What is the urgency to change away from vb3.8?

LOL I swear, he's like the energizer bunny!!

 

Because people are sick of waiting. And 4 isn't going to be a refined product for at least another year - it's already months since it went gold remb.

Personally we put things on hold and started work on other projects - front end has been designed and static built for two of my sites. Design update has been completed for my largest site. Another site went in beta and launched just as forum despite it being designed as a full social network (was waiting for 4 - got fed up and went with 3.8 and just forums for the time being).

Have also started on the branding for 3 more sites (although two are sister sites) these will be custom solutions tho as they're not your traditional type of site. Actually one is going to give FB a run for it's money (whilst also being more sympathetic towards smaller communities like ours).

So basically we got fed up of waiting hence we're now seriously considering moving to another product. But have kinda come full circle - the nearest competition while having some nice touches is lacking too many features as of yet. So I may just go with 3.8 as I badly need social groups for this site - if IPB had social groups I would sacrifice some of the forum features they don't have for it!!

 

I certainly am tired of waiting. Prior to post 1 of this thread I've decided that vb products will have inconsistent quality for the foreseeable future.

v3.8 works well. It may not be perfect for everyones needs, but it works.

Between my initial post, and my post #11 of this thread I did much soul searching, and came to the conclusion that we should proceed to take our forum to the next level and have since started evaluating IPB.

For us, at this time, there seem to be only 2 viable options - v3.8 and IPB. I am still evaluating IPB so am not sure if that is the final solution for us, but it does look promising.

I hope your new sites do well! : )

 

Thanks Ab!

There are other solutions too - don't dismiss Drupal (so long as you don't mind forums being basic - or, you could use a bridge to vB). There's social network scripts too and even dolphin looked pretty neat

 

Internet Brands and Invision have different goals and this apparently is overlooked by many.

1) Invision Board's primary purpose is to build great forum software.

2) Internet Brands' primary purpose is to buy forums with traffic on the cheap and run a group of sites to make money, amongst other things. The vB acquisition was secondary and a nice way for them to own the software of sites they are hoping to target.

Jelsoft used to be just like Invision Power - focused primarily on building the best forum software. Now there are different priorities including "the street" that wants to see revenues, hence the vBulletin 4 presale fiasco.

I'm still on 3.8.5 and see it staying there, even with some forums I shouldn't have upgraded but did thinking the $130 might be worth something in a year and change... silly me, glad I hedged the investment and we didn't do them all.

Why stick to 3.8? My challenge was in saving all the URLs that I've had in search engines and more for the decade plus time that some have been running. But what I'm realizing is that, unfortunately, the vB forum 3.8.5 seems to be the best version for quite some time and everything else should be built as if it is static and also not the primary center. If I was in an earlier stage with a forum, I would probably use IPB or convert a younger forum to IPB and avoid the issue entirely. The temptation to go to 4.0 is the thought that there is a tremendous amount of future development, hacks, etc. Right now no templates and even hacks are taking their merry time. What I like about invision is tht there is a lot I just don't have to hack.

 

It certainly was not overlooked by me. I 100% realize that IB has a completely different set of goals. As long as the software is suitable for their own sites, run by (hopefully) skilled people, and (probably) track other forums using vb for potential acquisition, they are happy. The various frequent releases may or may not work. One may be ok, no assurance of further releases working well enough to use.

That is a merry-go-round I've no interest in getting on.

In addition to everything else you typed which I 100% agree with, IPS rents hosting accounts so they have an even bigger interest in making the software work.

We rented a small IPS hosting account a few weeks after this thread started. And bought the software last week. Waiting for the beta release at the moment.