Goodbye vBulletin
 

Came across this article and they make some really good arguments

http://www.apaddedcell.com/goodbye-v...reasons-switch

Hopefully these issues will be addressed when vB 4 is released

By the way, I love vB and have not intention of changing :)

Agreed, my argument against vbulletin is, why keep making things that are pointless for the system? Like Yes blogs and all that have been made, but why not move into the suggestion forum, and take a look and start making updates from there. They are trying to develop a newer software when people already enjoy this one. That is part of the reason most sites are using 3.7 versions instead of the newer versions.

If the best argument for vBulletin is that it's overkill, then my argument is that you just don't know what to do with it ;)

And if you're going to complain about the heavy load, optimize your design. If you want something simple and to the point and without room for expansion.. Then don't use vBulletin. Heh, just my two cents.

I agree they can work a bit on simplicity and less complication, but once you learn your way around, try to see if drupal can compare then.

Agreed but why make more complication when people now still have more then enough trouble with the simple things? They will not necessarily kill vbulletin but it will come to a extent of losing buyers and such. That is my opinion on it, people have spent days/weeks/months/years working on how its gotten today. And its a pretty big organization with tons of support but if they go ahead and make it more then it really is then they will guarantee lose tons of people due to making it like that. Yes you can customize and say what you want about that, and i do agree. BUT 40% of the people cant customize the software that there is now or that has been released. How do they expect people to do it with a even more difficult software? But hey we will see what happens.

Care to write an in-depth vB optimization tutorial?
I'm sure many (including myself) would appreciate it ;)

Jacquii.

This article compares vBulletin to Drupal, which is not too comparable.
If you compare vB to IPB, you know that vBulletin is much easier to use than IPB, although it has many functions.

Moreover,

How can someone compare a cms system to a forum system? On a clean install of vb the performance is outstanding.But when you start adding "3rd party mods" then of course it's going to increase the load by a few.The same way when you do a clean install of a operating system.When installing a program either its going to take up ram or disk space.So what's the deal?

Man its like comparing to a volvo wagon to a bmw...:D

Thats more of a fitting comparison than I think you inntended

lol...hey i tried...:up:

Totally agree with puertoblack :D

I'm not leaving vbulletin, and I would never use durple..lol

The more features the better. At least you have the option of disabling most of those features that people usually don't use like social groups and such.

Better to have too much than too little

I think you guys are missing the point of drupal here. Drupal is only an example. vB is very outdated in comparison to alot of todays web software.

I love vBulletin. The only bad reason you could say is the money maybe. But it is way worth it in my opinion. vBulletin is probably much more customizable then any other forum software. Yes it may be a bit confusing to some, but thats why we have vbulletin.com and vbulletin.org

Unreal- If your saying Drupal is only an example. Show a better example. There is no better forums software then vB in my opinion. If you think there is a better forum software then vB, please show me. Also how is it outdated? Yes maybe the default style is, but thats why there are millions of templates out there...

More isn't always better. I always believe in the old saying quality over quantity. Having the option to disabling is nothing more than an excuse.

vB is the best forum software by far. However why are they using tables as layout objects? Thats really old stuff. Also, <font> for example is a depreciated tag. Why is this being used?

what would they use other then tables?

and yes they should fix the <font> for vB4

divs. Tables are not made for layouts. Where as divs are.

I read through all the cited articles and their own linked articles. I wasn't impressed at all by the arguments used against the vBulletin software.

Taking the anti-vBulletin arguments one by one:

"Bloated software"

This is heard a lot, yet almost all the time I have seen this phrase or an equivalent used, it's sheer emo and emo only, and has no substance to the charge. Breaking down this specific charge into three bits:

1. the charge that bloated software makes the whole vBulletin-based board run slower, owing to having to process more code than needed.
   .
2. and the charge of "too many features, too many options", yada yada yada.
   .
3. Crowded ACP.

Charge A seems to me to be overstated. In my experience, most boards suffer no performance problems using vBulletin; perhaps the issue of code really does affect some boards, perhaps the biggest ones, but I would like to hear some actual facts, some figures, some real quantitative analysis, before I lend this one much creedence.

Charge B is almost always vacuous. For example, in the Drupal node thread discussing the original article, one user claims no-one really needs a BB Code Editor. That's utterly ridiculous; most vB boards I've ever been on used the Custom BB Code functions, and I myself use them a hell of a lot on my own boards. One man's fish is another man's poisson; just because you don't like the full range of options given by vBulletin doesn't mean that they aren't exactly what someone else is looking for. As it is, I am extremely grateful for the large range of customization and other options offered by the vBulletin software.

And of course, a lot of people find Drupal far too limited. Drupal really has too little options, and the only response of the Drupal adminning community to that was to tell the complainants to help them write more Drupal code, which is hardly a strong refutation of the charge that Drupal is badly underpowered (no email notifications, and other specific lacks discussed in that thread).

I mean, really, the very original essay is ridiculous in how far it goes. The author suggests that these be removed from vBulletin and added as add-on's:

# signatures
# User Profiles
# Avatars (and profile pictures)
# Private Messages
# Subscriptions
# Buddy/ignore Lists
# Post attachments
# Calendar
# Event Reminders
# Announcement
# Polls
# Send Email to users
# Infractions
# User Ranks
# User Reputations
# User Titles
# Paid Subscriptions
# Smilies
# BBCode
# Statistics
# Podcast

This is incredible. In other words, make vBulletin crippleware, then get admins to have to install a whole lot of extra modules just to have what most board users regard as fundamental to a bulletin board????

No way. I like vBulletin as it is, and the users of my boards seem to like all those functions and functionality themselves.

Charge C -- the crowded interface of the vBulletin AdminCP -- is the only really strong charge of the lot. True, the ACP could be made more userfriendly.

"Constantly Changing Templates"

The author of the article exaggerates the amount of hassle in upgrading. I've been through three major upgrades, and doing up styles; it's nowhere near as bad as he makes out.

"Other Gripes of the original author"

Licensing
The author doesn't like the lack of absolute certainty that Jelsoft might not be there tomorrow. Well, goodness. We might be all wiped out by giant asteroids or vicious intestinal amoeba tomorrow, know what I mean? Time to get over it, and accept there is no such thing as absolute certainty, and simply do as best as one can.

Oh yeah, and paying. Well, golly gee. vBulletin offers me as a board owner a huge degree of functionality, and frankly, it's rather cheap at the price. The vB unencoded software, and the vB mod developer community, are what really help me and keep me on vB. IMvHO, it's very well worth what Jelsoft ask for it. Sheeesh. phpBB is free, and I'm very glad I switched from phpBB to vB.

Templates Stored in the Database
The author claims flat files would be better for performance than the database system. I'ld like to see actual comparative figures before I give creedence to this charge.


Security Issues

This is where the argument gets emo again. First off, vB is lambasted for having security problems, then vB is lambasted for quickly issuing security patches??? You can't have it both ways. Either vB is supposed to be insecure -- which I don't believe, not if all upgrades and patches have been implemented -- or vB rushes around with too many updates. Well, look, I'll take the constant updates any day, and rest easy in the knowledge that Jelsoft do indeed pay a great deal of attention to security.


SEO

Perhaps a valid charge of the author's; indeedy, vB could be more SEO'ed for boards. But it's not too bad as it is. Again, the author gives no facts, no comparative analysis with real figures, and I would like to see all that before lending too much creedence.

Finally,
CSS versus tables

Yeah, well, tables, tables, tables.

Tables are robust. They really do work, and there are cases where all the CSS in the world can't really replace a nice HTML table. Now, I grant CSS is better overall, and there is at least one committed vB coder (Mert of the Depkac site) who has developed CSS-only styles for vB, a massive undertaking and one which I respect and admire very highly indeed.

Hopefully, in the future, there will be more CSS stuff, and it will be easier for admins and users to customize. As it is, the newish vBulletin Blogs system is very mainly CSS, and very few tables indeed. It's a steep learning curve for those not used to CSS, and requires a good more work. Worth it in the end.

But when someone says they're leaving vB for Drupal, and then when the lack of features and functionality in current Drupal is pointed out, the response from others is "Well, write the code!"


:eek:

No way. I'll pay what is a very decent price for vBulletin any time, I'll simply hope giant nematodes don't wipe out Jelsoft tomorrow, and I'll go on using vB and most of its features, and I'll do so very happily. And my boards' members are happier for it (many can remember when my first board was running on freeware, and had all the power of a soggy buttie).

My vote's for vBulletin, every time, for the time being. I've looked at alternatives, tried some, always ended up preferring vB.

I don't agree with this point.

vBulletin uses Ajax and has some fantastic features that a lot of other forum software have copied.

In fact "out of the box" vBulletin offers so many features and that's what attracted us to convert from phpBB - because we would have to heavily mod phpBB to bring it up to the equivalent vBulletin.

So I would like to know what other forum software is out there that is less outdated than vBulletin? please enlighten me ...

A great, intellengent review of the article. Thanks for taking the time :)

While "divs" have their place, they are definitely NOT a replacement for tables. You can't just throw a hundred divs in your page and call it good, that's just as messy as having nested table after nested table.

My answer to this question:
HTML. But, SEMANTIC HTML. Don't replace every table with a div, that's terrible practice. Just use semantics. If it's a list, put it in a list.. Unordered, ordered, or definition. Also, tables definitely have their place on a forum. Displaying topics in a table is perfectly semantic, though I do tend to use a list since it IS listing out threads, after all.

As for finding a better forum solution than vBulletin.. That depends on what you feel is better. Personally, I feel that the features are ridiculous, and the template is just a joke. I've said it a million times before, but Jelsoft should have developed a semantic layout for version 3.0.. If they had, I may still be using vBulletin to this day. Instead, I attempted to make one over and over but got frustrated with the terrible template editor that comes with vBulletin. Something better? To me? I like Vanilla. It's simple, to the point, and has better markup out of the box. Then when I want to change the markup, it's just about as simple as theming wordpress. Oh, and it's FREE.. Can't beat free.

vBulletin isn't practical anymore. It's extremely dated and there are several options out there that aren't. Even programming wise. It would be really nice to have vB in an MVC structure. I hated having to update stupid templates because it was no longer compatible after an upgrade. Pffft.

Because when you support half a billion unique users on over 100,000 websites around the world and support browsers from the Netscape 4 and Internet Explorer 5 era, you can't just change these things. Yes, those are the design requirements for the vBulletin 3.X series. Stability and support are more important than creating a new design every year. However, you won't see these things as much in vBulletin 4.0 which will have a new design.

Drupal on the other hand prides itself on the fact that they do not provide backwards compatibility or stability between versions. This means that the code you developed in Drupal 5 will not work in Drupal 6 and will not work in Drupal 7. Their version scheme is a little different from ours. Generation wise, vBulletin 3.5 was the fourth generation of the software and could have easily been called vBulletin 4. 3.6 was the fifth generation of the software. vBulletin 3.7 and 3.8 comprise the sixth generation of the software. The vBulletin 4 series will be the 7th generation.

The reason we use vBulletin is the sheer number of features available to us. My forum wants those features because we use all those features. If we dd not want them then we would have considered something else.

This is not to say that vBulletin is suited for all. Different communities will have different needs. vBulletin suits us just fine only we want even more features not less.

Regardless of what has been said, I thoroughly enjoy vBulletin. The great thing for us is we have the power to choose. If we don't like what vBulletin has done we can easily switch over or just stick with 3.6-3.8.

Although I won't install 4.0 for a while even if it comes out soon, I still see myself checking vb.org everyday to see if there's any new updates on 4.0

Drupal = Not using.
vBulletin = Actively using.

Someone tell me which I'm gonna go root for, please.

vBulletin.. That's my Final Answer :p

Really now, let's be serious, if someone wants to do a complete comparison on the latest version of Drupal and vBulletin then I might read it but it's like that previous post I just read... except more like a Gremlin to a Ferarri and besides, all I EVER see is people who don't take the time to learn where stuff is, complain about the lot of it then think they know what is wrong with something based on their inexperience, that's just sad imo. It's like you saying MySpace sucks because you can't figure out how to pimp your profile or get some codes in there others have... Next I bet you top dollar someone will complain about Twitter being too simple so it has it's phases just like everything else with certain people at certain times is all.

My 2 cents and Mikey.. did I win the million??????

:D S-MAN

I think you guys are missing the point. Is Drupal comparable to vBulletin? Not to me.. Drupal is a community CMS solution, vBulletin is a community forum. I think Drupal is FAR more powerful than vBulletin as far as creating community driven websites, but the forum definitely lacks compared to vB.

The point of the article is that vB is expensive, and very dated.. even FREE options can be more effective for some people. Let's face it, most vB users are drawn to the social networking features, right? Well, same with Drupal.. This is probably the reason why the two are compared in this article.

As for people complaining without taking the time.. Drupal is far more frustrating and time consuming if you really want to customize it. You could spend days on a module set up and then find something different that works better, you could spend days trying to find a module, and you can spend days in your template.php file if you're as picky as I am with source code.. I usually finally just give up being picky and settling with what I have when it comes to Drupal.

Problem. vBulletin 3... published in early 2000s, maybe about 2001. vBulletin hasn't had a style update since then, when tables were basically the in thing. Comparing it to a piece of software that has had a style update since then seems a bit petty, seeing as most forum software has only switched to CSS recently, since full redesigns only happen for major versions.
Problem: vBulletin is dedicated forum software. Drupal is CMS software. CMS software has a wider array of features, but less for any one aspect, hence the forum with Drupal is pretty much horrible compared to vBulletin. vBulletin on the other hand has features for running a forum, which isn't the same thing. Confusing interface? Opinion. Bugs and security flaws? Sounds like the writer doesn't even know what they're talking about, vBulletin has always quickly fixed any security issues and as far as I know, the latest version doesn't have any major security flaws.

Remove these from any forum, and I'm sorry, you've done a pretty pathetic job. Signatures, user profiles, avatars, private messages, polls, ranks, titles, smilies and BB code are essential for a forum nowadays. Heck, even old stuff like EZ Board has this stuff, Drupal forum, if it doesn't have it sounds frankly rather pathetic. Heck, the forum given on the site the article is on looks pretty much dead to me, and I honestly can't wonder why.

:rolleyes:

It's getting an overhaul. It's called vBulletin 4.

• Quote:

  Licensing This is a personal reason for wanting to move The Webmaster Forums to different software, Free software allows us to: Not worry about licensing; Have the freedom to change code in the software package, then give it back to the community; Have the freedom to change code in the software package and distribute as we wish; Not worry that the software is owned by a single company who could go bust, be bought-out by another company with no interest in developing the product, or a competitor who buys the company in order to kill it;

So the writer is complaining vBulletin isn't free and open source, like oh so many people desperate to get it for nothing. Frankly, if you're concerned about the licensing, don't be. You don't need to be able to redistribute the software you're using for it to be good software, and the last point is rather pathetic, since quite honestly, vBulletin has been going for years, and looks like it'll keep going for many more years. There's no sign of a company not having interest in the developing the product. Besides, the future is the future.

SEO is not fancy rewritten URLs. vBSEO is probably great software, but seriously, this sounds mainly like 'my forum isn't ranking in Google so I'll blame the software I'm using'. Plus, vBulletin 4 will come with more built in SEO additions, or at least some stuff people have been begging for.

Suddenly, their switch to Drupal isn't seeming too good, at least with vBulletin 4 alleviating at least three of their major concerns. I guess their problem now they've switched to a piece of software that's meant for a different job than vBulletin and it's hurt their community.

The last bit of the article says it all really ;

Liam McDermott is the technical bod at The Webmaster Forums. He also writes articles and loves dallying with Drupal. His business site is InterMedia.

He was a Drupal fan, simple as that. :)

That doesn't mean his arguments aren't valid.

I completely agree with all his points on template system. Its bloated, updating is a nightmare, editing is a nightmare, reordering elements isn't possible, which leads to all styles using the same boring default templates set.

When I was working with vBulletin templates I had to write my own mod which exported templates to editable files (php for css templates, html for other templates), so I won't have to use horrible tiny textarea and could use BBEdit instead. I feel sorry for majority of designers who are using control panel textarea, its not a tool for editing templates.

Every update, which are out very often, changes something in templates. Often its just a few tabs/spaces, but its still marked as a new version, which means I have to revert my custom template and then have to do changes again. As coder I can handle that, but what about users? For users its too complex, so even if user was using a cool style that wasn't yet another simple header/footer change of the default style, it means he has to stick to default style so reverting templates won't cause any compatibility problems.

I do hope template system will be rebuilt in v4 and all html will be separated from php, which would allow designers to create styles that use different order of elements, which might lead to designers releasing some cool looking layouts.

There is actually a feature in debug mode that does this for you and has been available since vBulletin 2.X.
http://vbcodex.com/showthread.php?t=28

A new three-way diff/merge system will be introduced in vBulletin 4 that should make most template modifications automatically when upgrading to newer versions of the vBulletin 4 series. Though users will need to edit templates less for basic style changes.

The rewrite of the Style and Templating System is one of the core focuses of vBulletin 4. In future versions, we'll look at reducing the number of overall templates since new structures will reduce the need for them. See:
https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=217569
https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=217570

Awesome.

Well of course.. and most here are vBulletin fans.. The difference is the guy wasn't talking out of his rear-end. He had personal quirks with vBulletin just as I'm sure a lot of us do.. he was speaking 100% on his personal experience with both softwares, making his points worth reading, and valid.

Wayne, I for one appreciate the updates with vB4 and all, but in this case, I feel it's a little irrelevant. The article, and opinions expressed in this thread are solely based on vB3.X series, since that's all we have to work with. You may not intend to, but it seems like you're arguing vB3's issues with vB4.. "Yeah, but vB4 will do this and this and this" (obviously not a direct quote).. I mean, you can sit here all day and tell us what vB4 will bring, but the fact is, until we have that in our hands, all we have is vB3.. And I personally have several quirks with vB3.. We don't need to really get into that though.

The point is, Jelsoft is losing customers because of this. If just ONE customer is able to find an alternative that works better for them, it hurts the company.. Now, I understand you can't please everyone, and keeping ALL customers for life is impossible.. but most of the stuff he's touched in the article is something that I feel could/should have been taken into account way way before vB4... I mean, is Jelsoft just kind of hoping that vB4 will convince those who have moved on to come back? Or do they just simply not care and are more hopeful to future customers?

I don't know, maybe it's just me, but I don't think it's very fair to argue this article with something that very very few have actually laid their eyes, let alone their hands on. And perhaps you weren't necessarily arguing the article, more so comments to the article.. I still feel it's a little irrelevant.

I think its very relevant. It will be released eventually and its good to know that issues people are having with vB 3 are being addressed in vB 4.

this whole article is irrelevant, it's comparing a CMS to a forum..lol
lets next compare a motorcycle to a pickup truck..lol


pickup trucks FTW :D

I think I'm going to have to disagree with you there. At least from my point of view, I was drawn to vB due to its flexibility, a.k.a. it's wide range of options and its large selection of free mods and themes.

best solution

Drupal for frontpage
VB for forum

case closed!

I don't see how making the software easier to use and update in future versions is irrelevant to the discussion at hand. The comments were it was too difficult to upgrade and the style was archaic. Both of which are being changed in the upcoming version. Asking us to go back and retrofit these changes in previous versions or assuming that each version exists in a vacuum and the software isn't malleable is what should be considered irrelevant.