to just sit around, playing wait-and-see just wasn't in the cards for me.

The combination of I.B.'s poor business management techniques and yet another sad-sack vB release was all it took to get me shopping elsewhere. And, as it turned out, I'm happy it worked out as it did. I found a progressive company that cares about its customers and a software package that I've been wanting for a long time.

 

It's been said somewhere, either by Kier or one of the other former develoeprs, that at that time, even before Internet Brands took over, the feature list was being dictated by the then Jelsoft management.

I do agree that 3.5 was the last "revolutionary" release, in that it added the product system. You could search my old posts on vbulletin.com (except that the search doesn't work so they won't show up!) and you'd see that I was often bemoaning the fact that for the end user, almost nothing of note changed since 3.0. That was certainly a problem, but it pails into insignificance when you look at what we get now - releases where posts don't even appear correctly in threads, the search doesn't work, linkbacks to quoted posts go to the wrong place, and some valuable features from the 3.x series have simply disappeared.

Plus, at least you can style 3.x.

 

Hey Guys,

I sorta disagree with the premise that vBulletin didn't really evolve, or add much after version 3.5. Where the product was enhanced was in the blog and social networking and groups areas. And at the time, many people were asking for those features to be added.

Now of course, many seem to be dismissing those features as either un-needed or not very useful, but at the time before there release, those features were very much in demand.

And funny enough, if you surf around on the IPB forums, there are a number of admins that are asking for those features to be added into the upcoming IPB version 3.1 or in a future release.

 

My Choice -- vB 4 simply isn't good enough and I won't upgrade!

Gordie, I think you should have stuck to your statement below and not had the "I love vB 4!" as a poll choice.

I agree with Cheats characterization here.

Many of you make solid points, whether it be heavy on the script performance, heavy on the management, or coupled with both.

In short, the product as vb4 is completely disconnected from pre-vb4 in my mind. Completely different scripts (rewritten remember), different devs and managment, ergo different goals. I'm not taking another look at vBS until v5 comes out.

v4 is not a Gold state at all and will be far from it for a good while judging by the 4.0.1 and 4.0.2 descriptions.

 

This is a good point people need to remember before getting too carried away with the idea of Kier creating a new forum product (if he is that is). He was part of a talented team and didn't create vBulletin all on his own. Heck, one of the developers has even been employed by Facebook. So he must be pretty dam good in my book, maybe better than Kier himself.

That person is lost to Facebook now. So there's one ex developer who won't be working with Kier anymore. Just some food for thought. I would also imagine that many of the other ex vBulletin deveopers have moved on to pastures green by now also.

So were not talking about Kier and Co anymore here.

 

Howdy Mike, long time no talk. All is well here, hope things are okay out your way.

I agree with what you said. My biggest second-thought with jumping ship to IPB is that what's to say they don't get to big for their britches and decide to up the price significantly or sell out to another company a year or so from now. Then I'm right back in the same place I started with vB. :nailbite: At least if I move to a GPL'd solution I know I can never get ganked pricewise but on the other hand none of them seem to be quite on par with the robustness or product ecosystem of vB 3.x series.

I disagree with that. IMHO, Blogs detract from the forum, with the myriad of choices for blogging platforms available to anyone, lots of them for free why would someone start a blog on a forum? Every forum I've been on that implemented the blogs even going back to the 3rd party vBlogetin people started blogs with the best intentions then they died. I'm not saying that blogs don't work for some forums but where I've seen them implemented they've been ignored.

The blog add on wreaked of some slapped together code to turn a quick profit with an addon. If I had bought a blog license for the 3.x series I'd be very pissed with the way vB 4 dropped ala carte pricing. But hey the Project tools people got screwed over worse they paid for a discontinued product. :mad2:

Social groups: I can see them being useful but they detract from the forum by moving content off into some pretty much hidden area.

Visitor Messages: Utterly useless to anyone over 30. For the 'myspace generation' it's cute but it they went over like a fart in church on my board. As a matter of fact more spammers used it then members. There were accounts signing up, not spamming the board but adding link filled visitor comments to their own profile. This went undetected for me for quite a while because there was no easy way to see new visitor messages.

The integration of social groups in 3 series is laughable. Group threads didn't show up anywhere except in the group itself making it hard for anyone to find the content unless they specifically went looking for it. We all know how easily confused users can be. No option to subscribe to specific group threads either just the group itself. This appears to have been fixed in 4 with the 'what's new' link but I'm really not sure.

Visitor messaging is also laughable. Go View your profile. Your presented with a text box and visitor messages to you under it. A majority of people will just reply by typing in the text box, it's just makes sense. Most don't realize they're replying on their profile and the person they're replying to won't see it unless they come back to your profile. You have to hit the view conversation link to reply on the other person's profile which is counter intuitive.

A simple conditional not to show the visitor message input box on a user's own profile and renaming the 'view conversation' link to reply can fix that. The devs couldn't figure that out?
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Everything from 3.6 on seems slapped together and half halfheartedly implemented. The only thing they got right was PM quick reply. The quick reply functionality was already in threads, they'd have to be pretty stupid to screw that up. :yes:

 

And this is why I personally think vBulletin 3.6 is such a great version, because it came with most of those features missing that you say were useless. Just a pity vBulletin 3.6 didn't come with Akismet and reCaptcha as standard though, that only came later in vBulletin 3.7. Although there is a reCaptcha hack for it of vBulletin.org.

The option for members profile comments from guests, was something also that concerned me about vBulletin 3.7 onwards. Not a very good idea in my book today with the huge spam problem we have nowadays. That feature is a bit like leaving a back door open for spammers to abuse on vBulletin boards

 

Fortunately we have this lovely feature called Permissions.

Really, leaving any kind of content generation open to Anonymous submission is asking for trouble, on any platform.

 

Right now, I feel mistreated, and their legal department is extremely slow. It's been over 6 days since Patrick Stack responded to two of my last tickets.

 

I don't care about their attitude, if they wish to think they are rocket scientists to inflate their over-sized egos so be it. The product quality is what we pay for, I want to see a product that super seeds the previous, something that retains the vbulletin software as the flagship forum script. That's not the case here, they gave us a sloppy product (in all departments) and they are "proud" to release this and push the product down our thoats.

Nobody can blame IB for wanting to make a profit, but don't be proud of something that people can't use which doesn't offer anything more innovative/new than the previous version of the software.

IB are a joke, they have been since day 1. And they'll continue to be when the extinction of all the trees on planet earth have died resulting in log cabins being a thing of the past.

Maybe they should re-locate to brazil?

 

@BigDan,

The point I was trying to make is that vBulletin did evolve after 3.5. Many don't feel what was added was useful or whatever, but to say the product was stagnent for years really isn't true.

And as I pointed out, if you go on the IPB forums, there are people there, asking for some of these same features to be added to their software as well.

 

Log cabins? I still don't get this joke. Uncle Tom's Cabin?

Anyway, people expect to get what they paid for, not some half-assed script. If they want to inflate their e-penises with e-Viagra, then so be it, but they needn't dare think everyone will think they're right, insane, perhaps.

 

No one does anymore.

 

Yeah, it was a joke somebody started here that stopped being funny anymore after it was repeated for the 1000,000,000th time.

I dunno, guess he ran out of jokes? :shrug:

 

Like I said to the geek. It's not something people should get or find funny. Like it? great Don't? there's a nice ignore feature that vbulletin provides.