Category: Commentary

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)

I see many many vb users in the licensed areas of Invision Power, myself included.

It appears we will make the switch to IP.Board 3.1 when it comes out also. Our forum is incompatible with the business model Internet Brands is using.

Internet Brands has a fasinating history starting out as CarsDirect.com, and I invite anyone with interest to take 10 minutes to google ‘cars direct.com wiki’ and read what comes up. I found Roger Penske’s involvement, especially when he left the board of directors particularly fascinating.

From what I can tell they are not interested in what the vb customer wants/needs at all – “they” being top management, not the support staff. Clearly there are people in the company that are passionate about vb and the customers well being.

From my perspective, IB revenue from vb is dwarfed from other income they receive, although I’ve not seen any hard numbers of Autodata vs vb for the licensing revenue. I do wonder however if the companies that pay to advertise on IB forums know where their ads are showing up, at least at one point they were being shown on a motorcycle forum which was 98% spam from Nike shoes, womans purses, and viagra ads.

The only remaining question which I continue to ask myself: Is IB purposly driving customers away so their network of sites are some of the few remaining using vb (and by that time it will be a superior product)? Or do they simply not care.

And my only remaining concern is: what will happen to the vb support staff after progressively fewer sites are using vb, and with the reduced revenue vb brings in. IB is a business. Hopefully they will be offered new positions in other parts of the company.

If IB were able to get Kier back to developing vBulletin in his original role and a couple of the others, let’s say… out with the new, in with the old it would restore a lot of peoples faith. I am not saying current developers suck (I feel quite sorry for them), though the management decisions do. I’d love to see the old vBulletin team back together, they might not fix this mess over night but I dare say a lot of customers would stick around for their fix up rather than IBs. (Hence some going to IPB). I am on a fine line myself, the whole customization of themes is getting on my nerves more and more, slowly.

I am not a “theme” developer, yes I build websites but I don’t sell themes. vB 3 was easily customizable, vB4 is not. And I am having more and more doubts that StyleVars (even as a complete system) would make things any better. I personally think StyleVars was a very sensitive thing to put in or not. Converting the template to all CSS is one thing, but I think they should have only done that and kept the old system. Not a complete overhaul at once given IB have said VB4 comes in installments anyway. StyleVars being incomplete/buggy/etc = kills all development. Having to redevelop it, while it might prove successful runs the chance of throwing everyone off, again.

The simple, unedited truth.

Chronos and I both decided after vBulletin 4 went gold, we’d disappear into the shadows to do what we do best: observe. What have we observed during our writing absence? Chaos. Confusion. Backlash. Bugs. Customer Disappointment. Frustration. Disappointment.

As an auditor, I’ve been often asked to audit programs and the scope that’s been undertaken. I’ve also sat back occasionally as part of my audit scope to do a complete quality assurance check on software that is intended to be released into production. I find bugs and send them off to QA, but it has been an indicator to me as how a project is being managed, as well as an indicator to determine its current project state. It’s shameful that vBulletin 4 was released in such a state. The application itself shows too many signs of software bugs and glitches floating around all over the place. In my opinion, I would never have approved the release of vBulletin 4.

As I sit back and tinker in a closed beta environment on my localhost server, I could not and would not approve vBulletin 4 being utilized on any of my client’s sites (or my own for that matter). There is simply far too much risk involved in utilizing that’s still quite buggy.

My frustrations with Internet Brands is ever growing. As an auditor, I would likely be writing reports like mad and ensuring senior management is held accountable. However, seeing as I’m not Internet Brands auditor, my own position is one of a customer. As a customer, I am livid, furious, and insanely upset that Internet Brands would sell me a software that is flawed far worse than Windows Vista. More to the point, I’m extremely frustrated that senior management, in particular Bob Brisco, and Joe Rosenblum, have not taken responsibility, nor attempt to signal to stakeholders that this fiasco is being addressed and rectified. Instead, they’ve done their marketing campaign and have decided to hide from the wrath of customers.

I quite understand that software bugs are a part of any development of any application. I also understand it never will be perfect, but I’ve often chimed in my reports to various software companies that bugs need to be managed and controlled properly. If they ever become a significant issue, they can and will hinder functionality. Furthermore, they will cause backlash and create trust issues that will resonate for years to come.

The point of doing bug fixing is to get rid of those bugs. It’s to ensure the software is 99.99% functional for the most common setups.

Looking at some of the bug reports inside the Project Tools, several bugs I’ve found were documented AFTER the release of vBulletin 4 Gold. Some of these bugs are clearly obvious and are simply shameful as a 14 year old would have caught them. It’s appalling.

My question to you Internet Brands: Who did the quality assurance and wrote the quality assurance plan? It is obvious that QA wasn’t performed properly. It’s clear we’re paying more for vBulletin for more bugs, and less functional software.