I’ve been reading the recent comments and posts on vBulletin.com and I’ve heard several accusations of vBulletin Solutions Leadership taking vacations.

Recently hired manager Fabian and Don both have been on a break in recent weeks, according to several posts by customers.

My question: WHY THE HECK ARE THEY TAKING VACATIONS AT A TIME LIKE THIS?!!?

This is absolutely insane. The boat is burning. It’s sinking and the people at the helm feel they can take their sweet time getting things corrected and righted? All the while, customers are piling into life jackets and life boats, but still waiting for the wonderful leadership at Internet Brands to lower the boats to save their lives.

As a customer, I’m furious. They should not be taking a vacation right now. They need to right the wrongs now. They need to get everyone on the same page YESTERDAY instead of now. Reading what people like PirateReports have been posting have suggested they have absolutely no idea what’s going on and that they can’t decide which direction to go.

Here’s an idea. How about bringing customers who actually know what’s going on instead of pulling people who know absolutely nothing about the software or community?

Time’s ticking, and I think it’s time Internet Brands senior management start paying attention to what’s happening here. It’s not just our butts on the line, but theirs.

Oh yes, there’s a conference call in two days. Anyone want to ask questions? In particular to their wonderful security flaw that made the headlines of TheRegister, ZDNet, BBC and others? And especially where the heck they are going?

Just wondering what the opinion is of some of you long time members on what you feel about vB4?

Personally I was really frustrated with the way everything wasn’t fully thought through when they added the social networking a couple of years ago. I stood up screaming at some of the obvious problems and sure enough most of the things I mentioned would be problems turned out to be problems (but at least 90% addressed from what I can tell).

To say this left me rather frustrated was an understatement. I’m looking at starting a new site, but am seeing the same frustrating pattern as in the past. What really boggled my mind is that vB put a gold label on a product that clearly wasn’t gold! From what I can tell from some of the discussions going on in various threads is that vB4 still isn’t really a “gold” product.

I haven’t installed or played/tested it yet .. So my question simply falls to some of you regular participants here who can give me an honest opinion .. Is vB 4.0.2 what you would consider Gold?

Meaning are there so many bugs, issues and things “they are working to improve” that each update is more of a major upgrade needing to revert 30+ templates among other things?

I see complaints of search not being very user friendly, as well as the asset manager being frustrating to new end users .. are these claims legit .. or are they just the usual complainers from those who complain about anything?

I did look around and ticker around here a couple of months ago when it went gold and was frustrated that as much as I like vB .. vB4 clearly did not merit the gold status it was given and was still Beta in my mind. I could spend a couple of days tinkering again .. but at this point I can’t be bothered wasting the time and would like a simple paragraph or two from some of you summarizing your experience with vB4.0.2 and whether you feel it’s a product worthy of Gold status and thus worthy of my time in developing a new site around it .. or do you feel it’s not really “gold” and that I might be better off waiting a little longer for the product to stabilize a bit more?

You either love it or hate it, right?

It seems that the same can be said for vbulletin 4 and its starting to bug me. On one side you’ve got dozens of threads proclaiming “upgrading to vb4 was the worst mistake i’ve ever made” and “why i ditched vb4″ etc. On the other side, you’ve got a handful of people who are defending Ib/vbulletin to greater or lesser extents; some to almost religious proportions. I want to have my say, a more realistic view on vb4 without it getting burried in another ‘omg vb4 sucks’ type thread.

1. vBulletin 4 has bugs; probably more than any released vbulletin version in the past however this is probably due in part to far greater scruitiny of the code, the bug tracker is more active so more stuff is being reported. The other major cause is the fact that vbulletin 4 was rushed out, this was almost certainally done for ‘shareholder’ reasons and I feel it was a shame that this happened. If I were a shareholder, I’d be far more interested in keeping the reputation of the brand up instead of making a quick buck in the short term.

2. Stylevars. Probably one of the biggest causes of complaints. I agree that the system is totally useless, however one of my admins described it thus: ‘Its not ****, its just extreamly verbose.’ I agree with this fully; As a coder, I’ve dug into the style vars system the concept is great, the implemntation is well… lacking. I could go into how and why but thats a tl;dr in and of itself.

3. vB4 itself. A lot of people are ‘holding off on upgrades till its better’ I’ve seen complaints that traffic has dropped on sites that have upgraded already. I upgraded my boards a couple of weeks ago and have seen no sigificant changes in traffic, positive or negative. The only complaints i’ve had from my members is the fact that most of the skins have not yet been converted to vb4. As far as the forum goes, there were a couple of minor issues, nothing site killing mostly style related.

Myself, I’m pleased with vbulletin 4 the upgrade has given a breath of life into a few areas of the forums and I’m hoping that activity will pick up more significantly in the coming weeks after I’ve launched the CMS. The new framework looks promising from a development point of view; I’ve already put together the begginings of my own webcomic content type and written some widgets. For the longer term i’ve sketched out plans for a store mod. The framework needs work, but its almost certainally going to be good to work with once the kinks are worked out.

I think what i’m trying to say here is that there are too many people saying vb4 is a disaster and not enough people giving a realistic view – it works for me, its not spectacular but it does its job.

I’m sad to go, in a way, as I loved the old regime and was happy with the 3x series and really looking forward to the 4x series.

I moved my site across to IPS last July after the “leak” fiasco. They gave me a free conversion to their platform and my user base and myself as admin, quickly adapted without much trouble and sulking.

Since then I have started another two forums both running on IPS software. So things are looking positive, which is nice.

I could only voice my discontent, at the direction that IB was taking us, with my feet and my wallet. I did this and went elsewhere for my forum solutions. I still don’t understand the business mind that IB has and why it should seem to actively want to reduce its existing customer base. I don’t really care now as I feel they are as worthless as my “owned” vB license is.

I’d like to thank some of you fellows and some of the staff for helping me with issues when I needed you.

You – the users are what really helped to make vB what it is, it’s a shame that those in charge just can’t see that.

Good luck to everyone and thanks again.

Cheers
Ted (texterted)