Version 3.7 Rant

[Skipsoutdoors]

Ok, I'm ranting a little, getting on my soap box, whatever you want to call it.

I've been running vB since the 2.2 something days and getting ready for a major overhaul of the site. I know it needs it and has for a while, that's not exactly what this post is about.

These days if you buy a new computer off the shelf you have to spend a few hours deleting out all the "Software 30 day Trials" "Trial Versions" "Internet Service Options" and other completely useless stuff that takes up space and time.

vB seems to have taken the same tactic as HP, Dell, and every other computer manufacturer. 3.7 has a lot of unneeded, unwanted, and half assed options on it that the majority of us I feel like are going to end up removing, deleting, and replacing.

Most big boards are running some sort of ad management scrip to keep track of the money making advertisements. I've been using Red Tyger's version for over a year now modified quite a bit to suit my needs. 3.7 has ad templates built into it all over the place but no central controlling menu to handle rotating banners, rotating scripts etc. Otherwords, it's not really what we need, just some junk that if you wanted to you could stick an ad here or there. They said they were doing it to make upgrades easier without having to disable plug ins. Yeah, right. Done like most people are operating their boards, they haven't solved anything.

A lot of larger boards are also using a 3rd party photo cataloger such as photopost or photoplog. I'd added photopost to one of my smaller sites in prep for bringing it over to the largest site. Then I see that 3.7 has a built in photo album, but wait, it's a half assed version like that Quicken that came on a new HP that won't balance a checking account unless you pay for a different version. A member can upload phots and create an album but that album doesn't combine with other albums to create a page others can see. People can't even add comments to the photos if they did manage to find them through the member listing. I'm sure someone will come up with an add on that fixes that, but why can't the geniuses designing the software fix this to where it function like 99.9% of the people that use a photo add on set theirs up to do. As is, it will only confuse users as to where they are supposed to upload their photos.

As for the photos, that I can find, they've yet to include a image handler routine using GD or image magic that will resize uploads to the forum automatically preventing someone from loading a 1200 px wide picture and blowing the forums out to the right.

For the ones running larger boards and having to take serious steps to reduce bandwidth, server time, storage, and other issues similarly related, this just seems to me like another issue of having to serve oodlins of HTML and scripts and such that aren't doing anything for us and are really just in the way.

I think I understand their logic. I suppose they want to create a website script that is all things to all users. It does a little bit of everything so everyone can have a piece of the pie. At the same time, it's creating issues for the larger web sites.

What would be nice for us, IMO, is if they would make a basic version of vB and set all this other stuff up as plugins that if you wanted it, you could download it and use, but if you didn't, then you wouldn't have to deal with it being there, having to serve it or spend hours or days removing it such that each upgrade becomes a royal pain in the tail.

Skip

[nexialys]

i see your point, but you're a 2.x fan, so you will have to keep in mind that a change of major version means also a change of technologies...

the 2.x is like a nintendo.. it do what he do best, play games... a 3.x is more like a PC... have more options, lot of gadgets... and as developped by Microsoft, your OS is filled with strange things...

buy a Mac ?!... deactivate a lot of things in 3.7 is easier.. lol

[Zachery]

As for the photos, that I can find, they've yet to include a image handler routine using GD or image magic that will resize uploads to the forum automatically preventing someone from loading a 1200 px wide picture and blowing the forums out to the right. If you UPLOAD (ATTACH, not LINK) a picture, it will be thumbnailed according to what you want the maxium size of a picture to be, Infact this has been there since 3.5.

[Marco van Herwaarden]

I am afraid you posted your rant at the wrong forum. If you want to reach the developers and make your voice heard among other customers as input for changes made inot vBulletin, then you should post at vBulletin.com, not here.

[SEOvB]

Ok, I'm ranting a little, getting on my soap box, whatever you want to call it.

I've been running vB since the 2.2 something days and getting ready for a major overhaul of the site. I know it needs it and has for a while, that's not exactly what this post is about.

These days if you buy a new computer off the shelf you have to spend a few hours deleting out all the "Software 30 day Trials" "Trial Versions" "Internet Service Options" and other completely useless stuff that takes up space and time.

vB seems to have taken the same tactic as HP, Dell, and every other computer manufacturer. 3.7 has a lot of unneeded, unwanted, and half assed options on it that the majority of us I feel like are going to end up removing, deleting, and replacing.


Blah Blah

Most big boards are running some sort of ad management scrip to keep track of the money making advertisements. I've been using Red Tyger's version for over a year now modified quite a bit to suit my needs. 3.7 has ad templates built into it all over the place but no central controlling menu to handle rotating banners, rotating scripts etc. Otherwords, it's not really what we need, just some junk that if you wanted to you could stick an ad here or there. They said they were doing it to make upgrades easier without having to disable plug ins. Yeah, right. Done like most people are operating their boards, they haven't solved anything.


Everything comes developed in steps and over time. I'm sure eventually (maybe 4.0) They'll improve the advertisement sections

A lot of larger boards are also using a 3rd party photo cataloger such as photopost or photoplog. I'd added photopost to one of my smaller sites in prep for bringing it over to the largest site. Then I see that 3.7 has a built in photo album, but wait, it's a half assed version like that Quicken that came on a new HP that won't balance a checking account unless you pay for a different version. A member can upload phots and create an album but that album doesn't combine with other albums to create a page others can see. People can't even add comments to the photos if they did manage to find them through the member listing. I'm sure someone will come up with an add on that fixes that, but why can't the geniuses designing the software fix this to where it function like 99.9% of the people that use a photo add on set theirs up to do. As is, it will only confuse users as to where they are supposed to upload their photos.


Because its a forum software? Again, as i'm sure time goes on these new features will be developed more. And I don't see where you're having a problem finding the user albums, There is a block on the profile page that lets you view them straight from there? And there is a link to view all of that users albums. I'm sure within days of the release someone will have a view every album page ready :)


As for the photos, that I can find, they've yet to include a image handler routine using GD or image magic that will resize uploads to the forum automatically preventing someone from loading a 1200 px wide picture and blowing the forums out to the right.


As already stated, this has been in place since 3.5 days.


For the ones running larger boards and having to take serious steps to reduce bandwidth, server time, storage, and other issues similarly related, this just seems to me like another issue of having to serve oodlins of HTML and scripts and such that aren't doing anything for us and are really just in the way.


Yet, you admit to having your current vBulletin loaded with basically the same modifications, that just aren't as polished yet.

I think I understand their logic. I suppose they want to create a website script that is all things to all users. It does a little bit of everything so everyone can have a piece of the pie. At the same time, it's creating issues for the larger web sites.

What would be nice for us, IMO, is if they would make a basic version of vB and set all this other stuff up as plugins that if you wanted it, you could download it and use, but if you didn't, then you wouldn't have to deal with it being there, having to serve it or spend hours or days removing it such that each upgrade becomes a royal pain in the tail.

Skip

Just about everything can be enabled or disabled from the settings menus.

Hopefully vBulletin does polish some of these features up over time, and increase the usability or it all, but as it currently stands I can see where they are going over time with everything, and I do beleive it's in the correct direction. Everything just takes a little time :)

[Loanmanken]

Well you don't have to upgrade. I would not call vB bloat ware...just remember you pay for what you get. I am not to fond of how the new profile page is designed but that is easy to fix.

[Zaiaku]

There's alot of things I would like to see vb changed, and there's things I would complain about like why doublepost prevention is not a standard feature and yet is a major concern on many if not most boards. But if you an earlier version over another, you was never forced to upgrade. In fact you can still download vb 2.3.5 from the vb.com.

[Awjvail]

TBH, I won't be upgrading to 3.7 any time soon. 3.6.8 does me just fine for now and it's more trouble than its worth to upgrade.

[incurable]

Upgrading or not has always been a pain to me. lol.

[Alfa1]

I see your point. It is amazing that certain features in vbulletin are just not even halfway finished. But at the same time, Jelsoft does lay out a lot of foundation for vb.org coders to expand on. It seems that Jelsoft is choosing to release a wide array of basic functionality, in the hope that vb.org coders will release a large number of addons.

[Yours]

I see your point. It is amazing that certain features in vbulletin are just not even halfway finished. But at the same time, Jelsoft does lay out a lot of foundation for vb.org coders to expand on. It seems that Jelsoft is choosing to release a wide array of basic functionality, in the hope that vb.org coders will release a large number of addons.

We should also realize that it is still just the BETA version that is out, so they may still be working on the scripts but want testers to find bugs on the way. I would rather it be given to us in pieces that work rather than in one big chunk that doesn't work at all.

[Alfa1]

There will not be any real additions in functionality between the beta release and the full release. Only bug fixes and small improvements. IMO we have received a nice upgrade of functionality and will need to wait for vb 4 to receive more.

[Yours]

I have been messing around with the settings and to be honest it is MUCH improved. Some of the mods like the thread prefixis and the Human Authentication upon registration was very nice, I wanted them and didnt want to have to install the mod to do so.

[therogueforums]

I haven't installed it yet, still waiting for the stable version, but I will say I am saddened there are not more built-in SEO options.

[Yours]

I haven't installed it yet, still waiting for the stable version, but I will say I am saddened there are not more built-in SEO options.

I agree with you on that one. But what they did add was a godsend. Had most of the mods I was going to install anyways. Saved me about 2 hours of template edits.

[Alfa1]

I agree that they did include a lot of functionality that I had set up with mods. I do like this functionality upgrade a lot.

Still some things are hard to understand. Like the weird image gallery without functionality.

[Rich]

As a coder, I have found all sorts of different uses for some of the features. If you don't like the added features, don't use them. If you want them to function differently, modify them or put in a request on the .org to see if a coder is up to the challenge.

Completely knocking the added functionality though is a bit harsh. As stated, it opens all sorts of doors for new modifications.

[TECK]

Edit: We are in the big boards forum, so I presume you have over 5 million posts and a ton of users online.
I removed the above comment. It is not fair to the developers. :)

Blah Blah
What do you mean by Blah Blah.. he is right. ;)

[Kittencare]

Have you got any details on that TECK? 5%? 10%? 25%?

[TECK]

Just install ApacheBench or http_load try it. :)
I cannot post the percent because it actually depends a lot on what server you run your board.
I also removed the comment because it is not fair to post something like that.

Those guys worked hard and they deserve credit.

[Kittencare]

Well why not just publish it? If it's 5% it's expected, if it's 30% it needs to get out and be looked at.

[AWS]

I can't believe some of the comments in this thread. Anyone that owns a big board knows vbulletin lacks in performance. You have to shutoff those extras in order to keep the sites online. Search? Forget about it. You have to look for other solutions because vbulletins search chokes on a big board.
I can understand the ops frustration. Nothing to ease the pain for big board owners is this release and because of the closed mouth status of the devs we don't know for sure if anything in 4.0, which is supposed to be nearing the programming stage, will ease our pain. Heck, we've been waiting 5 years for postgresql or sql server support.

Features are nice, but, if you can't use them what good are they?

[Awjvail]

Just a question: When stable is released, will a list of all modified templates be included as well?

[ssslippy]

They alware are and there is a listing in the admin CP as usuall and you can even compare the changes.

[BamaStangGuy]

Ok, I'm ranting a little, getting on my soap box, whatever you want to call it.

I've been running vB since the 2.2 something days and getting ready for a major overhaul of the site. I know it needs it and has for a while, that's not exactly what this post is about.

These days if you buy a new computer off the shelf you have to spend a few hours deleting out all the "Software 30 day Trials" "Trial Versions" "Internet Service Options" and other completely useless stuff that takes up space and time.

vB seems to have taken the same tactic as HP, Dell, and every other computer manufacturer. 3.7 has a lot of unneeded, unwanted, and half assed options on it that the majority of us I feel like are going to end up removing, deleting, and replacing.

Most big boards are running some sort of ad management scrip to keep track of the money making advertisements. I've been using Red Tyger's version for over a year now modified quite a bit to suit my needs. 3.7 has ad templates built into it all over the place but no central controlling menu to handle rotating banners, rotating scripts etc. Otherwords, it's not really what we need, just some junk that if you wanted to you could stick an ad here or there. They said they were doing it to make upgrades easier without having to disable plug ins. Yeah, right. Done like most people are operating their boards, they haven't solved anything.

A lot of larger boards are also using a 3rd party photo cataloger such as photopost or photoplog. I'd added photopost to one of my smaller sites in prep for bringing it over to the largest site. Then I see that 3.7 has a built in photo album, but wait, it's a half assed version like that Quicken that came on a new HP that won't balance a checking account unless you pay for a different version. A member can upload phots and create an album but that album doesn't combine with other albums to create a page others can see. People can't even add comments to the photos if they did manage to find them through the member listing. I'm sure someone will come up with an add on that fixes that, but why can't the geniuses designing the software fix this to where it function like 99.9% of the people that use a photo add on set theirs up to do. As is, it will only confuse users as to where they are supposed to upload their photos.

As for the photos, that I can find, they've yet to include a image handler routine using GD or image magic that will resize uploads to the forum automatically preventing someone from loading a 1200 px wide picture and blowing the forums out to the right.

For the ones running larger boards and having to take serious steps to reduce bandwidth, server time, storage, and other issues similarly related, this just seems to me like another issue of having to serve oodlins of HTML and scripts and such that aren't doing anything for us and are really just in the way.

I think I understand their logic. I suppose they want to create a website script that is all things to all users. It does a little bit of everything so everyone can have a piece of the pie. At the same time, it's creating issues for the larger web sites.

What would be nice for us, IMO, is if they would make a basic version of vB and set all this other stuff up as plugins that if you wanted it, you could download it and use, but if you didn't, then you wouldn't have to deal with it being there, having to serve it or spend hours or days removing it such that each upgrade becomes a royal pain in the tail.

Skip
I agree with your post. 3.7 is nothing but bloat imo. vBulletin seems to be half assing a bunch of the new features they throw in. The Tagging system in Beta 1 was absolutely pathetic. So much so that they had to change it because of all the complaints. The "ad management" sucks. The sad thing is that once these features go in they are there to stay. So this bloat doesn't go away. vBulletin 4 needs to be less about new crap and more about paying attention to the people running large forums who are tired of having to hack up their forum to keep it up on serious hardware.

I can't believe some of the comments in this thread. Anyone that owns a big board knows vbulletin lacks in performance. You have to shutoff those extras in order to keep the sites online. Search? Forget about it. You have to look for other solutions because vbulletins search chokes on a big board.
I can understand the ops frustration. Nothing to ease the pain for big board owners is this release and because of the closed mouth status of the devs we don't know for sure if anything in 4.0, which is supposed to be nearing the programming stage, will ease our pain. Heck, we've been waiting 5 years for postgresql or sql server support.

Features are nice, but, if you can't use them what good are they?
Unfortunately, even though this is in the description:

Please only post about issues running an existing Big Board here.

No one reads it and it ends up being just a few people who actually run large forums and more people asking dumb questions. That's why you can't believe some of the posts in this thread.

[TECK]

Some of the people want to find out more from experts who run huge boards how is it, out of curiosity. But ya, most people don't care this is large forum discussion. I read threads about people posting that they have one server powered by a Celeron processor and they run a "big" board. Ya, right. :)

[FlyBoy73]

I can't believe some of the comments in this thread. Anyone that owns a big board knows vbulletin lacks in performance. You have to shutoff those extras in order to keep the sites online. Search? Forget about it. You have to look for other solutions because vbulletins search chokes on a big board.
I can understand the ops frustration. Nothing to ease the pain for big board owners is this release and because of the closed mouth status of the devs we don't know for sure if anything in 4.0, which is supposed to be nearing the programming stage, will ease our pain. Heck, we've been waiting 5 years for postgresql or sql server support.

Features are nice, but, if you can't use them what good are they?

Simple solution... Add more servers.. ;) Hey, its just money, right? :p

I know most people use leased dedicated servers rather than buying their own servers and colo'ing them for their "big boards"; however, as vBulletin grows with features and what some call bloat, server performance is growing at a similar or faster pace.

It hasn't been 2 years since I purchased a Quad Opteron server with 6x 15K SAS drives running RAID 10 & 1 (I think, lol).. Back then that was a monster that people in the DC drooled over when I rolled it in and racked it up.. Now days you have Quad Core Chips and 15K SAS drives are more standard.. The price of the new servers with monster specs are less than when my quad opteron was back then and packs so much more processing power. My Quad Opteron still handles my primary Big-Board and a second one that has reached that "status" (according to B-B) and it still handles it quite well. I'm about to upgrade to 3.6.8 and add a bunch of hacks and new scripts etc.. Soon after that I will be adding a dedicated http server and making the existing opteron a dedicated database server..

I guess where I am going with this (loooong winded) is that as vBulletin grows, so does the level of performance with servers (across the board) that host it.. I was speaking about colo'd servers but when you compare leased dedicated servers from 3 years ago and today, you will see improvements for the same $$ as well..

And besides, if you really do have a "Big Board", you should be able to monitize it and afford the hosting that it requires..

Just my 2 cents of course..

David

[AWS]

I've posted several times at vbulletin.com about things need to be added in order for the product to scale on big sites. I've been doing it since my first forum hit the wall 6 years ago. The standard answer I got was add more hardware. More hardware isn't the answer all the time. On my busiest forum I already run 4 servers. Search does not work and pruning, another answer you'll get, is not an option. This is a private forum by invite only and my members would kill me if I deleted any or the 7MIL posts. What is needed is a true archive system with a separate search engine. This would allow us to move older threads out of the db keeping it down to a size that is searchable and fast.
My take is vbulletin only cares about selling the software. They'll add useless features until they're blue in the face as long as it sells the product. What they don't care about, or if they do don't say, is once your forum reaches big board status things start to slow down drastically.
IMHO, they could care less about optimizing vbulletin for big boards because they already got our money.

[FlyBoy73]

I read threads about people posting that they have one server powered by a Celeron processor and they run a "big" board. Ya, right. :)

lol... I wish.. Maybe with 30 second + page generation times.. If at all..

--------------- Added 1199311534 at 1199311534 ---------------

Adding hardward definitely isn't the end-all, be-all.. But, having good equipment definitely does help. Optimizing it is even more important.

Here is an example.. I used to have (3) Dual Xeon servers prior to my purchase of the single Quad Opteron, and the single Quad Opteron blew the doors off the three seperate servers hands down.

Both myself and another forum owner (we both at the time had well over a million posts and usually 1,000++ active members online with a 30 minute refresh) stuidies up and spoke to a lot of people (like Marco VH, Eva2000, etc) as well as other BB forum owners trying to find the right marriage.. We found it with fast hard drives, fair amount of RAM (8 gigs) and good processors.. ((btw,I know this has all been discussed in other threads))
I've got 3.2 million posts now, 132k members, and over 2,400 online at this moment...
I've also got a fair amount of hacks.. And I'm running a load of about 1.56 at the moment.. That also includes sever other forums. (The board stats mentioned above is running 3.5.4)

At least to me... That isn't too bad.. We'll see how it does once I upgrade that one to 3.6.8 status all hacked out.. Oh, and btw.. The other BB hosted on this server is running 3.7 with about 5 hacks..

I'm in no way saying vB isn't heavy on code and modifications out of the box, but I think a lot depends on what you are powering it with..

AWS, What is your PHP Memory Limit set at? I've had to bump mine up a few times to keep the search feature 'happy'.. I agree it definitely is hungry..

Lastly, I will NEVER EVER purge posts... I think it is the cardinal sin (well, one of them) of admin mistakes..

David

I've posted several times at vbulletin.com about things need to be added in order for the product to scale on big sites. I've been doing it since my first forum hit the wall 6 years ago. The standard answer I got was add more hardware. More hardware isn't the answer all the time. On my busiest forum I already run 4 servers. Search does not work and pruning, another answer you'll get, is not an option. This is a private forum by invite only and my members would kill me if I deleted any or the 7MIL posts. What is needed is a true archive system with a separate search engine. This would allow us to move older threads out of the db keeping it down to a size that is searchable and fast.
My take is vbulletin only cares about selling the software. They'll add useless features until they're blue in the face as long as it sells the product. What they don't care about, or if they do don't say, is once your forum reaches big board status things start to slow down drastically.
IMHO, they could care less about optimizing vbulletin for big boards because they already got our money.

[alexi]

I've posted several times at vbulletin.com about things need to be added in order for the product to scale on big sites. I've been doing it since my first forum hit the wall 6 years ago. The standard answer I got was add more hardware. More hardware isn't the answer all the time. On my busiest forum I already run 4 servers. Search does not work and pruning, another answer you'll get, is not an option. This is a private forum by invite only and my members would kill me if I deleted any or the 7MIL posts. What is needed is a true archive system with a separate search engine. This would allow us to move older threads out of the db keeping it down to a size that is searchable and fast.
My take is vbulletin only cares about selling the software. They'll add useless features until they're blue in the face as long as it sells the product. What they don't care about, or if they do don't say, is once your forum reaches big board status things start to slow down drastically.
IMHO, they could care less about optimizing vbulletin for big boards because they already got our money.

I think the logic is pretty clear. At $125.00 a copy they need to sell volume in order to make money. There are not enough big boards to even come close to paying the bills, but new features help sell to the 1000's of small boards. I have always thought they should have an "enterprise" version with features that cater to the big boards. I would pay significantly more for such a service

[SCRIPT3R]

I think the logic is pretty clear. At $125.00 a copy they need to sell volume in order to make money. There are not enough big boards to even come close to paying the bills, but new features help sell to the 1000's of small boards. I have always thought they should have an "enterprise" version with features that cater to the big boards. I would pay significantly more for such a service
bingo, and ditto!

[FlyBoy73]

I think the logic is pretty clear. At $125.00 a copy they need to sell volume in order to make money. There are not enough big boards to even come close to paying the bills, but new features help sell to the 1000's of small boards. I have always thought they should have an "enterprise" version with features that cater to the big boards. I would pay significantly more for such a service

I totally agree... And I would definitely pay more as well. I still can't believe they are charging the same as when I bought my first license in 2001..

[Adrian Schneider]

I mostly agree... a feature release which many big board owners will consider bloat.

I think the logic is pretty clear. At $125.00 a copy they need to sell volume in order to make money. There are not enough big boards to even come close to paying the bills, but new features help sell to the 1000's of small boards. I have always thought they should have an "enterprise" version with features that cater to the big boards. I would pay significantly more for such a serviceIf they want to have a community to back their product, they need to start catering to the big board owners more. They are the ones who have been around the longest, and are the ones who help the new site owners. Maybe they will consider some sort of enterprise version of the software. Less goodies, more performance, with more options for like searching, templates, plugins, etc. All the weak spots. If they don't, admins might turn to actual enterprise level forum solutions.

Adding new hardware obviously helps, but if the software is the weakest link, then it should either be improved or removed.

I've worked with many big boards and efficiency is always the #1 problem. Look at SitePoint... it usually takes me 10-30 seconds to perform a vB search. It's completely unacceptable. Of all sites, I'm sure they have the resources for decent hardware (and use them wisely).

[FlyBoy73]

Is there an enterprise software solution that you believe is better than vBulletin, especially in the resources department? I haven't found one, though I haven't looked in over a year.. In either windows or linux..

I know some big board's that moved to them from vb, such as www.rcuniverse.com a long time ago, and they were much more resource intensive.. At least, the page load times were horrible until they added more equipment..

I'm not all that brand loyal, but vB has been the best that I have seen for a long time.. That and the hack community is incredible..

Always willing to learn more!

[TECK]

Features are nice, but, if you can't use them what good are they?

VB 4.0 will have postgresql support. Thank God! We can unleash some real SQL performance. :)
But when it will be out???

[AWS]

RC Universe uses asp.net playground or some name like that. It is an a .net/mssql forum package.

All the weak spots. If they don't, admins might turn to actual enterprise level forum solutions.

I have moved one of my 2 bigs boards to community server and the one I'm having problems with I'll move as soon as I tweak the import controls for cs3. CS is an enterprise solution and it cost me plenty. Performance gains more than paid for it however.

[TECK]

$2500 for the CS enterprise license. You pay two and half larges but you save the cost of 3 servers, 2 grands a pop... go figure. For sure it is worth every penny. The real solution is to use an Oracle database, Microsoft SQL is simply insulting. So I guess for me the solution is to stick with the upcoming PostgreSQL support in VB4 and hope that a miracle will happen related to performance... unless there is a new piece of software that truly focuses on that important part.

I agree that the best thing CS does is to focus on code performance, not on useless "gadgets".

That's the reason why many people will pay a high price tag for CS. I will pay in an instance a high price like that for an equivalent piece of software based on PHP and PostgreSQL.

Let's don't forget that Facebook is run entirely in Unix/PHP. Only their memcached web cluster has 200 servers with 16GB of RAM per box. So there is room for a good product written in PHP language that is scaled for performance, not crazy options.

Edit: But I don't blame the vBulletin developers, really. The guys work their asses off day and night to satisfy the masses who come up with stupid requests and don't have not even an ounce of experience on server maintenance or programming. If some kiddo starts a trend and wants to have a new facebook on his site, a million others want it also. Those people never think what is the result of their request.

The devs sleep like 4hours/night (sometimes) just to code a stupid profile gadget, because it was requested. I respect them a lot for their white nights... I know that because I passed through this also. That's also the reason why I get mad at people here, because it makes me go ballistic when I see the total lack of interest for code efficiency and server performance. I remember when people used to release hacks here at vb.org that generated 70 queries per page.. simply insane. Heh, what do you expect, those people run vBulletin on a shared account with 5 users online. I want to see them dealing with a farm of 20 servers, while the disks are almost getting on fire, due to the intense MySQL reads.

Those people have no idea what is that an unix box and how hard is to maintain it properly... but they are the first ones to request a ton of crap features... just because they find it "cool".

How many people install here products or code modifications without even asking one second: "Wait a minute, is this thing I just installed good for my server performance?" No, all they care is that it looks good. But they never wonder why none (or maybe 2-3 of them) of the hacks available at vb.org are installed by vBulletin developers or serious programmers.

AWS, I know exactly where are you coming from and I understand totally your frustration.
It justifies totally your move to CS... and your money are well spent, because I know you are a Server 2003 guy, not like me... a CentOS lover. :)

[Tallis]

I think you should be able to choose the extra features (that you were ranting about) on the same page where you choose what version of vBulletin you want to download, what format you want it to be in, etc.

That would be a nice addition :P

[Kittencare]

I don't understand why features like Tagging, Extended Profiles and those new "Usergroups" aren't released as addons.

I also don't understand why they don't finally pull through with the OO. Classes like Search or UserAuthentication with a defined set of public functions could easily be replaced by other code, allowing easy Sphinx integration or authenticating users from other sources (how old is that thread on vb.com? 5 years?). Not supporting PostgreSQL after so many years is a joke too, they can't be using that many MySQL specific code, and if they do, it's bad anyway.

New features are fine, alexi is correct, they need to, but it isn't all that hard to pay a tiny of attention to the bigger boards. Nobody is asking for a all-in-one solution for all problems but at least some attention would do much.

[Zachery]

I don't understand why features like Tagging, Extended Profiles and those new "Usergroups" aren't released as addons.

I also don't understand why they don't finally pull through with the OO. Classes like Search or UserAuthentication with a defined set of public functions could easily be replaced by other code, allowing easy Sphinx integration or authenticating users from other sources (how old is that thread on vb.com? 5 years?). Not supporting PostgreSQL after so many years is a joke too, they can't be using that many MySQL specific code, and if they do, it's bad anyway.

New features are fine, alexi is correct, they need to, but it isn't all that hard to pay a tiny of attention to the bigger boards. Nobody is asking for a all-in-one solution for all problems but at least some attention would do much.
Big changes can't happen over night.

[Kittencare]

Whatever haha

[AWS]

Big changes can't happen over night.
You're right.
They make take 10 or 12 years and we're only in year 6 waiting for support for other RDBMs.

[Jan Klerks]

The needs of a big forum are quite different from the needs of a small board. I'm not sure if that one-size-fits-all strategy is the best way to go these days. I'd by happy to pay a lot more then what I do now for a pro version of vB dedicated to professional big forum users.

[alexi]

I have been wondering if there isn't an opportunity for someone here. If VB doesn't want to take the time to come up with an Enterprise version I wonder if they would consider a licensing agreement with someone who could. If someone could work with them directly so that hooks could be in the proper place etc and they would have direct access to the developers so they could see what was coming and understand the internal workings they could do a pretty decent job, pay Jelsoft a royalty and everyone could be happy.
Basically the "big boards" would buy their vbulletin or pay their annual fee to the third party who would pay a royalty to Jelsoft