The State of vBulletin today

Most of those feature are in several of the SMF portal mods, or can be added as modules.

 

Because it's not very good.

User interface is poor, many features not in the stock package, and the big thing for many people is they need a professional support system, not one where the response is often "it's free, what are you moaning about?"

 

Seperate from the forums?

 

"User interface is poor"... I guess that's up to the users. VB is new to me, so in my book their interface is poor... simply because I don't know it.
"many features not in the stock package"... such as?
Simple Machines has the charter membership where you can pay a yearly fee for extended support.

Depends on what you mean. The portals are depending on SMF to be installed, but you can create custom pages if that's what you mean. They are also managed via the SMF admin panel.

 

There are also some functionality in this VB forum that I'm missing.

Quoting:
When I click the quote button, I'm taken to the post window in this forum.
In SMF 1 as well as SMF 2, you are taken to the quick reply if the quick reply is open. If the quick reply is minimized or deactivated by the admin, you are taken to the post window.

If I want to quote two replies as I did in my previous post, I'd have to copy them to Notepad for editing.
Im SMF 1 as well as 2, I click quote to the first, then when in the post window, I browse through earlier posts listed below, and click the quote button there as well. Then I got the two quotes I want to respond to, and can edit them easy.

Posting:
When replying to a post, in this forum I have the standard size of the post window.
In SMF 2 I can drag the post window to be any size I want (downwards). This makes it a lot easier to manage large posts.

When I post in this forum, I often find out later that someone replied before my post was done. They don't show up until I refresh the page. That's very annoying! If you are replying directly to a post, it needs to be the next post, otherwize it's a good idea to quote the person, or start the post with the name of the author of the post you are replying to.
In SMF 1 & 2, you are warned that new posts were made. Not only that, but you can even see them above the post window! You can then take actions, before you finally make your post.

Notifications on posts:
When I have notification enabled for a topic in SMF, I can choose to only get an email on the first reply.
Sometimes when writing an answer in this forum, I get 2-3 emails that replies were made in the same topic. Pretty annoying to me.

The odd thing is that I get the message in my emails from this forum:

 

I'm sure SMF is a competent product, I just personally can't be doing with it. I hate using sites that run it. My preferred free solution is MyBB.

But *none* of the free solutions can hold a candle to either vB or IPB.

 

You can quote however many posts you want using the multi-quote feature. You can do this simply by clicking the button below next to the posts you wish to quote;

You can also do this using the arrow in the editor;

I feel exactly the same.

 

It doesn't hold to state it, without stating why. SMF is strong enough to be a paid software. I don't know about the others.

Doesn't work for me.

It's your loss, not mine

 

Click all the posts you want to quote with the multi-quote button, and then click the regular "Reply" button, and it should work fine. It does for me.

 

This information might be useful to some as I've read many in this thread looking for an alternative.

I recently purchased an IPB license from someone else. (On the webhostingtalk.com forums) - it came with IP.Board and IP.Gallery. After a successful transfer, I messaged IPS to see if they would allow me to upgrade to the suite. They told me it is only possible in the first 30 days the license was bought. They did offer me a discount on the additional products I wanted to add (IP.Blog and IP.Content). In the end, I paid 155$ total and I have IP.Board, IP.Gallery, IP.Blog and IP.Content.

If you're in the market to change your forum scripts, I would say this is probably the only way to get some of the money back if you have an expired vb license. If you're looking for a "used" license, just google for "invision power board license" and you will find many sites that have some forums with users selling the licenses they aren't using anymore.

I got quite a deal and I am happy I can just put vbulletin behind me and never look at that company ever again. I got more than vbulletin offers for much cheaper than my upgrade price on my vb owned expired license (210$!)..

Good luck!

 

dang ruiner, that is a great deal. Very glad to hear about your positive experience.

 

Ah, that works, although it's not as clever made as in SMF. Didn't see the reply button until now. My bad.

 

It's a vB thing.

 

A competitor site to mine uses SMF and its awful. Their forum is down, more then it is up... Constant database failures to boot. They have lost hundreds of thousands of post through 2009.

They have also been hacked a number of times. If you have a lot of traffic, why would you use free forum software? Its just asinine with the lack of patches to address concerns.

 

So SMF is unstable and easy to hack? Do you have a link to the forum?

 

Mazda3 Forums - Index

If you scan their site news area, you will see tons of posts from their outages and hacks through the 2009 year.

 

Have they purged the spammers and hackers and instituted increased security protocols?

At this stage it would be wise to employ the admin approval setting.

 

Mazda3 Forums - Index

I can find something about "the datacenter crashed", as well as some issues when the owner upgraded to an early SMF 2 version, but nothing about the site being hacked.

 

The State of vBulletin today, it is amazing how steve machol has managed to put so much make-up and rouge on what is happening with vbulletin.com's unhappy customers. Reading over there now, steve has managed to make it look like everyone is happy and that the unhappiness has passed. Not sure if that is just a way to help him keep his job with vb.com/IB.
Would have been nice if he had left an avenue for unhappy customers to discuss their thoughts and maybe have a way to let the upper managers view how allot of people really feel about this. Unbelievable. I guess the state of vbulletin today, is happy. :frown:

 

Why shouldn't he be happy? He banned all the unhappy members, aparently :devil: