Yes I remember all of this but it never seemed to be as bad as the v5 reaction. At least with v4 there was still SOME resemblance to version 3. Plus people by and large, seem to really like v4. Initial reaction may have been bad but nothing like we're seeing now.

Why? Why just "deal" with buggy software until they "fix" it? That is just out of the question. When you pay $250-$285 for software it should NOT have so many bugs out of the gate and pretty much EVERYTHING should work out of the box! When are they going to fix it? Its been over a year now so when does the fix come? Dude, I'm sorry but there is NO WAY I'd run something extremely buggy if I could help it with a promise of we will fix everything.

I think the distinction people miss here is the one between the average vB.org user (or vB.com, or TAZ or any of those plances) and the remaining admins who probably make up the majority. I don't really think the majority of people running vBulletin are really all that involved with this, or many admin communities. They might come in, post about a problem, download a few mods, and never be heard from again. Meaning, regardless of how many bugs you know are in there, it's never going to be an issue for these admins who mostly use vBulletin stock. And anything they don't like, they disable. Factor in those people who have no idea what vB was like "before", because they're new forum admins, and you have quite a few people who simply never consider the bugs an issue. Basically, the road is full of potholes. But I never drive far enough from home to hit any of them.

*Sigh* Yeah I know :( Its a shame because it was once really awesome. I miss it.

That's because many - like myself - were prepared to give IB the benefit of the doubt and a second chance. They tried to pull the same stunt twice. And no doubt, they'll do it a third time.

Trust me, in the beginning, I was really disappointed and pissed at the same time. My first month and a half, basically built the bulk of the content on the site between myself and my users(started out with 12). We all came from a close to out of the box VB4 environment as users, so some of the new features in VB5 were exciting and new to us.

When I realized how many bugs I was dealing with, I wanted to move on to something else but buying IP board was out of the question and "reverting to VB4 is not possible at this time" was the answers I got when I asked. (I didn't even know I had a license to VB4 at the time). So I just rolled up my sleeves and hit it head on. I may be new to forum software, but have used Linux on my desktop for 18 years. Chasing down bugs and working them out is really not an issue for me. I've become very intimate with the database and very seldom use the site builder for anything other than a quick html adjustment. I create my custom pages with cli scripts, adjust routing tables manually when I come across an simple issue that plagues the rest of the user base like renaming articles to homepage. It really isn't that complicated and I have a wide enough skill set to handle it.

I'm happy with the performance of my VB5 as are my users. I've worked out many of the bugs that are still present in the stock installation and I've done some custom work as well and will continue to modify it.

If I get tired of dealing with it, then I will either downgrade to VB4 or move on to another brand.
Probably the latter because lately I see more support issues for version 4 than 5 on VB.com.

This ^

When vbulletin 4 was released in poor shape many of use wanted to give it a chance knowing how successful vbulletin 3 was for years. When it took 2-3 years before vbulletin 4 was in a stable condition we figured, surely the next version would start off stronger.
We were all wrong.

One thing to note is vbulletin 4 and 5 both had alpha and beta groups go over the code and offer suggestions and explained why something wouldn't work. The really strange thing is both times, in beta 4 and beta 5 groups, for the most part our criticism was completely ignored and the shareholders carried more weight then experienced admins did.

It's obvious to everyone that this is how things will be ran from now on with vbulletin. The management doesn't care about the users or their customers, they only care about sales and how to squeeze more money out of the product. Since vbulletin 4 was released there have been additional addons in the core that are only there to create more income on vbulletins part.. eg the email marketing plugin, the classifieds plugin, the mobile app. With the exception of the mobile app (which has been broken for 2 years) the others are purely there to create addition income for vbulletin themselves and in 99% of the installs I've personally touched, have been disabled and are considered bloatware.

In short.. vbulletin only cares about bringing in more money, they don't care of the product is crap and will in fact sell it as "the greatest forum platform in the world" even if they are 100% aware that it's full of bugs and VERY poorly written as we've all seen vbulletin 5 is.

It's not coincidental that zero of the code reviews for vbulletin 5 have been positive.

I can vouch for this. We told them vB5 was nowhere near ready for release. But they released it anyway.

I think the biggest difference though between the reactions was, v4 was at least somewhat related to v3. Mods for 3.8 would work or could be easily adjusted to work, with the v4. Therefore the community was alot more forgiving.

v5 is a completely different animal, related to vBulletin in name only. It's like putting Cadillac badging on a Yugo.

Me 2.