JIRA numbers mean nothing... There are JIRA's for misspelled words in help documents, an extra semi-colon in code, These all count as "bugs." Also counted in JIRA as "issues" (your image) are countless "improvement requests" and "feature requests" which aren't bugs by any definition.

Use the product, I would bet you would be hard pressed to find a bug without looking one up. Most people who use VB 4.x will never run into a real bug, those who do will be hit by one or two.

There is absolutely no intellectually honest way of calling VB4 "bug ridden."

I concur, Jacquii give it a go... it's not like it used to be when it first launched it improved ten fold easy I can assure you.

Sites' statistics is the real answer :0) VB4 is bug free! but we always want to see more features and updates, who doesn't like that. Else complaints by members would have been posted in thousands, we all know that~ ex my site, i don't see anyone complaining that a certain function breaks when x does this or y did that.

Statistics: since 2006 - Just upgraded to VB 4.x last year when i felt it is safe to do it.

http://forum.nihonomaru.com
Threads 229,654
Posts 4,810,512
Members 1,684,229

Use to be around 900+ to 1200+ new registered member daily but thanks to Google and their constant changes http://i.imgur.com/OwXXwcE.png things changed a bit. Some credit back in the days to Vbseo. VB didn't have seo features for VB 3.x. That is why VB 5.x should focus on the right SEO features and make it easy to change your url structure via admin cp, it is very important for any forum software to have a solid SEO. like make good use of tips like these

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogsp...lnext-and.html

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogsp...and%20indexing
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogsp...arch%20results

To this date for instance Vbseo Sitemap is better than VB 4.x sitemap, mainly their smart features with priority based on views, posts, and rating not assigning a certain priority # per an entire category https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthrea...emap+Generator

Example:

Smart Frequency for Show Thread Pages
Select 'Yes' to activate automated page update frequency calculations for each show thread page.
NOTE: Frequency is calculated based on the last modification time.

Smart Priority
Select "Yes" to activate smart priority setting for ALL pages. .... Priority will be automatically calculated for each thread based on (a) views, (b) replies, (c) rating, and (d) number of Linkbacks.

NOTE: If your forum does not have Linkback capability, the smart priority will be calculated based on elements (a) to (c) above.

Now compare to Xenforo, i don't want to even start comparing and contrasting, it is a nightmare with its lack of features, ex it is lacking a Tag feature on Xenforo, you can't tag your threads, the tags aren't in a canonical list on a forum by forum basis.

Nice stats

There is a reason why many companies like 2K Games uses VB (: http://forums.2k.com/ there is no deny in that

https://www.2k.com/
http://forums.2k.com/

How about Funimation - VB
http://www.funimation.com/
http://www.funimation.com/forum/forum.php

They all appear to be using VB 4.x for a reason.

Apparently Joe concurs :P

I've heard this before - but from my perspective - these errors still exist. The fact that we can safely ignore them does not make them any less errors that need to be fixed.


JIRA numbers mean nothing?!
I've been looking through JIRA to see if there's anyway I can confirm what you're saying. Here's an example of what I've found as concerns vB 4:

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/external/2014/03/52.png

I've seen a few examples like the above - where the general response by vB Staff is like:
This is a known issue, you can workaround that by bla bla bla... The bug still marked as confirmed, yet unresolved.

The list in the screencap above is NOT feature & improvement requests. This seems a direct contradiction to what you're saying Joe.

What's most concerning to me is that vB 4 is finished. There's to be no further development or bug fixes? Noone's working on it? It's been abandoned as an unfinished product with confirmed bugs.

Perhaps my eyes are deceiving me? I would like to think not anyway...

I must admit - the last time I attempted to use vB 4 on any of my own personal projects was prior to vB 4.1 ... I'm of the school that the 'upgrade' from vB 3 - vB 4 Gold broke the styling system. vB 3's styling was (and still is imo) much more intuitive than vB 4.

Should be interesting to see the improvements between 4 Gold and 4.2 styling anyway...

J.

Actually Jacquii that list is great...

The actual bugs on that list are mostly related to foreign characters and that is because UTF-8 was never a fully supported feature of VB 4.x, there are functions that just don't work with it.

So if you are using VB 4 in a supported setup (say English) then none of those are problems for you.

Now you say these are all marked as bugs but just reading these I can see that is simply untrue- Look at the notices condition- script name- that "bug" is clearly marked as a "feature request" - http://tracker.vbulletin.com/browse/VBIV-6602 - Absolutely nothing is broken about it, someone is simply requesting we add more options to the notices manager. There are several others listed that seem to be feature requests or improvement requests whether they are listed as bugs are not I don't know (and honestly don't care- because it doesn't really matter) such as- Facebook Connect needs a User CP feature to Opt Out and Usergroup permissions to enable HTML in forums- this has been a long requested feature that was delivered as a feature in VB5. It's not a bug and not likely to come to VB4.

The bug reported by digital point about user merges is legit- http://tracker.vbulletin.com/browse/VBIV-6602 - but it only will hit really big sites with slave databases (I've never seen one in the real world) doing multiple user merges at once which is very few. A great example of a legit bug but it just doesn't affect many people.

Hidden CMS Forum Visible If URL is known - http://tracker.vbulletin.com/browse/VBIV-4785 - another "Improvement Request" - not a bug, not a problem, as designed really.

So in that entire screen shot perhaps there are one or two actual bugs but they don't really affect the vast majority of license holders and fewer still who use the software in a supported environment.

Jacquii, No one said vB4 doesnt have bugs, it does, just like every other forum software.

The general implication of calling something "bug ridden" is that it has so many bugs you will find it hard to use without issue.
Thats just not the case, the vast majority of users will never encounter a bug, and even then in many cases its just trivial (like a mis-spelt word).

Im not sure what your point is exactly, but to imply (as you seem to be trying to do) that vB4 is unstable or unusable is simply untrue.

Well I'm sure you already knew from interacting w/ 4 after it first hit but styling 4.x is different than 3.x used to be. If you're tinkering anytime this week or weekend then check out my article here - it's older but 95% of it still holds true to the style so it can help!

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=256370

Well - the initial purpose of my post:

Then Joe stated something about vB 4 code being stable for years. This seemed curious to me - so I, a bit distracted, wondered aloud how 'stable' a product can be when it has at least 3 pages of user-reported bugs in JIRA. Then the (unwinnable?) battle of semantics: stable, usable, buggy, bug-ridden, etc:

For me = bug ridden does not mean unusable, it simply means there are substantial amount of bugs. And from the look of it - vB 4 has quite a substantial amount of them. vB 5 Connect is just one huge roach.

I'll appreciate you guys' vB 4 bug (feature/improvement request) feedback and concede that it's safe to say vB 4 obviously is stable enough to use in production environments. That's a little difficult to do when you own a script that's much less than the perfection you'd rightfully expect it to be... But I'll do it.

In terms of what this thread is about though (vB vs. XF) --- my point was not at all to insinuate that vB 4 is unusable. These words never came out of my mouth -- and afterall - I have a vB 4 license that I'm planning on using sometime this year... My point is to show that XF is a cleaner script in terms of code bugs/errors when compared with both vB 4 and vB 5.

And don't get me wrong. I'm not 'hating' vBulletin. [s]I simply feel that I am in a position to demand better of a product that I've been a fan of since vB 3.5[/s] I simply feel that WE are in a special position and SHOULD demand better of the product that's struggling to remain #1. We're obligated to do so not only because we've purchased the script, but because we are still fans of it in some way or other. Also because - at the end of the day - these facts still remain: bugs are going unfixed, development has basically stopped as far as vB 4.x is concerned and vB 5 in its current condition seems mired in tar, with seemingly a 2+ year non-plan of a timeline to bring it to usable status.

J.

--------------- Added [DATE]1394660469[/DATE] at [TIME]1394660469[/TIME] ---------------

Oh yes. I had been doing some styling for vB 3 and found the process enjoyable even.

I was completely floored to see the drastic changes made between vB 3's to vB 4's styling system. The vB 4 stylevars seem all over the place. It certainly wasn't intuitive the last time I actually seriously considered coding a vB 4 style anyway.

Thanks for the article link - I'll check it out a little later.

J.