bingo, and ditto!

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..

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

If 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).

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!

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

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

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.

$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. :)

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

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.