vBulletin 3.8.0 Released
 

vBulletin 3.8.0

Today, the vBulletin team is proud to declare version 3.8.0 to be our stable, supported release.

vBulletin 3.8.0 is available immediately from the Members' Area to all customers with active vBulletin licenses, and will be offered as the primary choice to those making new purchases. We recommend that all customers with active licenses upgrade to vBulletin 3.8.0.

Google AdSense Integration

vBulletin 3.8 features a control panel to allow you to quickly add Google AdSense advertising units to your forum and monetize your site traffic!

To get started, please visit the members' area and either sign up for a new Google AdSense account or assign your existing account with vBulletin.com. Once you have linked your members area account to your Google AdSense account, all vBulletin downloads will include the advertising control panel. (It will not be included unless you do this.)

From the control panel, you can choose an advertising package that contains the amount and type of ads that you want to feature - and deploy it instantly with just a couple of clicks. The positions and ad unit types chosen for each package are designed to give the maximum possible revenue for your site. Text-based advertising units will automatically inherit the color schemes of any styles you have on your board. Should you wish to experiment with the different ad packages, you can change your mind on deployed package at any time, including the option to remove ads completely.

For more information about this feature, please visit the vBulletin members' area.

New Features in 3.8


There are many new features and improvements to existing functionality in vBulletin 3.8.0 over vBulletin 3.7.x. Here is a brief list of just a few of the highlights.

• Social group discussions
• Social group categories
• Private message sorting and filtering
• Private message history
• Quick edit for newer types of content (visitor messages and picture comments)
• Social group icons
• Social group transfers
• Private message quick reply
• Private message throttling (limit messages sent over a time period)
• Private message reporting
• Profile privacy (limit blocks to a subset of users)
• Lightbox navigation
• Thread prefix permissions
• Dismissible notices

A full and detailed list is available in Darren's blog.

Support for 3.7

This release supersedes the 3.7 branch as our primary product. Active maintenance of 3.7, including fixes for functionality breaks and security problems, will continue for approximately six months (to 1st July 2009), after which only security fixes will be released. Upon the release of vBulletin 4.1, the 3.7 branch will be end-of-life'd and no further security fixes will be made available and customers will be advised to upgrade to vBulletin 3.8 or newer in order to gain fixes.

PHP and MySQL Requirements

vBulletin 3.8.0 requires at least PHP 4.3.3 and MySQL 4.0.16 (These are the same requirements as vBulletin 3.7), but we strongly recommend that all customers run PHP 5.2.8 with APC and MySQL 5.1.30 or later. Major performance benefits can be had by taking the recommended route rather than simply satisfying the required versions.

What is a 'Gold' Version?

When talking about software, the term 'gold' is not related to the color of the application. Rather, it refers to the practice of burning the final version of a software product to a CD-R so that it can be sent to a large scale CD press for large-scale distribution. It is used to indicate that the code is ready for deployment to customers. The official name of this new version is vBulletin 3.8.0.

Installing or Upgrading vBulletin

Anyone who has installed or upgraded any version of vBulletin 3 before will be familiar with the process, but for those who are new to the system, the vBulletin manual has all the details for installing and upgrading.

Template Changes

A large number of templates have been changed when compared with vBulletin 3.7.x. It will be necessary to revert affected customized templates or otherwise carefully integrate the changes into your custom versions or new features and existing functionality will be adversely affected. A complete list of the templates you have customized whose original version has been changed by the 3.8.0 upgrade is available within your Admin Control Panel after the upgrade is complete.

Bug Reports

As with any software, bugs will appear. If you find a problem that you believe to be a bug, please don't post about it on the forums where the development team may never find your message, but instead use the dedicated bug tracker to make a report that can be tracked through to completion.

Before reporting a bug, please ensure you are able to reproduce the problem on a board using a default, uncustomized style with all plugins disabled.

Please do not use this thread for support questions.

More...

Great! Keep up the good work :)

upgrade now!

Thanks vBulletin Team.

very nice indeed

Wow vBulletin 3.8.0 stable version has been released! thanks a lot, i'm gonna upgrade my forum right now! :up:

thank u

Upgrading it now.

me too.. :)

Would of been better if they would of added rotating banners instead of the google adsnese for those of us that have more than google ads

having to enter my AdSense info on vb.com is pathetic... to receive that addition to the file, this is cheating the engine... VB.com will now have the ability to add partnership to AdSense, which i refuse to do so... this can be debated i suppose...

or we continue to use the Mods released here that do not do this.

Thanks

Yeah I'm not sure what VB are doing with AdSense. It's odd for them to be working with Google.

they're asking what!:eek:
hmm, I'm not very happy with this either
but than again, I need to renew my license to even get to 3.8..lol
with a little research I seen this.

So what happens if your banned from adsense? or don't want to make an adsense account? or what if your working on someone else's forum... I'll have to enter a madeup pub-XXXXXXXXXXX if I need to dl the script for someone else.

That is a stupid move jelsoft IMHO ;)

I guess I'll just have to check out this ads CP, are you able to use other advertisers?

You can associate your vBulletin Customer account with your Google Adsense account or if you don't have an account, sign up for one from in the vBulletin Member's Area. This allows people to quickly and easily include Adsense ads from the Admin CP of your vBulletin installations. It is a standard basic implementation developed in cooperation with Google. This is a quick and easy way for forum owners to place advertising if they do not have advertising already and want to monetize their forums.

It however is not the only way to include advertising and you can continue to use the advertising templates or other methods to insert your own advertising.

Associating your vBulletin Customer Account with a Google Adsense account is not mandatory but just another service that we felt would be beneficial to our customers.

Have google bought IB?

Thanks for clearing that up

upgrade now nice

Upgraded my own forum to 3.8 now. Overjoyed at the idea of 38 template edits required (not).

The adsense is a nice addition but my own mods work much better. I edited the postbit template to show my ads like follows: one after the first post, and one before and after the last post in the thread. This keeps the ads in the readers eyes and not simply lost at the top and bottom of the page.

I'm really curious about the vb-google deal, probably vb will get several new referrals. Hopefully there will be some hot stuff behind this (Can't get enough of conspiracies and bribes :P)

just updated evrything went great thanks guys :up:

i will download now
Thanks vBulletin Team

I am currently updating, in upload queue. Hope to get Killed in 38 Template edit. :D

OMG, I did so many edits. I'm gonna die.

Enough kidding, Lets see what are those.

Shishir

You should never have to download from someone elses account. You should not even have the login details of the Members' Area of others.

in the last 3 days were 3 big vbulletin forums hacked (3.7.5!) from shit noobs, there is everywhere a big security risk in the vb-script !

If you have information regarding vulnerabilities in the default vBulletin software, then please address this in a support ticket.

Posting on the forums "there is everywhere a big security risk in the vb-script" does not get anything solved if there is a real issue (which i doubt), it only will make others nervous for no reason.

its a shame what they are doing with the adsense thing.
Why people should send private information to vbulletin staff? to help then to earn more money from google?
They should have released the adsense feature for everyone and offer licence owners to sign up for google adsense but not coarse people by giving you the product if you sign up to adsense or provide vb staff with private info.

I am still confused....Should i update the 3.8 Version or not...

Great to see that another vBulletin version is out! I do have to say, with my limited knowledge on all of this, it's very hard to keep up with all of these releases.
I am running a big forum with a lot of mods and a customized style installed. Are you saying that it won't be usefull to use this style when I upgrade to 3.8.0? If I revert all templates, I bet the style and some of the mods will stop working right? Is it better for me to change styles (a 3.8.0 made style) when upgrading?

Sorry for the many questions but I hope someone can give me some clearity.

Thank you in advance.

You don't have to use this feature.
The ad location templates are still there, so you can use them.

You are mistaken by the above. The google account-id is only used to generate the files needed so you can implement AdSense easy on your forum, so you can make money.

No private info is ever requested on vBulletin.com. We do not get access to your Google account.

PS Strange that this assumption has now been posted twice in this thread on vB.org, where it is not even asked once on the only place where a full answer can be given: in the release discussion thread at vBulletin.com.

Features I would never use...

Yes I know that and I am not going to use it, I'm only expressing myself.
Maybe the next release the will ask users for their bank account numbers and passwrods to integrate it to the forum.

Please do not spread wild rumors that are not based on any facts.

Come on, any google adsense user knows how to start a google ad campain. There are some mods that allows any user to add google banners to their forum and they dont ask for any data.
In my opinion no user data is needed to release a tool for placing google adsense ads.
Is only my opinion, it is something I want to say and regerdin the place where I wrote my complian, I also worte it in vbulletin.com.
Cya

You can have your own opinion wether this is a needed new feature or not. But it was added because of massive demand from maybe less experienced users.

What i do have a problem with is that you, without basing this on any fact, are posting that Jelsoft makes money out of your advertising instead of yourself, you are insinuating that we request information that would give us access to your google account, you are insinuating that we will request additional private and sensitive information like bank accounts and passwords. Unless you can base this on any facts, then please do not try to insinuate such things.

PS Could you link me to your post in the vB.com release discussion thread where you raise these question, i just quickly read the entire thread and could not find it.

This is actually designed for the 10s of thousands of vBulletin customers who don't know anything about adsense or placing advertisements in a forum. This allows them to deploy ads in a few clicks with no hassles or configuration issue on their end.

As stated in your other thread and elsewhere, if you already have advertising or want more advanced options then this program and featureset is probably not for you. There are a wide range of people using vBulletin to power websites from advanced programmers who don't even look at manuals to people who did not even know what a web hosting company was before they started.

What private info exactly ?

Surely all they ask for is your adsense client id - which is freely viewable in the source of any page you have adsense adverts on.

adsense client ID, postal code, and last 5 digits of phone number.

Hmm, you're right, I just looked ....

Dont understand why either of those is needed myself, surely all you need is the client id.

Oh well. Not something I will be using anyway, so it doesnt really matter to me. :)