Month: November 2011

I was once a happy vBulletin customer by Mitzy

Veritas Leave a comment

Reference: I was once a happy vBulletin customer in the Licensed Customer Feedback forum.

Just thought I would give a bit of a review and offer some insight in my decision to remove vBulletin from my site.

Perhaps you’re a potential future customer and are considering purchasing vBulletin 4 for a new project, I would respectfully suggest that you reconsider. I took over a site in the vBulletin golden era when Jelsoft were the owners and Kier Darby was lead developer, shortly after vBulletin 4 was being promoted. Being new to the forum game and looking at the list of features available I thought I was onto a sure winner and decided to purchase the product.

For well over a year I was happy enough, I had heard a lot of complaints in the hidden “licensed customer” forum but as a lot of the issues didn’t effect me I wasn’t too concerned, a lot of the time I even defended the software. One thing I began to notice though was all the new releases in the 4. series that would introduce a new feature but would then have to be patched and patched/upgraded over the next few point releases to actually be usable. You can imagine you can only upgrade so many times before you get bored and realise that you’re not actually adding anything useful to your site.

Anyway for whatever reason, probably after reading about it on here so much I decided to give XenForo ago, that’s an alternative paid forum product (for the uninitiated). Their whole forum is public, they don’t have a hidden forum for all the customer complaints, they don’t get many complaint at all actually. The difference in development, the entire ethos over there is a complete contrast to what’s happening within vBulletin at the moment. I’m rambling.

Point I’d like to really put across is that being on the inside, seeing the lack of development and vision and the disinterest for anything that would seem logical in terms of the future of the vBulletin product led me to a competitor within 24 months.

If you’re currently trying to decide if you should purchase vBulletin I would personally not recommend it.

Regards
A Customer

PS My comments are strictly for the development and implementation of features and lack of vision in the core product. One excellent plus with the vBulletin team is their support staff and the individual developers themselves, they’re a credit to themselves in spite of the company.

vBulletin Staff – Behind the Curtains

Chronos 3 Comments

First, let me start by saying a big thank you to Internet Brands, and the staff at vBulletin. Thank you for not making me regret my decision to ditch vBulletin, for the far superior XenForo. Thank you for continuing in the downwards spiral that you have been going in, one which will ultimately lead to your demise.

It has been some time since I last visited vBulletin forums. Still having an active vBulletin license, I do like to frequent the forums time to time to read about the latest happenings, but in truth mostly to get a good chuckle out of the mess vBulletin has become. Recently, I was browsing the “Licensed Customer Feedback” forum and a thread caught my attention and actually shocked me. This forum is a private forum only accessible to current licensed members of vBulletin, and is not visible to the public, which is most certainly a good thing for Internet Brands because it allows them to hide and censor the reality of the debacle that is now vBulletin.

Recently, a new staff member joined the team – Lawrence Cole. Here I was thinking it couldn’t possibly get any worse for vB, then they surprise me yet again by hiring this 34 year old man who behaves like a child. Having read many of his posts in the private forums, it was apparent that he is completely unprofessional and has no respect for the customers. He engages to cheap tactics and resorts to name calling, belittling and being all out rude to customers. His excuse and justification was essentially (paraphrasing) “if you attack me, I’ll attack you” I think he fails to understand that he is a staff member, one who should be focusing on CSR and not engaging in picking fights with customers. Do any of the other staff members come in to support the customers? No why would they actually care about concerns have, instead they let the thread, and bashing by the staff member continue, until he decides to close the thread.

Don’t take my word for it, have a look at what happens behind the closed doors, if only the public knew just how bad it was in this private forum.

In sum, there is no excuse for someone in his position to behaving this way towards paying customers. Even if other customers were “attacking” him, the solution is not to retaliate in this manner, as a customer I would expect them to approach it in a professional, courteous matter…then again this is vBulletin and it seems that shipped sailed long ago.

Internet Brands, enjoy the customers you have, it’s only a matter of time before the remaining ones you have follow the rest of us and move on from vBulletin to bigger and better things. The primary reason you are even able to get new customers is because you censor any signs of conflict in the public forums, and allow it to go in in the private forums that new members (and potentially new customers) have no knowledge of. This ruse is a temporary solution, and since you will do nothing for an actual solution, it will be just that – temporary. Enjoy it while it lasts.