Is it perfect? No.
Do they listen to their customers? Yes.
Will they make mistakes? Yes.
Is their product better than vB? Depends on what you’re really looking for/at.

For me, I came to vB because it was known to be the best.. using that name I bought into the vB 4.0 being bigger and better…. then came the day the site went down and their main site changed to that wonderful splash page and I was excited… and then the forums opened… sad is what I was feeling. The design, the 1st impressions was horrible.

It doesn’t take much to see that the customers here aren’t listened to unless there are a number of people screaming.. Support is lacking because of the path they (IB) have chosen and it shows.. People that have been running forums forever are having troubles with this new script and in the end I just couldn’t wait for a stable release. (stable meaning everything works and everything they said I would get was there)

So I chose to move to IPB. So far it’s been great, just looking at the pre-sales forum you will see the amount of time they spend with the community, listening, helping and communicating.. Take some time and compare pre-sales here and pre-sales there to see the difference.

For vB for become the leader again they will have to learn that the customer is always right and we have been telling you where you are going wrong for months now… it started with the leak slides and you had a chance to stop, listen and do the right thing, instead you moved forward as fast as you could and look where that’s gotten you.

Time will tell the grand affect… as we all have bought the vB 4.0 license which grants us use through the next version… it will be interesting to see what your sales are when vB 5.0 comes out.

Throughout these last 79 days, I’ve been fighting bugs, fighting with the lack of features, and last but not least, fighting the lack of functionality.

I was a skeptic to be honest when Internet Brands acquired Jelsoft. At first it seems like a great move, however I now have adequate proof Internet Brands is not the godsend they claimed to be. Looking at our 79th day since vBulletin 4 has been released, we’ve regressed.

vBulletin 4 is worse than IPB.
vBulletin 4 is worse than phpBB.
vBulletin 4 is worse than SMF.

To be blunt, vBulletin 4 just plain sucks. It does not deserve to be called the leader in community solutions. It’s lost it shine.  No longer is it “instant community”, but more to the point, instant hell and disaster.

Support is lackluster at best. Attempting to run vBulletin 4 in production mode is beyond unbearable. It’s torture. Not even tolerable.

The bugs are so bad that I would equate it with an infestation.

Note: I have the utmost respect for the current vBulletin Developers, and Project Leaders. Given the mess Joe and Bob has made, it’s a wonder itself that vBulletin 4 functions even at all.

Let’s take a look back and do a quick review.

First we get the release of vBulletin 4.0 Gold. This build of vB 4.0.0 is plagued with bugs and known issues, yet it’s still released. Then we get vB 4.0.0 PL1, which is a release patch to fix a newly discovered exploit. This takes us to vB 4.0.1, which is a “maintenance release” that fixed 200+ bugs.
Finally, this brings us to 4.0.2, which was supposed to have been released February 4th, 2010 (now delayed).

The mentality used by IB is amusing, but not at all surprising. Instead of focusing on releasing a solid, stable build, they are merely pumping out versions as quickly as they can, and releasing them prematurely, even when they are clearly not ready to be deployed due to known bugs.

Only now with the delay of the 4.0.2 release have they actually held off releasing it to provide a more “quality” build. Maybe they finally learned their lesson that quality > quantity? We’ll soon find out.

@IB, you disappoint me, yet again. Dare I say, we told you so?
I would highly suggest you take a page out of the old vB team and focus on building a quality product. The old Jelsoft actually valued and knew the importance of releasing a solid build instead of just releasing as many, and bug filled versions as they could.

Once installed, the admins sighed in relief
and begins to tinker, then much to his disbelief
not one, but hundreds of bugs did appear
and it’s wrecked their Christmas cheer.

Then with a fury he curses at once
he runs for support just to fix the matter
To his surprise he’s not alone
that this bug was found long, long ago.

The poem’s a bit overly dramatic, but it’s rather fitting based on the struggles Chronos and I have seen this week. It’s been four days since vBulletin 4 came out, and it appears it has been a miserable four days. Bugs galor, customers crying foul, requirements not met (which is the biggest concern as any excellent systems developer would know you must achieve a good percentage of them). And the there’s the occasional cheer, and celebration saying vBulletin 4 is rather golden.

vBulletin is a marvelous product. vBulletin 4, however, leaves a bitter taste in my mouth. There are far too many mis-use cases that were not accounted for, thus breaking the entire information system.

I will be the first to say that we as customers should have held Internet Brands accountable. Clearly Internet Brands dropped the ball, and now we’re dealing with an incomplete, half-baked, second rate, forum and CMS.

I’m going to pose the question to everyone out there: What do you think of vBulletin 4? The blunt, brutal hard truth. Is it worth the price, time, and energy in buying, installing, and/or upgrading to? What would you tell to future investors? Or what would you tell to future customers?

Comment away.

When dealing with any investment, there is risk. Does Internet Brands understand how much risk they've undertaken? Is Internet Brands those managing risks well?

I’ve often wondered why some the senior development team for vBulletin suddenly left without any advance warning. In one short month, Kier Darby, Mike Sullivan, and Scott Macvicar all left Internet Brands. In that one month, it represented a significant loss of talent, senior management, and senior development of vBulletin. These three represent the brains of vBulletin. They represent the integrity of vBulletin. They represent the key development and leadership of a industry icon. They understood customer’s requirements. They understood the customer. Last but not least, this trio understood vBulletin.

These questions have been racing in my mind. Why did they leave? What possible reasons could they have left? Was it because Internet Brands (Nasdaq: INET) acquired them? Was it because of management? Was it because they no longer liked working at Jelsoft and Internet Brands? Was it because they became merely a cog in this giant machine? Or maybe rather than job enlargement and enrichment, they experienced job reduction and dissatisfaction?

Finally, that silence has been broken. It appears what we’ve suspected all along happened. I hoped this wasn’t the case, however, my own nightmare, suspicions, and fears have been confirmed.

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.

Due to poor oversight on management’s part, it’s now lead to a disaster of a product. Software bugs are at an all time high. Customer dissatisfaction is on the rise. The investment to acquire Jelsoft was made to boast Internet Brand’s portfolio. Now it’s clear that with poor oversight on management’s part, they’ve created a significant number of issues that they were not originally facing. It’s looking more and more like it was a poor investment. Thousands of hours are being thrown into manpower. Resources are being allocated towards trying to correct what was originally not broken.

Looking at this entire debacle as an external auditor, I would put in an audit report with senior management and investors that due to current management’s mishandling of this situation, and the lack of oversight on management’s part, this poses a risk to the company. This is risk that needs to be addressed and managed promptly. Controls that should be in place to manage these risks are completely inadequate, if not non-existent.

If you don’t believe me, read Scott’s recent blog entry for why he left. Assuming he doesn’t mind a reposting, here it is:

This post is part one of a few to be published over the next coming days about my current funemployment, the best place to start is the leaving from my previous employer.

I’ve a small script that I run locally to show me how many days it’s been since I left Jelsoft Enterprises (171 at posting), the reason for which I’ve more or less kept very quiet about. A tweet did recently appear in an article on The Register, oops!

A significant amount of time has passed and I’m now comfortable commenting on this without sounding terribly bitter about the whole thing.

In the summer of 2007, Internet Brands (carsdirect.com) purchased Jelsoft the company behind vBulletin. Nothing changed internally and the engineering team had very little direct contact with our now parent company, this remained for around a year. Jump forward to summer 2008 and a few members of the team were summoned to LA to give a presentation about the future of vBulletin 4.0 and the big re-write that was planned. Most of the progress since finishing 3.8 had been design plans and research. We had looked over the old product for current features and design issues, analysed customer feedback on missing features and checked the bug tracker for common issues. The end result was that the 4.0 re-write was cancelled.

A new project / general manager was installed based out of LA (development was in England) and scrum was the shiny new model that would allow us to refactor the current release of vBulletin (3.8) and have a new version chock full of features in a meager six months. I’m not going to comment too much on why there were problems, but lets just say that it didn’t quite work out that way and we’re now at 14 months and the beta process is just underway.

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. I was no longer passionate about the product and had been that way for months. This accompanied by the change in direction of the product and priorities of the company resulted in my resignation in May just before php|tek. My final day at Jelsoft was June 19th 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 in a short period of time and I’m not sure if it was for the best.

While Scott wrote one perspective from behind the scenes, much what he has presented has merit as we have seen the end-results of those decisions. Risks are not being managed.

With any audit findings, I’d leave recommendations. Here are my recommendations.

• 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.
• Implement policies to ensure proper communications happen between customers and Internet Brands. Customers can not afford to be uncertain. With uncertainty comes doubt. With doubt comes more second thoughts on purchases. With hesitation and second thoughts on purchases, comes lack of sales.
• Internet Brand’s Human Resources needs to implement policies to ensure employees do not feel their opinions are not welcomed, nor that their jobs are being reduced. Especially in scenarios in which companies are acquired, they need to train management on how to properly incorporate outside corporate cultures with their own. With all the creative controls taken from existing developers, it’s clear that could feel they no longer have control over a product they’ve spent several years working with a labor of love, and care.
• New policies should be created on how creative control should be handled. With such a mature and competitive product vBulletin was, it was clear that this product would complement the Internet Brand’s portfolio. Clearly it should have completely complement and increase the value of Internet Brand’s however due to poor oversight on incorporating vBulletin into Internet Brand’s portfolio and the lack of understanding of vBulletin customers, we’re seeing backlash at all levels, and not just customers.
• Implement a proper open forum regarding customer policies. Clearly this pricing structure is flawed. Clearly this transition has been completely rough and mishandled.  It does not favor existing customers. As the classic business saying goes, 90% of all sales comes from 10% of your customer base. Especially from a flagship and industry respected product, vBulletin’s growth was purely from word of mouth advertising. There was hardly any advertising done that significantly increased vBulletin’s market share. Furthermore, allow a period of time in which customers can comment on certain policies. Rather than denying certain policies are being implemented, garner feedback. This way both Internet Brands and customer will be satisfied. Clearly the risks of implementing new policies from senior staff were not acknowledged and ignored. To ignore such risks is unacceptable. These risks needed to be understood, addressed and managed, but clearly it was not. They clearly did not anticipate the backlash from customers.
• Good will. I can not stress enough good will enough. It was good will from the old management team from vBulletin that newer price structures came to be without much protest. It was good will that allowed the older management team to progress things at a pace we knew things would be done well. It’s clear that good will is out the door.  Internet Brands needs to issue apologies to all customers. It will be tough to admit to customers, and especially shareholders that they’ve completely mishandled the situation. It will, however, generate, a step towards resolution and hopefully appease customers. Next would be to upgrade all vBulletin 3 customer’s licenses to vBulletin 4 Forum. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, however, it needs to be done. Clearly things were not communicated properly to customers, and now things needs to be corrected.
• New policies and controls are needs to be implemented on how to handle acquired projects. It’s easy to say use a waterfall or prototype approach in development. It’s also easy to say use SCRUM as an approach towards development. However, management needs to look at existing projects and see if it’s remotely possible to implement such a development approach. Clearly this backfired on Internet Brands as they attempted to implement a development method without completely understanding and managing the risks of implementing such a new development model.
• New policies also needs to be implemented to ensure customer requirement’s are met. Thus far, the feedback for the Content Management System (CMS) has been lackluster at best. The CMS has been filled with bugs, disappointment, and poor implementation. If customers requirements are not met, then customers will not use the product. It is simple as that.

Clearly there’s lots to work on.  Internet Brands has inadequate controls and policies to handle the growth and risks. Due to lack of controls, it has tarnished a product respected and considered to be an industry standard. There is hope. vBulletin is at an important crossing point. The next set of decisions will ultimately determine whether vBulletin will fall by the wayside, forgotten, or reclaim it’s position as an industry standard. It starts by valuing your senior developers who have been working with a product far longer than you ever have. It starts by working with customers once more in creating an award-winning, industry respected product.

vBulletin could clearly be a significant source of income and profit, but only if Internet Brands starts understanding their customers and starts managing risks.

Sincere thanks to the vBulletin community!

Greetings all,

As some of you know, my wife and I own property in Central America and have worked for the last few years toward building a home there. We are now in a position where we can begin construction, and that will require a lot of time on site and a great deal of travel.

Since my role in vBulletin can’t reasonably be filled from 3,000 miles away, the time has come for me to transition various responsibilities to my teammates. I will be with Team vB through this Friday, December 11.

These changes will not directly affect vBulletin customers. The rest of the team remains intact, and the most important things are not changing:

Kevin Sours will continue to run vBulletin’s large Engineering group, with backup from Joe Rosenblum, Internet Brands’s CTO.

Don Kuramura will continue to be responsible for Product Management, strategy, and business development.

Steve Machol will continue managing the Support team, with backup from Jennifer Rundell, Internet Brands’s VP of Content.

The path to building 4.0 out the door has been incredibly exciting, and all the more so to have done it alongside such a smart and dedicated team. (Each of them has a standing invitation to visit Lake Arenal!)

vBulletin is in very capable hands. The imminent release of 4.0 is just the beginning of some very exciting things ahead. The Internet evolves quickly, so in addition to new things like the Content Publishing Suite, Team vB are working on even bigger expansions, like products and services for big-board customers, vB for mobile, and more.

Again, a heartfelt thank you to the vBulletin community for all of your support.

Onward!

Our thoughts to come later.

I was tutoring this weekend and I helped an 11th grade high school student with US History.  He pointed out to me that history is useless, but I retorted that if we never learn from history, history has a tendency to repeat itself. That gave me reason to pause as I thought how that very logic applies to our scenario. Internet Brands did this once to us, what’s not to say they will do it again?

Let’s face the truth. I got my credit card bill last week, and it’s simply highway robbery. I cringed at the fact I had to pay just to do an upgrade. Sure $130.00 doesn’t seem much, but when you combine the fact that our license was suppose to be worth $160.00 (or $180.00 for others), we’re still paying more than $235.00 for a brand new license! What Internet Brands is making us pay is simply highway robbery. I don’t know how else to put it.

I don’t see ANY reason at all to justify existing license holders paying more. Essentially we’re being told to just pony up money for a brand new license. Forget what Internet Brands has told you; it’s merely a ploy, a cover. It’s purely marketing. Rip off all the marketing, and you’ll see is that we’re paying for a brand new license.

As existing Legacy vBulletin license holders, we’re treated as second rate citizens. We’re not important to them. Our wallets are more important to them. What’s not to say this is to happen again when vBulletin 5 arrives on the horizon?

We’re stuck holding a useless, absolutely pointless license vBulletin 3 license. After our license expires per-se, no more updates.  No more security patches. Once vBulletin 4 goes into full swing, vBulletin 3 citizens are treated as the scorn of the earth. Internet Brands manipulated us using fear tactics so that we’d buy licenses.

I really sympathize with those who bought vBulletin licenses really late in the game before vBulletin 4 was announced. Anyone who bought a license merely hours or days before vBulletin 4 got announced feel the real wrath. They bought a license only to have it invalidated and ripped from their hands minutes later.

Yet when they protest that they’ve been scammed, they’re told to upgrade to the latest vBulletin 4 License by paying even more? Any more protests, and you have threads closed. Has anyone checked out Pre-Sales recently? There are several threads in which customers point out that they don’t treat customers well.

Has anyone at Internet Brands done the math? We’re paying MORE for upgrading to a vBulletin 4 license than brand new vBulletin 4 license holders. Where’s the justice? Where’s the respect? More importantly, where’s the loyalty to your existing customer base that made vBulletin so successful? If they’re treating customers like this, as a shareholder, stakeholder or investors I’d wonder how Internet Brands may very well treat me in the future.

Let’s face it. vBulletin 3 license holders have been screwed over. If history has anything to say, it’s that it’s going to happen again.

Pricing:
The pricing changes that were brought up in the thread ended up happening.
vB4.0 Publishing Suite – New license: $285, Upgrade: $250
vB4.0 Forum Classic – New License: $195, Upgrade: “Free”.

Note, that I am intentionally leaving out the discounted “pre-order” prices, since there was no mention of these in the leaked thread.

Also keep in mind, the pricing above is for vB 4x. Upgrading to vB 5x will be an additional fee (notice a pattern here?) which has not yet been determined.

Support:
The change to support – These changes also ended up happening.
Although customers get access through the forums, the Forum Classic customers only get access through the support system for 30 days and they will be forced to pay extra if they need additional support through a ticket.

One major reason people chose vBulletin is because of the affordable prices in the past, and the excellent support that was offered through tickets and the forum, yet once again, IB is taking something that worked well, and engaging in price gouging, because they know they can by charging extra for the software itself and for support tickets.

Beta Testing:
In the past, when the times were good and we had original development team, open beta testing was something of the norm. This was important because it gave members to try out the software so they could get a head start on getting their communities ready. It was also important because members of the modding and skinning community were able to play with the software to prepare their products for the new version of vBulletin. All of this changed however with IB and the new development team. Beta access to vB4 was only given to a select handful of customers. Later after much controversy they decided to give members who pre-ordered it a chance to try the beta as well, but only because they were forced to, because of all negative attention, and this was a feeble attempt to “give back” to the community.

Impact:
News of this leak caused an upheaval. Most people were furious to hear about some of these planned changes. When the topic was brought up on the forums, it resulted in nothing but closed threads and IB simply ignored the subject, telling us to wait for “official word”.

In the leaked screenshots, Steve clearly states that if the situation is not handled correctly, it could cause a “negative impact” and he pretty much nailed it – yet even with this, they failed to transition correctly and failed to handle the situation accordingly. The last line regarding the customer issue is what makes this whole situation ironic: “If we want loyalty from our customers, then we should be loyal to them in return”.

IB had a chance to try and reassure their customers but failed to do so. People grew more and more frustrated and IB turning their heads in the opposite direction, continually ignoring the subject only added to this frustration. IB should have taken what they learned from the original leak to make changes, improve and do everything in their power to assure the community but they failed to do so.

This is not to say I won’t like the theme further down the line when more changes are made with each new Beta version released, but of course a lot depends on what changes they do actually make before it goes Gold with a final and completed theme in place. They won’t make changes to suit me personally, so it’s going to be a case of waiting and seeing what each new release installed on vBulletin.com brings with it theme wise. Many would argue that you don’t have to use the default theme anyway, and you can use your own design instead. True, but I always like to keep things simple if I can by staying with the default theme. So for me personally it does matter a lot!

The new vBulletin 4 Theme faults

This list below is what I personally found most at fault about the new theme used with vBulletin 4. Yes, I could nick-pick at other smaller design issues that I spotted as well pretty fast. But I’m just going to list some major faults that I feel need sorting out straight away first.

Too bright on the eyes the theme style is:
Quite a few people complained when the official vBulletin forum first went live using the new “vBulletin 4 Suite” theme design today, that it was too bright and hurt the eyes after using it for about 5 minutes. This is something that I totally agree on, it really did genuinely begin to put strain on your eyes after using it for a very short period of time. Making it very unsuitable for a forum board in general that your trying to keep your members using for many hours, posting and using none stop.

Looking at the theme, the biggest issue there is too much White used as a whole. Just by shading it down to a more dirty white colour in some areas, or maybe all areas. Would greatly reduce eye stain, and maybe even slightly darken down some of the very light blue colour in a few areas very gradually too. Basically, it need to be toned down to a slightly darker shade, concentrating a lot though on the large open white space areas to reduce reflection that’s causing most of the eye strain.

Wrong font style, size, and colour used:
Another problem is the colour of the font used for “Post Text”, it just looks washed-out as though it needs to be a little darker in colour, not black though! Also, the font size needs to be increased to a more comfortable reading size as well in many areas. And again, the font style itself didn’t look well suited for Text Reading on the Internet, as though they’ve tried to play around and veer away from Internet Standards to look more stylish and fancy. But in doing so it’s not worked well for reading posted text because of the font style used. Which I might add also looked a little rough around the edges and not clear and smooth, a clear sign it’s the wrong font style to use.

Another problem was the small font used for the Smallest Tags in the “Tag List”. To me it looked as though they’d used a font size of around 8px small. I could hardly make-out what the smallest tags actually said. Very unsuitable indeed for usability!

That wasn’t a long list of faults you might say

While this list of faults above may not seem large, only two aspects really. There is a fact a lot of work involved in changing them. For example; changing the font style, size, and colours. Will have an effect on other areas of the forum in some cases, which may also need changing to suit accordingly. And making changes to the themes colour styling can cause issues with blending-in with other areas of the forum, again creating more work than might first appear to be needed.

So although the list is small, a lot of work could possibly be involved here. As changing one thing, effects another thing, which in the end leads to much more work that you first ever imagined would be the case.

Feel free to drop by and share your feedback, thoughts, stories or anything else you feel like.