When did you *start* trusting them? I stopped trusting the vb development team when most of them left in 2009, and nothing released since has gained it back.

First- no matter what- even when staff accidentally say we have been suppressing errors since 2002, they mean warnings. PHP warnings. We have been suppressing warnings only. Warnings don't stop execution of the code, warnings don't hurt anything. Most are in fact deprecation warnings that just say "Hey, this code still works but one day you will need to change it."

All forums used in production environments should be setup to suppress warnings and errors to begin with for security reasons- that is good practice. Only development environments should be showing warnings and errors.

Our competitors also suppress warnings in their software in normal modes. It is common practice is all PHP software.

4.2.2 was the first time in a long time many of the long-standing issues were addressed. Everyone who is saying "how come you didn't fix it instead of hide it" well 4.2.2 (and 4.2.3 now in beta) are the result of actually fixing the issues rather than hiding them.

I have been running vb3 on my big board since 2005 and have not suppressed error reporting. So stating that errors were hidden since 2002 is complete nonsense.

You can spin it however you like, but warnings are intended so that the developers pick up on it and do something about it. It is not good practice at all to hide warnings.

Deprecated errors are a big sign on the wall that the software you run is getting outdated and should be either fixed or replaced by modern software. Because sooner or later your server software like php version will be EOL and you risk all. PHP 5.3 is already EOL. PHP 5.4 will be.
Just like YUI2 has been EOL since 2009 and YUI is abandoned now. But we see no rewrite going on replacing YUI with jquery. Its just waiting for the hammer to fall.
Hiding the warnings is like fixing the security vulnerability by completely removing the install folder. It sort of works, but it evidently shows that quick hacks are provided instead of quality development.

In the case of vb4 you can wait until it stops working, hope that Internet Brands actually fixes up vb4, releases a quality vb6 or draw your conclusions based upon the current situation.

So you are saying, you went in the core files, and removed the suppressed warning code that was in there?

Note, we are talking warnings, not errors, they are two totally different things. :)

You people have got to be kidding me. What software company would actually tell it's customers that they are actually suppressing error and/or warning messages? Clearly you need to learn how to run a business.

Under no circumstances is it justifiable in my book to suppress these warnings and errors. The whole purpose of a warning message is to alert you that a condition exists that is not correct. Why then would you want to ignore it and not correct the condition that caused the message to be displayed?

Can you provide any reasonable explanation as to why these conditions are not addressed ? As a customer who paid a lot of money for this software package I expect it to work WITHOUT errors and warnings.

If warnings were not suppressed, every time your server had a php update, it would probably throw up a bunch of warnings, due to the new php coding. Then everyone would be crying that there is warnings all over their sites.

Sure the vB code should try and accommodate for all of this, but sometimes it is not feasible.

When I write my mods, I try to make sure everything is correct, but sometimes I even overlook stuff. :)

Mods are not what I am talking about. Mods are free and when you accept free software you accept it as is for FREE with no expectation of bug free software.

When you PURCHASE software then you should be at the very least be told BEFORE THE PURCHASE that warnings and/or errors exist and are being hidden. Not telling a potential buyer that these conditions exist is tantamount to deceptive selling practices.

Also, how do you explain the comments from Zachery a vBulletin Support Staff member that, and I quote:

"For a long time, no one actually had touched the code that did all of this, and the code base goes back to 2002~ or so when vBulletin 3 development started. Every developer from that time period is gone. We don't have that knowledge laying around anymore. "

He is actually saying that they are selling software containing code that they know nothing about. Unbelievable!!! Not only is he saying they are marketing a product they do not fully understand but that they apparently do not have the skills necessary to understand it.

How do you rationalize that?

I don't comment on what he has said, as it is something he said, I will leave it to him to to explain that one. :)

Which is exactly why its great to have error reporting turned on. If I upgrade one of the 110 addons that I run and it causes a warning or error, then its good to have that clearly in sight. Because if I do not encounter the warning then one of my 3.5 million readers will instantly notify me. This allows me to quickly report the bug to the developer and have it fixed.

Getting it fixed is what the error reporting thingy is (or should) be all about.

Or is it more about getting the error report and ignoring it?

What is the point of including the error report mechanism if nothing is going to be done about it?

I mean, from the nobs that included the error report, I am guessing that there was a reason for it to be included.