Will upgrading to vBulletin 5 Kill your traffic??

May i just ask whats so wrong with it whats unfinished? like what bugs are there i use a vb5 forum and see no problem with it.

 

Did you upgrade from an older version? For starters.

The Missing features.

Then the 1000's of unresolved bugs.

With 26 critical and over 600 major, I'd venture to say, you haven't dug very deeply.



Scott

 

As Scott has demonstrated so well using vBulletin's own data, vB 5 has hundreds of bugs, many considered critical and it's missing some of the most fundamental features essential to using and maintaining a forum. How for example do you multi-quote? Why am I presented with content flagged as new when I've already marked it as read? I could probably list a hundred and one bugs and omissions but it's all there in the black hole of Jira, Take a look.

 

still lightening fast load times at vb.com

 

It's was certainly dreadful when I looked a few days ago. I couldn't even get a page to properly resolve, there was no CSS being delivered.

Incidentally I was wrong, apparently there is a multi-quote function. Someone over on vB.com explained how to use it but I must be some kind of stupid because I cannot for the life of me get it to work

 

Apparently to get the quote to work, you click quote, scroll to the top of the page, hit post reply, then hit quote again.
I guess the logic behind that is off, I figured it would add the quote to the quick reply.. I mean, it takes you to the quick reply but I guess you're expected to scroll to the top or hit the floating (annoying) bar at the top of the page to post a reply.

 

That really is so incredibly intuitive. How do they think these things up! Sarcasm aside, I'll give that a try the next time I'm over there, thanks

 

It took 5 mins for me to reach the "New Threads" page and then I got a nice error message..

Ya... Surely updating to vBulletin 5 wouldn't kill your traffic

 

I'm officially giving up on even checking vbulletin.com, it takes well over a minute to view the new post.



I'll check back in a month or 2 but I'm not holding much hope for improvements.

 

I've given it up, but i'm vising them weekly, because there's really much, one can learn from them.

e.g.
JIRA=>
people don't like it
staff "needs" it...
why not make something, that both parties are happy?

eg
let the clients use suggestion & bug boards.
let the devs use jira
why not create an importer, show an link to the low level support inside the posts "copy to jira" which creates the issue automatically? with all their resources and bugscrubers it shouldn't be hard...
pro: only real reports would be in jira, no "could you describe it better / we can't reproduce it / you've chosen the wrong priority and components.. comments

if you don't have the stuff/don't want to change the workfl0w=> why not import the issues automatically into jira from threads?


ATM it's http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/forum/vbulletin-5-connect/vbulletin-5-suggestions

create jira item
create thread and link to jira
discuss in thread and also track the comments in jira......

TOO much work for clients!
TOO complicated for clients!


jira is only one example from the many many things, which went wrong

 

This is sort of what I posted in my latest seen but unseen post in this but another closed thread on vB.com (through a known bug in vB5, which I bet isn't yet posted in Jira as one ). I said in my last post, vB staff should be the only people to post bugs in Jira. Customers should only have to post comments to those bugs, if they want to. I also suggested there would be confirmed and unconfirmed bugs from the support staff. The former obviously getting more attention from the dev team than the latter (aka confirmed bugs get a higher priority in bug triage). With this method, ALL bugs are logged by staff and only by staff and all other channels for bug reports are then closed, after the issue is logged. (i.e. tickets and threads) and only referenced in a link in the bug report.

This would...

be the proper way to raise bugs to the next level,
lower duplicates of bug reports (you wouldn't really need bug scrubbers),
increase discussions in Jira,
increase Jira usage, because probably more bug reports would be made,
give a single point of reference for known bugs
and only slightly increase support's job, if at all, as then the next level (i.e. dev team, project management, etc.) can and should join in on the conversation asking the right questions to localize how it happened or even the cause to help better speed up fixing them,
thus it channelizes contribution and collaboration around what needs attention the most.....the issues themselves.

It definitely can't be left up to the customer to always post Jiras. IB should be glad customers are even reporting anything currently and therefore, shouldn't be waiting for customers to post them in Jira. They already donated their valuable time writing the ticket or thread.

Scott

 

I guess this is how they announce updates to the 5.x series.
I was notified of it via twitter.

 

Some disappointing news from BirdOPrey5 on vb.org. I would be careful of anything he posts there, as he is unethical and may also post defamatory lies and personal information of VB customers in public, like he does on his own website.
It may be best to check with VB.com for the truth about any announcements he posts.

 

It will be interesting to see if he decides to comment as he usually runs away and hides. Of course he does not like having to defend himself when he cannot hide behind his ban button!

What is a Dmoz? Never heard of it.

 

It'd be interesting to see a thread topic with the reverse question...

Has upgrading to vBulletin 5 helped your traffic or increased forum activity?

Sure, there are some people who are new vB customers who say they like vB5 and even a couple of people running really tiny forums with no activity who have upgraded and say they like vB5 but, at least personally, I have yet to see any active forums run by experienced admins who have upgraded with a positive result.

 

There's something odd going on over there. I have the same issue. Pages generally resolve for me in seconds but if there's a search involved e.g. a search for new posts, it takes minutes for the search to come back and often with no results plus an error. The staff claim not to see this. How come?

Incidentally, I also found multiple errors occurred when I attempted to post some info in a feedback thread over there, so many in fact I probably can't list them all.

I was unable to multiquote from a previous page. The floating bar 'Post Reply' button indicated that there were two posts flagged to quote but it would only deliver one of them. On posting I found a lot of my carriage return input had been stripped. I also found the same happened to some data I cut and pasted into a quote. White space had also been stripped. I had inserted two quotes into the post to place emphasis on data and they got completely mangled. Some of the data in one quote also got truncated and lost. The list goes on...

There are still so many bugs in the software it is really only worthy of a beta tag.

 

I think that would turn into a quiet thread.

 

True, but I love hearing both sides of a story.

 

Yes transitioning to vB5 will kill your traffic, and google will largely drop your pages from their index because of it.

Before vB.com upgraded to vB5 there was something like 4million+ pages indexed, now it's at 1million and continuing to fall.

But hey, while more targeted pages are better to have indexed for traffic and conversions, having no pages indexed im pretty sure isn't what they were shooting for.