Chronos and I have been busy with real life. Sadly, we both gave up on vBulletin. The once iconic forum platform is now a smoldering piece of dung. No one loves being told their baby is ugly. Sadly, ugly is putting it politely.
We cracked open the mailbag curious to see what’s left of the ashes, and we found no phoenix. Only more scathing letters. We’re adding another one from Will this week.
Sharing my Story
By Will D.
So nearly a decade ago I logged into my first vBulletin and helped a friend run a forum. It was slick, it did it’s job exceptionally well. Around the time vBulletin 4 came out I purchased and configured my first vBulletin forum and ran it for several years without problems. Regular updates went smoothly, bugs were few and far between and in general the product was simply excellent. I’ve since moved in from that community and shut it down, but it was an exceptional experience.
When I started seeing vBulletin 5 Connect advertisements hit my mailbox I checked out the Beta and saw what I expected to be a huge leap forward in the CMS/Forum software. Recently I found myself needing to setup a CMS and Forums for a non profit and wanted something I was relatively familiar with and would be rock solid. Without a thought I advised we purchase vBulletin 5 Connect assuming it would be vBulletin 4’s feature set improved/expanded…
The product having been released for nearly a year, with the current version of 5.0.5, I assumed most of the early adoption pains would be absent, and that I’d be dealing with a rock solid product that was going to make my life easy.
Imagine my disappointment when I find out that two key features, Calendar and CMS were simply left out of the release. The CMS was expected for 5.1.0… which had a very loose ETA of ‘End of 2013’. The Calendar isn’t even planned at this point! I was stunned.
I took a good look and realized I could limp along with their existing features until 5.1.0 released and went ahead setting up my forums. What I didn’t know is the number of ‘bugs’ I’d run into that would qualify as ‘major’ in my mind that vBulletin support simply accepts as facts of life.
Images have no configuration options in posts… they are supposed to, but it will be fixed in 5.1.1… maybe…
Insert a table and it ignores settings you configure in the UI… it looks fine in the WYSIWYG editor and when you click post goes to the most basic table without any options. vBulletin support’s answer to this? They simply say it’s the way CSS and HTML interact and I need to advise users to use the advanced tab and apply formatting that way… yea, good answer.
At present my forums just went live with a small community of users and I’m frankly looking for an alternative that will give me CMS options with a solid Forum backend… once I find this I’ll be buying it out of my own pocket and migrating away from vBulletin forever.
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