It is getting quite old.... seems like on every admin forum, that is the only thing people can do. Suggestion.... can we have just ONE central thread where people can complain about it.... this way it does not pollute the rest of the forum. Seeing so many posts across all of them is just getting me to the point of wanting to stop visiting and contributing to the admin forums in general. this is what brought it on.... http://www.theadminzone.com/forums/showthread.php?t=101258
We saw the same thing when vbulletin 4 was released over at AdminAddict.com as well. I guess when a company gives it's users the "product" it did, the users will pick it apart and express their concerns about what they like and don't like. I hope vbulletin 5 will turn out to be a great product like vb 4 has, unfortunately I think it'll take a year before we even get close to that point, just like it did with vb 4.
If you read the forums at vBulletin.COM and see how "support" treats its customers you would be upset too. vB4 just needs a few things fixed (mainly updated CKeditor) and it would be fine, but supports attitude is too bad, if you want that stuff to work upgrade to vb5. I don't want to leave vBulletin, but its almost like they are wanting us to move somewhere else.
I completely agree, in fact I really like the site builder. It's just at the moment there are some really bad aspects of the framework, the performance would be a big in in my opinion. Once the team is able to get that under control I have a feeling the complaining will be less.
Today I found myself interested in vb4 for once so I decided to stay. Goodbye to XF. VB still has their history which from it there are many good modifications and article. What is more like I said before, I love thing famillar. VB is always a good choice.
I really tried hard to fall in love with XenForo, and as a software.... for a basic board, it is awesome... but it is not a complete solution. VB and IPB are by far the only complete solutions out there.
Of course Vbulletin is more complete in its older versions, but Xenforo has made huge headway. And I honestly no longer trust the Vbulletin brand. Even though, it has some better, more complete, features as you put it, they have destroyed the customer trust. I doubt they will ever recover from the loss of that, even if they fix all the VB5 problems. Vbulletin became a money grab, nothing more , nothing less. And it really is a shame, because it was such a solid, trusted product. The brand is essentially dead. The product may not be, but other than that they have lost the luster they once had. In my opinion they would be better off rebranding it with a new name and starting over, some kind of relaunch would be better for their company. Otherwise they will continue to lose customers and support of the forum community.
I dont think that vbulletin is dead as a brand or product, but I do think that its dead in the eyes of a lot of customers, including mine. I hope they somehow fix their product, their reputation and their ethics or sell to a company capable of doing so. vb5 indeed has some great ideas and features. However the execution is so bad that I dont think it will become good without a full rewrite / redesign which would take years. Unfortunately the code base is so bad that fixing a few thousand bugs will probably lead to new bugs replacing the old ones. I have been working with badly coded software in the past and that was a never ending drama. I am not interested in repeating such experiment. Especially not with millions of users active on my sites.
As a non VB customer... here is what I will tell you..... VB5 is the FIRST vb product that I like.... I can understand why the VB3 and VB4 fanboys don't like it.... however as an outsider... well, put it this way, it made me put my money where mouth is. Am I going to convert my big forum from IPB to VB5? No. But... I am going to launch a new project, or convert a forum I am acquiring from 4 to 5. Page Builder.... FAWKING AWESOME! How easy it is to modify a page on the fly? AWESOME!
Yes, I agree with you there. Vb5 has some awesome concepts implemented. It looks like someone took a very good look at the feedback forums and made a list of highly popular functionality. This is what made me very enthusiastic about Vb5 before it was revealed. When I saw the implementation my enthusiasm tempered. The implementation of these great concepts is poor and does not give a good user experience. To me it seems as a list of really cool features was handed to someone who had little clue about the original suggestions nor about user experience design. It seems as if features were simply ticked off from the list. Take the notification system for example. This looks like a 2002 version of Facebooks notifications. It's nothing short of laughable. When I saw the underlying code and read the extremely negative expert opinions I realised that Vb5 will not be a solid basis for highly active big boards.
I installed XENFORO and VB5 on a test server, then imported my site into each. The conversion from vb 4.2 to Xenforo took two days. The conversion from vb 4.2 to 5.0.1 took 5 days and the rebuilding of the search index is still going. I have a very large board with over 3 million posts. The Xenforo did great at the import, only missing my subscription expiration dates for my paid membership usergroup. The vBulletin 5 didn't do so good, giving me errors along the way requiring me to contact support and being told it was a bug and it was listed in the Jira. But they gave me a workaround of stuff to delete in my database and I was good to go. It finished however it did not import my avatars, and I am not sure why that is or how to get them in vb5. Xenforo pages pop up in less then a second, while vb5 pages take about 6 seconds to load up.. both test sites are on the same server. I don't want to move away from vB but I need them to update the CKeditor. I am tired of being told if I want to properly support IE 10 to upgrade to vb5. VB5 might be nice, but its not ready yet. And from what I see it has a long way to go.
How did you convert to vb5? Or did you mean you upgraded from 4.2? As far as I have seen the converters aren't ready yet and will not work to convert anything to vb5.
Simply upload all vb5 files into your host, make sure to delete all file relate to vb4 first. And run upgrade.php. Yet it won't convert all the thing to vb5 but it still works nicely.
I converted a 1 million post forum from vB 4.2 to xenForo in less than 1 1/2 hours. It is all about optimizing your server and the importer. Jake pointed out a tip that helped a lot but you will need to adjust php.ini and my.cnf settings to prevent timeouts (having a fast harddrive, lots of memory and nice processors helps as well, obviously)