1 Yr Later: Is vB4 Better than vB 3.8?

[shaqoneal]

When vBulletin 4 came out back in December '09, there were a lot of compliants of how it's not as good as vBulletin 3.8. Well, it's been over a year now.

In your opinion, is vBulletin 3.8 still better than vBulletin 4?

[mccollin]

It is for me... I love the look and feel of vBulletin 4 vs. the dated look of vBulletin 3, and the CMS is something I've been wanting for a long time. Its not perfect, and it will only get better... but I'm all in on it and loving it.

[rob01]

not really, many good mods got lost forever... :S

[mccollin]

not really, many good mods got lost forever... :S

Thats true, but there are also mods that get lost in point releases because of developers that lose interest. The best part about vB4 for me is that the CMS eliminated 90% of my mods that I considered critical and made them part of the product. Any other mod I can live without.

[Alfa1]

With 1000 bugs, and little functionality improvement in vb4 I see no reason to upgrade.
If the CMS gets fixed up that may change though.

[tocheli]

i am running two homepages, one with vb 4.1 and one with vb 3.8.

4.0 pro's:
- cms
- editor
- blog (categories, image blacement in blog)

4.0 con's:
- handling is not intuitive. some links & options are bad placed and not intuitive! many of my visitors have problems to use the features. many of my visitors have problems to use the forum features. still 4.0 is not really useable fore many users like old peoble ore internet amateurs...
- to many bugs!

my resume: i still do not upgrade my 3.8 installation, even if a have the 4.0 licence.

[Jaffery]

Look has improved but code is mess, looks like the one who handles the look parts of vb4 had nothing to do with efficiency.

[mccollin]

Do you guys have some specific examples of what features in vb4 you find so hard to use? The average forum member does only a few things... they post new threads, they reply to threads, and they search. I've migrated two forums to vb4 and haven't had any complaints about someone not knowing how to use it so far. The moderator functions are a little different, but that Delete Post as Spam function is pretty cool and my mods are liking that. The forum works. The CMS works. I'm not getting what all the negative hoopla is about. I must be missing something.

[MarkBeeson]

My members love vb4. No issues here.
I do have like 12 mods installed but that's fine. I usually always have alot of mods installed. ;]

[worried]

Do you guys have some specific examples of what features in vb4 you find so hard to use? The average forum member does only a few things... they post new threads, they reply to threads, and they search. I've migrated two forums to vb4 and haven't had any complaints about someone not knowing how to use it so far. The moderator functions are a little different, but that Delete Post as Spam function is pretty cool and my mods are liking that. The forum works. The CMS works. I'm not getting what all the negative hoopla is about. I must be missing something.

The enhanced picture uploader. Members, including myself were confused by it. I posted a tutorial but that's confusing as well with all the arrows and numbers explaining how it's used. The old uploader serves our purpose.

[metalguy639]

With 1000 bugs, and little functionality improvement in vb4 I see no reason to upgrade.
If the CMS gets fixed up that may change though.

Agreed 100%. To answer the original poster's question....No.

[Eruantien]

4.0 was been somewhat of a mess for me. I realize my experience may vary from others, but it has been a nightmare managing my site and trying to sort through countless bugs to get rudimentary functionality. I am now searching for a reason why I can't upload images via the CMS to articles. It takes a ridiculous amount of time to fix these small issues.

[conradk]

I agree that Attachment and Album/Gallery stinks. My users have mostly given up. Album handling is terrible. Needs much better pic display features.

The forum is slower than 3.8 and uses more memory/bandwidth. Page loading is slower overall.
Search is inconsistent and mostly unusable.

BUT it is mostly stable now and is what developers are working on.
And I feel like there are fewer security issue/updates.

My approach is to stay a few versions behind now to see what happens, and wait to see what mods are updated.
We're currently running 4.0.8 (just updated).

[shaqoneal]

thanks so much for your feedback. I will stick with 3.8 then and maybe for years to come.

[mccollin]

I'm actually glad in one sense that some of you are writing it off. It will create some differentiation for those who have 3.8 vs. those with 4.x. I hope my competitors decide not to upgrade, quite frankly. I'm actually quite pleased with my site right now. I have gotten rid of a bunch of custom stuff because of the CMS and its working very well for me. The whole site looks fresh and new, and it was minimal work to get it that way. And the more I get into the CSS, the easier I'm finding it to tweak things the way I want.

The biggest improvement I'd like to see is that they integrate the integrate the widgets, forum blocks, and blog sidebar blocks so that its all one architecture. And, I'd like to see more ad management places for articles to be placed, OR, a simple way to drop in your own placement locations into templates, but still manage them via the ad management tool.

But I can certainly work around both of these for now.

The

[conradk]

I don't think I'd advise slowing down your upgrade that much. Given the stability of 4.0.8, I'd say upgrade. The upgrade isn't trivial however. Backup and duplicate your database, and test the upgrade on a new directory to see how it goes.

I caught quite a bit of flack from my users for upgrading the site. I upgraded too early in the 4.x release and should have waited. However, like I said, I have avoided many issues by slowing down the update timeline (unlike 3.8.x update timelines which was driven mostly be exploits). I have not yet enabled CMS and Blog due to some of the bugs that existed in previous versions but will likely do so soon.

A good CSS refresh will freshen up your site just as much as the vBulletin upgrade, so I disagree re: the competitive advantage. Content is what drives site popularity.

[shaqoneal]

so you are saying 4.0.8 is stable?

Just forums alone, because that's all I want (not CMS or blog), is 3.8.6 faster and less resourc-intensive than 4.0.8?

[TNCclubman]

Im still using vB3.8. Too scared to use vB4 on a live environment as its full of bugs.

[Sarteck]

I don't really make much use of the CMS feature, and I could live with or without Blogs, tbh.

With vB 3.8.x, things were a lot easier to handle, especially when it came to design. There wasn't six dozen StyleVars for a heading--you had thead and tcat and other stuff that you could set in ONE PLACE and have it be uniform throughout the entire site. In this vB4, no such luck--if you want to make your own Style(s), you have to sit down and one-by-one see which StyleVar does what to which parts of the page, and half the StyleVars seem to simply not work at all (case in point, see my recent thread about trying to change the background colour of the Profile Sidebar).

And the Search... Gah. Don't get me started... Well, it's really no worse than vB3, I suppose, but in vB3, we were able to replace it with Sphinx. Trying to do so for vB4 met with utter failure.

Maybe it's my inexperience, stupidity, or plain Bad Luck, but vB4's been a lot more of a headache for us than vB3 ever was.

[brandondrury]

I'm still in upgrade-mode, but I've committed to vb4. Getting the theme right has been astronomically more time consuming than I had expected. (BTW, I HIGHLY recommend Opera's "Inspect Element" feature. It smokes Firebug by a zillion.) I gave up on the Style vars and just made my changes in additional.css and that saved me a few days of cussing. Seriously.

It's clear that the admin side of the CMS is not nearly as mature as Wordpress. That's okay, Wordpress is almost 10 years old or something.

Ideally, a fully and perfectly integrated Wordpress with vb 3.8 would be what I would want. However, I played with the mods for those and it was always clunky. So I never really considered that an option. I can't count the number of times I had to figure out how to get the two kids to play nice together (the two kids being vb and Wordpress) or had to perform redundant tasks with differing code.

I used RSS the best I could to more or less "join" the two worlds, but it was always half-cocked at best. Seeing what vB4 is capable of in this department was the big seller for me. They've got this "joining" thing right, at least from the visitor perspective.

For what I need, vB4 is ready to go. I'm really counting on a few contests on my part dramatically escalating the quantity and organization of user activity. We'll see. If I fail, I don't think it's the fault of vB4.

As mentioned, the current theme system of stylevars is something you'd expect from 1998 and is clearly not something that much thought went into.....at least not by a progressive kind of mind.

Seeing "critical" or "high priority" bugs from 4 month sago that still haven't been dealt with has been disappointing.

I seriously considered going with another platform, but I'm still convinced that vB with vbSEO is as good as it gets. It's what my users like, I rank very well in SEs. I can't really complain. I'll have to fight an unideal admin and unideal learning curve in the blog/CMS, but it'll be worth it, I think.

Built-in Facebook integration looks very fun.

I'll most likely be developing my own intensive-tracking system for marketing purposes as well as an intense per-user incentive mod.

I'm really hoping that the vB4 development team will step up their game, tie up all the loose ends, and start applying cutting edge thinking to future features. If not, I'll just have to do it myself.

Maybe it's my inexperience, stupidity, or plain Bad Luck, but vB4's been a lot more of a headache for us than vB3 ever was.
Upgrading for me has been a TOTAL headache. Of course, I'm guessing switching an active community over to a new platform is ALWAYS this way. There are many technical hurdles, but I think the user side is better than anything else out there.

Brandon

[Idawg]

I installed my first 4.0 forum in Feb 2010, and upgraded my 2 biz sites in April. The install of 4 went well, BUT the upgrades crashed BOTH sites, to the point I had to install my current backups 2x before it finally ran. And the mods had not caught up yet, and I had to leave a lot of the mods out. I was and still am VERY disappointed in the upgrade system.

I would recommend a fresh install, but be VERY wary of upgrades from 3.8 to 4.x.x

[conradk]

I should say, that I've only a couple of times gotten over 100 active users at one time. So who knows if it scales the same. But I'm finding 4.0.8 is about as fast and stable as 3.8.x was. And I have a chatbox + sidebar + gallery-what's new on the forum home. Page loads are not generally a problem though I've turned off some 4.x features to speed things up on the forum index - but I didn't really need those anyways. (Should say here that vB3.x was equally inefficient in displaying 'who's on')

Had to turn off Facebook Connect, but that was due to the hang loading the fb logo and fb bots - not a vB problem. Had to restrict Guest access due to bots following all links and causing SQL cpu usage to spike. I'm lucky in that the bloated (due to post/thread cache) file size of the db is not an issue with the hosting provider.

[SamirDarji]

Great feedback guys! I've been sticking with the vb3 platform and will probably continue to do so. I think with the evolution going on in the world of communities, I may drop a forum format completely and go with something else if I can find a product and a company that will back it properly.

[RedWingFan]

When vBulletin 4 came out back in December '09, there were a lot of compliants of how it's not as good as vBulletin 3.8. Well, it's been over a year now.


In your opinion, is vBulletin 3.8 still better than vBulletin 4?

Bought the 4.x license just to keep updated with the 3.7/3.8 series. Set up a test 4.x forum--the moderators don't like it, and the test users didn't like the sluggishness. As the site admin and developer, I don't like the code bloat. And with no native Sphinx support, and a lack of time to dink around with trying to get Sphinx working on 4.x, It's a definite pass.

Short version: "No." vB4 is the last time we buy a license.

[Joey805]

So what happens now that they have stopped allowing maintenance renewals for VB3? Once that expires, we can no longer receive patches and security updates. We are basically FORCED to goto VB4. I did a test upgrade yesterday from VB3.8 and it did not go well. A bunch of errors but I worked through it. I have the test forum up and running now but I do notices freezes and hangs which my VB3.8 forum does not experience. Overall, it just performs slower. I've also run into a few random bugs within the admincp as well.

[Brandon Sheley]

vBulletin 4 works fine for me, if it didn't than I wouldn't of upgraded..

No one is FORCED to do anything.. You always have options
Those that say that, are just looking to argue in my experience

[misuse]

I have been running a dev server since it came out. So far I see no reason to upgrade from 3.8.
The skinning/styling is near impossible for an intermediate user let alone a company that is one of the best template designers in the VB world. They have had their hands tied with template design since before the gold versions came out.

The ad spots are very limited! For those of us that make a living off our sites the spots and ability to ad new spots (there is none) makes VB4 a definate NO UPGRADE.

I feel like IB took over and wants everyone's sites to not make $ and all look the same. It would mean less customer support issues.

It seems now that they are trying to force us to upgrade. Great....

I want to use the new tech but not at the cost of losing $ and dealing with managing nightmares.

I have 3 dedicated servers running my site. My host said they would not support VB4 if upgraded to. Too buggy for them, this was yesterday!

[Joey805]

I have been running a dev server since it came out. So far I see no reason to upgrade from 3.8.
The skinning/styling is near impossible for an intermediate user let alone a company that is one of the best template designers in the VB world. They have had their hands tied with template design since before the gold versions came out.

The ad spots are very limited! For those of us that make a living off our sites the spots and ability to ad new spots (there is none) makes VB4 a definate NO UPGRADE.

I feel like IB took over and wants everyone's sites to not make $ and all look the same. It would mean less customer support issues.

It seems now that they are trying to force us to upgrade. Great....



I agree 100%

[Chase]

I've gone back and forth probably 100 times whether or not I want to upgrade to 4.1.2. Right now I'm on 3.8.4, very happy with it, at the very least I would upgrade to 3.8.7.

I set up a test forum for 4.1.2 and here are some things I've noticed.

- Page load lags... seems to take a little longer to load normal pages, doesn't seem as fluid as 3.x... I am on a semi-dedicated server so it can't be that.

- Editing styles can be very challenging... this could especially be true for new owners with no experience. vB took away the simplicity and made things harder to customize, of course IMO. What drew me to vbulletin 9 years ago was the simplicity of the software... not to bash the developers, but I don't think they took us into consideration. Not everyone is an expert in design and customization.

- Adding tabs or nav links aren't as easy. Shouldn't this be a rather simple procedure? I don't want to deal with crazy conditions.

- And like many others have already stated, it seems like 4.x is more bloated than 3.x.

[Boofo]

- Page load lags... seems to take a little longer to load normal pages, doesn't seem as fluid as 3.x... I am on a semi-dedicated server so it can't be that.

I agree. But you also have to remember how much more is going on in vb 4 than in vb 3.
- Editing styles can be very challenging... this could especially be true for new owners with no experience. vB took away the simplicity and made things harder to customize, of course IMO. What drew me to vbulletin 9 years ago was the simplicity of the software... not to bash the developers, but I don't think they took us into consideration. Not everyone is an expert in design and customization.

Yes and no. CSS is always the best way to go for most things. The only drawback is that there are some things you still cannot do via CSS that you can do with tables.
- Adding tabs or nav links aren't as easy. Shouldn't this be a rather simple procedure? I don't want to deal with crazy conditions.

Once you do it, it is not as daunting as you think. It gets easier.
- And like many others have already stated, it seems like 4.x is more bloated than 3.x.

True, again. But, as I said above, there is more going on in vb 4.

[Brandon Sheley]

The skinning/styling is near impossible for an intermediate user let alone a company that is one of the best template designers in the VB world.

All opinions of course.. I was able to make a few styles that our members liked, I've also seen several nice 4.x styles.
IMO the style system is better than the 3.x series, but again.. just my opinion.

PS.. what's this "best template designers in the VB world" I'll be sure not to recommend them.

The ad spots are very limited! For those of us that make a living off our sites the spots and ability to ad new spots (there is none) makes VB4 a definate NO UPGRADE.
PS.. they are the exact same ones that are in 3.7 +
I feel like IB took over and wants everyone's sites to not make $ and all look the same. It would mean less customer support issues.
Do you have anything to back this claim up?
It seems now that they are trying to force us to upgrade. Great....
Once again, no one is FORCED to do anything.. you always have options
I want to use the new tech but not at the cost of losing $ and dealing with managing nightmares.
Do you generally use the latest and greatest of everything?
Have you ever ran into problems with other items using this route?
I have 3 dedicated servers running my site. My host said they would not support VB4 if upgraded to. Too buggy for them, this was yesterday!
You must have a crappy host than who has no idea what they're talking about :rolleyes:

[misuse]

First off I am not in this to argue. I was just pointing out my experiences with VB4 after running Vbulletin for the last 9 years through all of the series.
I have built a business off a single forum site that now has 16 well paid employees.
My case is not the general little fansite. 350K+ users a month.
My community puts food in the mouth of many. I have to be very careful with which paths I choose. VB4 is not the best option for my business right now...

Originally Posted by misuse
The skinning/styling is near impossible for an intermediate user let alone a company that is one of the best template designers in the VB world.
All opinions of course.. I was able to make a few styles that our members liked, I've also seen several nice 4.x styles.
IMO the style system is better than the 3.x series, but again.. just my opinion.

There is lots of nice color options out there along with header images.
Customization to the templates is all vanilla so far.

PS.. what's this "best template designers in the VB world" I'll be sure not to recommend them.

I found them on this site and he is one of the main guys that everyone has recommended for years! He's done a great job in the past but since vb4 came out he has been stumped with my particular layout. (layout is a big deal in the ad world)

The ad spots are very limited! For those of us that make a living off our sites the spots and ability to ad new spots (there is none) makes VB4 a definate NO UPGRADE.
PS.. they are the exact same ones that are in 3.7 +

Maybe you should research this a little more. http://tracker.vbulletin.com/browse/VBIV-7586

I feel like IB took over and wants everyone's sites to not make $ and all look the same. It would mean less customer support issues.
Do you have anything to back this claim up?

If everyones website looked/worked the same then end users would have the same problems and the customer service would have less gremlins to chase.
In the end the product would be stable and work out of the box just like Apple.

It seems now that they are trying to force us to upgrade. Great....
Once again, no one is FORCED to do anything.. you always have options

They discontinued support for the 3x series at the end of this last month.
Options:
Stick with 3.8 series and hope there is no security holes.
Upgrade to vb4.
Move to PHPBB, SMF or custom. I will probably fork out the $20K for custom.

I want to use the new tech but not at the cost of losing $ and dealing with managing nightmares.
Do you generally use the latest and greatest of everything?
Have you ever ran into problems with other items using this route?

The question was 1 year later... It's not so much new anymore.
Yes I have been known to upgrade my cell phone, video card, processor, servers, drivers, car, truck, office, wife, etc after a year.
Yes I have had problems with new stuff. Especially the wife.

I have 3 dedicated servers running my site. My host said they would not support VB4 if upgraded to. Too buggy for them, this was yesterday!
You must have a crappy host than who has no idea what they're talking about

Because a host that has experience with other big boards going to VB4 does not recommend my company upgrading to VB4 they must be crappy.
They must not know what they are doing with VB.
I will leave them immediatly to whoever you recommend so I can be supported with VB4 server configuration.

VB.org must not know what they are doing. They are not on VB4 either!

Brandon I know you try to make a living off of design and forum set up. I hope you are as busy as can be and wish you success.
The GF forums look good for what they are.
I remember 4K members years ago. It's not easy to get. When you hit 10K members it will start to roll and the next thing you know you are at 80K then 100K+.

[jgt58]

My members love vb4. No issues here.
I do have like 12 mods installed but that's fine. I usually always have alot of mods installed. ;]

12? Is that it? hahaha

[Boofo]

12? Is that it? hahaha

Depends on the mods. Some can use the same resources as having 3 to 5 mods installed.

[Frosty]

I can't decide... Both of them are great, but both are for different types of people. For example, I'd say that vBulletin 4 looks way more "cleaner", and all you have to do is to create forum categories, change logo, and invite users. Everything else looks professional and great, it can be easily optimized. Pretty much it has everything that some average vBulletin Forum Administrator needs.

But, vBulletin 3 is a different story, you can make anything out of it easily, it's made for customization.

So yeah, I'd say that vBulletin 4 is better than vBulletin 3 for those who aren't much familiar with coding and design.

[RedWingFan]

- Page load lags... seems to take a little longer to load normal pages, doesn't seem as fluid as 3.x... I am on a semi-dedicated server so it can't be that.

I have access to a couple of different web servers, including dedicated. vB4 overall is just not as responsive.

- Adding tabs or nav links aren't as easy. Shouldn't this be a rather simple procedure? I don't want to deal with crazy conditions.

Conditions unfortunately are a necessary evil. I've had to do the same myself.

- And like many others have already stated, it seems like 4.x is more bloated than 3.x.

WAY more bloated. 4.x has featuritis. More new features thrown on top of existing features--just overall clumsy coding (and I've coded for a living). vB could be better if it had a ground-up rewrite, and lose all the extras that slow the entire system down. Yes there is "more going on." Bloat does that. Bloat is a waste of CPU cycles. That bloat should never have been added--no important new functionality was added.

With 4.x, vB has turned into the Microsoft Office of forum systems.

How many of these features did we really need? None that I can see. Why don't we TRIM features and instead, work on making the coding more efficient (especially the expensive database queries), and make it a lot more responsive? Why don't we rebuild the template system to something a bit more modern in terms of web standards? C'mon...tables in 2011 for forum layouts? The web HTML coding standards have moved on. vB is stuck in 2005.

On a couple of forums, I've switched over to something completely different and users have overwhelmingly liked it--I've noticed participation has gone up substantially on both. It's much more responsive and has far less clutter and "featuritis;" our members have not really missed all the extras. The emphasis is back on discussions and community interaction...and our members. Which is how it should be.

One final shot on the "forced" comments above, and I'm dropping out of this thread: what choice do we forum license holders have? We either have to convert to vB 4.1 to receive support, or get left in the dark because we can't, or don't want to, convert. Many of us also have a lot of customization in our 3.8.x forums (many of which address shortcomings in vB that STILL haven't been addressed in 4.1, by the way), and it is not feasible to convert to 4.1. So if we want support, yes, we are forced to convert to 4.1. I have never seen the Jelsoft-era vB drop support for older versions this quickly. Us 3.8 and earlier license holders just see this as a throbbing middle finger thrust in our general direction...

[kevinwill]

I currently have Version 4.1.2

what do you guys think about that one?

[Boofo]

Pretty much the same as we think of all vb 4 versions.

[boodog]

Personally, I am quite happy with the upgrade from 3.8 to 4.0. I like the cooler look, CMS, and more. Runs great, looks great and it was the right decision for my forum. A lot of 3.8 sites look dated in comparison to the sleek new 4.0. I've not encountered any significant bugs or have any major complaints. vb support has been excellent and with vBadvanced I have even more control over content.

[Alfa1]

I still see no reason at all to upgrade to vb4. There is nothing in vb4 that I need or that vb3 does not have. Not counting the half baked CMS and the mobile style that does not display the whole suite.
What it does have is 1000+ bugs that I surely do not need.

One thing that vb4 does have is some addons that are not available for vb3. Like digitalpoints sphinx and Cerberus. But other than that, I would not be able to find something we need in vb4.

Even if that would be motivation to update to vb4, I would not be able to due to GARS being stuck on vb3.

[Paul M]

What it does have is 1000+ bugs that I surely do not need.

I love the way people band around this inaccurate figure.

[belowthebelt]

Nope, not here either.... to many good mods should be standard with the base software.

you pay an arm and a leg for it, it should be better equip to handle post management, it simply dose not stack up to v3.x

[Alfa1]

I love the way people band around this inaccurate figure.
Indeed. The real figure is higher, but I excluded anything not 100% confirmed when defining that number of 1064 bugs. As stated it doesnt include design flaws.

But I am glad you like the banding around. :D

Paul, have you found a good reason to update to vb4? Something substantial that vb3 doesnt have, not counting the fact that its the newest.

[DNN]

I would say VB4 is da bomb diggity! =)

[combs]

I dunno, I like being on the latest stable version and recently upgraded. One thing I constantly hate is having to ask if a certain mod will work on an updated version that just goes from say 4.0.7 to 4.0.8. I am currently stuck because I see a lot of the mods I want to use don't work on 4.1.3, so why would I upgrade? What do they have to change so much that makes it not work.

The 2 biggest improvements in VB4 are both terrible.

1. The side blocks are super ugly. I don't see why anybody would use them. They are big bulky, the text is big and ugly and the border around it is as well. You should be able to customize them much easier.

2. The homepage CMS crap. The stuff is way too complicated to figute out between the categories and sections and all of that. I remember I spent two days trying to figure the crap out. It needs to be simplified. It needs to look better. You should be able to build skins for it like wordpress etc.

To be, most VB4 forums all look the same. It's got to be hard to really customize it. I model most of my skins after VB3 style. I wish I could upgrade to 4.1.3 so I can use the skin converter, but again i'd lose a lot of mods.

The forum support is pretty terrible as well. I post simple things I need a little help with and rarely ever get a response.

The worst part is I paid what $200 for an owned license of VB3...and then the discount I get to upgrade to VB is instead of paying $190....I pay $175?? WTF is that.

If the forum I bought wasn't using VB, no way I would have used it again. Vbulletin will probably be close to extinct in the next few years because of the way they screwed over their long time customers to make a quick buck. IPB is superior.

[Joey805]

They should just offer VB4 as another product but continue to support VB 3.8x just for security fixes and such. I would be happy to keep paying for it but don't force us to upgrade to a product that doesn't suit alot of our needs. This is rather a brutal thing to do.

[RWerksman]

After running VB4 on multiple forums for the last year, I can honestly say that I wish I wouldn't have upgraded. There is nothing in VB4, with the exception of a little bit slicker UI, that warrants upgrading. In fact, performance on every single one of my forums has slowed, and I've needed to purchase additional hardware to keep it to a somewhat acceptable level. (which isn't saying much)

After blowing over $1,000 on licenses, I wish I would have either stuck with 3.8 or evaluated other alternatives more heavily. As it sits, I feel like we're just treading water and we're locked in long term after having invested so much - kinda like having a child.

[Alfa1]

I find myself checking out the state of vbulletins competition every day to see how they progress. I hope to see more alternatives to vb and to see the current alternatives progress to a point where migration is possible.

Or maybe vbulletin will surprise me and finally develop into a state that we can all be happy with. But I do not see that happening anytime soon. There are no signs of it. Realistically we should be happy if IB fixes the mess that was created with the vb4.0.0 release. But that would not satisfy my sites needs.

[Boofo]

I'm too old to start learning another board software's coding style, so I'm struck with vb 4 for the duration.

[Alfa1]

I'm too old to start learning another board software's coding style, so I'm struck with vb 4 for the duration.
That is a serious consideration for me as well. I would much rather keep using vbulletin after all the time, energy and money invested in vbulletin. Learning a new system would be like throwing away everything I have learned about vb. But after 4 years of waiting, it seems that vbulletin 4 is not going anywhere near fantastic, within the foreseeable future.

Its interesting to see that various forum software that was previously incomparable to vb is now approaching vbulletin 3 in style and functionality.
And IPB 3.2 looks very promising.
XenForo has a long way to go, but the addon community is already impressive. The lawsuit seems to have done XF a lot of good in that respect.
Joe Ward's Launch.Forum seems an interesting and promising startup.

[Boofo]

I have not heard of "Joe Ward's Launch.Forum" before now. XF doesn't impress me at all. IPB, maybe.

[Alfa1]

<a href="http://launchforum.com/" target="_blank">http://launchforum.com/</a>

Negative stories about IBs troubles with vbulletin 4 has spread widely, so its logical that new companies enter the market and release new forum software. Hopefully we will see more promising startups.

[AusPhotography]

We have been using vB 4 for about 6 months.
Now on 4.1.3 - all very good and I like it better than 3.8

Kym - site tech

[SamirDarji]

With 4.x, vB has turned into the Microsoft Office of forum systems.And it seems that's exactly where they want to be.

Look at what IB uses on their own sites--vb3 and viglink. But they want us to buy vb4 and skimlinks. There's a bit of "do as we say, don't do as we do" going on here....

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Yes I have been known to upgrade my cell phone, video card, processor, servers, drivers, car, truck, office, wife, etc after a year.
Yes I have had problems with new stuff. Especially the wife.LOL!! Funniest thing I've read all day. :)