Kier designing his own forum software?

But you can't have rounded corners in all browsers without awkward images or Javascript. I have always avoided those. I'd have been angry had vbulletin gone down that road. i can completely see why they did it the way they did, I guess you either agree or disagree on this, it's rather polarising.

IE6 though - it should work, end of story. Without rounded corners obviously, but otherwise it shoudl work.

Remember, you praise Invision's current style - and yes, it's very good - but it does exactly the same thing. Rounded corners in some browsers and not others. It's the "other" browsers that need to catch up, and with Opera 10.5 imminent, that is basically just IE.

 

Kier you're a dirty rotten tease!

Nonetheless - without wanting to sound over-sycophantic, if you really do go ahead with this I guarantee you my immediate purchase here and now, just as other have said.

 

The bottom line is what PeterDavies said Nick. The "truth is in the pudding" so to speak. We all saw that NOTHING happened before IB took over things. Saying now WHAT MIGHT have happened now they're not there anymore is pointless. What matters most, is that for over 5 years people asked for a Gallery and CMS. Neither ever came in all that time.

5 years is a long time Nick to be asking for something that never came in terms of developement. Honestly, I could'nt agree with PeterDavies more!

 

Disagree entirely. vB was moving into Social Networking.

I like Internet Brands' CMS (apart from the query problem) but it's unfair to say vB was going nowehere.

I think they'd lost ground and got distracted with the blogs, but it was not standing still.

 

Oh you mean they added a few social networking icons that you clicked displayed below a thread. Not exactly hard to do that coding wise compared to creating a full fledged CMS or Gallery that people asked for 5 years for.

Was that the anti climate to it all?

And let not forget the fact they gave us "Project Tools" instead of a CMS or Gallery. Which hey, they only gave us that because they already used it themselves on vBulletin behind the scene for bug tracking. So they didn't exactly have to code that from scratch did they?

 

No, the SN features included the blogs, groups, better profiles, better "friends" features, etc.

Plus we got tags.

Now I know the implementation of these wasn't perfect and we needed the "correction" of 3.8, but nonetheless it's wrong to say the product was standing still.

Resources were a problem, they as good as said so.

Call me sycophantic but I won't entertain these criticisms of Kier and the original team. Things were not perfect, of course they weren't, but the former situation was eminently preferable to what we have now. And nobody understood the product like Kier, just nobody.

 

Don't forget thread prefixes!

Anyways, I agree. Kier shouldn't be blamed for all of this; there were limitations on the team as a whole that probably couldn't be helped.

What Kier does on his own probably will not reflect the downsides of past ventures such as vBulletin.

 

Mark you seem to be forgetting one thing here. I'm talking about the most wanted products that vBulletin customers wanted for many years. Which was an official CMS and Gallery that never came.

So please don't try and whitewash that fact just because they started adding other stuff like the social networking features. You need to keep in mind also that with the Social Networking stuff, that could be added slowly in bits and bats over time with each new vBulletin release. improving it further each time.

They could not have done that with a CMS and Gallery.

 

Oh yeah...forgot about prefixes. I still use those. Most of my members don't bother but I use them. They are useful in many ways, as are tags, it's just about educating users in their proper use.

I have done all sorts of playing about with the basic layout to further improve the use of such things. Playing with vB4 does remind you how good Kier's Main CSS system is for styling. But then, I'm a fan of old skool table layouts, don't see the problem with them, they work and I can do whatever I want with them.

 

You're missing his (our) point. You said the product has been at a stand-still for five years. This is simply not true.

Nobody is trying to whitewash anything. Do you think the developers sat around and said, "Hey let's avoid creating a CMS and gallery, just to tick off the customers." ? I doubt it. Again, resources were limited.

 

Then let me re-phrase it then. We ask for extra product addon's to match IPB. We wanted a CMS/Gallery that never came. Where talking extra products here, not forum software enhancements and improvements.

And for gods sake, don't even dare mention Project Tools as an extra product they gave us, I've already covered that (joke) above.

 

Did you ever stop to think that perhaps Kier didn't have the freedom to develope a gallery and CMS (what a joke that's turned out to be) ?? Do we yet have that gellery?

There were just as many people were crying for the SN features/new profiles as there were for the gallery/cms.

Don't forget that Kier was a paid employee, just like the developers at IB are now. You will never get any new feature unless the boss ok's it.

 

Project Tools? Yes, use that too. What's the problem with it? Aside from it being dumped in vB4?

 

Well as far as people asking for an integrated gallery goes, many of those people making that request were already using PhotoPost. So what many were looking to do, was to have an integrated gallery and one less license and piece of software to worry about.

And unless I missed something, I haven't seen any integrated solutions out there, that come anywhere close to Photopost in terms of features or performance.

For content management, the best solution that I could find, at least a few years back, was vBportal but I know many others preferred vBadvanced. And then Wordpress came along, along with some other similar products and that now seems to be popular.

Personally, I still find vBportal the best true content portal for ease of use and integration.

I'm sure at some point, development on some of these integrated options will progress to the point where I would switch away from PhotoPost and vBportal, but that time sure isn't right now - for me at least. :2cents:

 

Giddy up!

Need investors?

 

Just to respond to the various things brought up in the last two pages, I think it's wrong to say that everyone was asking for a built-in gallery and CMS. And there were third-party options available at the time.

I remember when talk about a possible official CMS was first going on, and I was really excited for it at the time, but the way it turned out I'm not even sure if I'll be using it (despite having paid for it). I'd much rather have fewer features that were actually done well, and use addons for anything I really need that isn't included.

 

Well let me see.. Keir said on Twitter that this coming year was going to see exciting things. "After the horror of 2009, there will be great things in 2010 ... Here comes 2010, good riddance to 2009! I can hardly wait to show everyone what will be coming this year. Good things to those who wait."


He came on this thread, and at intervals has commented a few words. Including that he didn't know till the IB buyout was done deal that VB was sold to IB. That's a rough deal on him as Lead Developer. So was the move to western USA other side of the world.


Scott MacVicar, who left within a day or two of Kier Darby has blooged the background. Scott's Blog: Funemployment Part 1: Becoming Unemployed It's quite long so here's salient points: At first after the IB buyout "Nothing changed internally ..." then "summer 2008 and a few members of the team were summoned to LA " and "the 4.0 re-write was cancelled." "A new project / general manager was installed based out of LA (development was in England) ..."


"With creative control of the project moved to LA and out of the hands of the team that had been overseeing it for the past six years it was hard not to feel like a simple code monkey." "This accompanied by the change in direction of the product and priorities of the company resulted in my resignation in May" 2009. "Since the other UK-based senior developers and I left the code quality has dropped somewhat, there are over 1000 open bugs filed, on a normal day this time last year it would be around 10. Internet Brands have also increased prices, changed the licensing model and shelved the project tools product. A lot has changed .."


Kier had publicly stated that the different employees had different notice periods, so their exit all together was coincidental. Nor, he said were they paid to keep silence. vBulletin 4.0 is going to cost even more? (vBulletin Leaked) - Page 9 But he is less sanguine in these quotes, vBulletin 4.0 Quotes Does vBulletin 4.0 suck ? plus some other choice ones from Scott and Mike: Scott in his "funemployment" period whizzed around the world for a bit having a high old time, and has now settled into a happy position with Facebook.


Meanwhile on www.vbtruth.com Scott's story is quoted by "an external auditor" who coldly analyses the disaster IB have created for vbulletin. "Internet Brands meddled where they should not have. They’ve roasted, and killed the goose that laid the golden eggs. It is the classic management case study in which employees leave because of management, not because of the company."


She or he calls on IB to urgently "Get Kier back. Get Scott back. Get Mike back. Do what it takes to get them back on the team and back in control of this entire mess. They need to be placed at the forefront of this project and development should be placed back in their hands." Because they understood the product and its community. That, obviously, is not going to happen.


Instead we have Kier posting as the VB 4.0 Gold arrived: Originally Posted by Kier Darby [no longer employed by VB] "wondering if sanity will prevail at vBulletin, pushing vB4 gold to January, or are Q4 promises to shareholders too important?" Dec 17 around the same time on Twitter: "I wonder if vBulletin's new masters have looked at past spikes in support requests and bug reports following a gold vBulletin release?"


On this thread 3 weeks later Kier told us that a fresh start, benefiting from hindsight would be "very appealing." Benefiting from hindsight suggests doing something not too far removed from the previous project.


Then a few hours ago he wrote in Twitter "Just spent an hour debugging code to find why a large image is being served instead of a small one, only to find it's the cache I wrote..." 8:09 AM Jan 8th from TweetDeck So he's obviously hard at work. In Reading UK, halfway around the world away from IB.


While our UK Government is spinelessly extraditing Mackinnom to the USA, that's arisen because the USA spooks got their noses tweaked by an immature Brit hacker. The UK won't cooperate with harassing Keir on a non-compete clause - which is tough to transmit across sovereign states.


I'd say the guy is cooking up a rollout later this year. He left VB on June 22 2009. He could pull a lot together in a year with the right team.

 

Good post, Shanj.

Also, I may be a total ass for requesting this, but can we get a IP cross-reference on this peterdavies guy? This section of the forum is off limits to guests and cannot be seen. Someone just signs up and makes on post, to put down a talented developer at that, well, my suspicion level rises.

As for Kier... I do hope you have 100% success with this project, and I wish you and any other person working with you on this great success. The way IB has treated its customers is despicable. I can only hope that their actions cause the company to fail in the future. We don't need companies with so many fallacies running in this world.

 

To the IB buyout: IB wants to make money and that's their mission for their shareholders. I hope they succeed here. I believe the jelsoft developers were asked whether they like to work in california. I bet most did not like the idea.

The last years the jelsoft team did not make that large improvements to their software, the system architecture was not reused for blogs or social groups. Instead the attachments were stored differently in the groups, blogs and forums. It's a good thing that this platform ends.

The big thing here is trust: We trust Kier.

I see a big opportunity for Kier if he makes a new platform where you can interact with users (social networking) about specific topics (more forum orientated direction). Kier, make it easy to use. There is a bigger market for the small forums than for the large forums. Address the small market first to make most out of your money. Good Luck!

 

mrgtb, why are you so negative about everything which is vBulletin? It is unneeded, someone once told me that if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say it at all.