vb3.8 or vb4 on a new forum?
 

I'm about to launch a new forum and don't know whether I should go with vb3.8 or vb4.0

What is your recommendation?

4.0 is still in beta, so I would suggest the 3.8 gold version
you can always upgrade later

three point eight

Thanks Brandon, and Floris.

4 isnt out yet... go with 3.8.

3.8 simple answer. upgrade to 4.0 when it becomes gold.

I personally would go to 4.0 so you have to skip the whole mod-and-skin-upgrade and get used to the new code. But thats just me =p

Not just you, that is what I would do if I were to start a new one. However, you must be willing to upgrade when a new beta comes out and retest your style and all functionality everytime. It's still very buggy, so you need to be willing to put up with that and also if you have problems, you need to be a bit of a debugger yourself instead of always needing someone else to figure out the problem for you.

If you dont plan to customise your forum, then go for 3.8.

If you plan to customise it then consider using the vb4 beta - you may save yourself pain upgrading later. Depends on how techy you are really.

The majority of the problems that we hear of 4.x are from 3.x users wanting more bells and whistles...You are just a baby, I would go with 4.x...

Was wondering the same thing myself, decided just go with 4.0. If you are going to go to it eventually might as well save yourself headaches in upgrading and then learning all the new things it offers.

Definitely 3.8, as Paul M said, in case you do not want to modify your forums for time being (unless your mods can be easily ported to vB4). Otherwise, go with vB4 - but even in that case, I'd wait a bit before modifying styles and templates excessively.

vB3.x

That can be done with a test board. For the live version, I'd stick with the most recent stable version, which is 3.8.4. It'll take a while before most of the mods support vB 4.0. With 3.8.4 they're a sure thing.

Just use 4.0 if it's a new board.

Gold will be released before the end of the month, so if i had a new board, i would go for v4.

I've thought about this subject and well, since vB 4.0 Gold is slated to be out in a couple of weeks I'd opt for 4.0 too. The transition from Beta 4 to RC1 was quick. I changed my original position. :D

Four.

For some things, I'm an early adopter, but for scripts, I'm definitely not, so I'll say 3.8.

Are the nav bar buttons on 4.0 gonna stay that bad? They look so ugly and don't even fit the bar itself-too tall. If so, I'm never upgrading to this. Also what's with the header image? It looks chopped off at both its and look totally unfinished.

That's not even the half of it. I'm officially boycotting 4.0 till the late first quarter of 2010 when vB gets it's act together, seriously. And even then it's only because I have no choice, business-wise :p

What is the "gold" version?

It is the first release developers consider to be stable enough to be used in a live, active website. Anyhow, early gold releases, in any software, will unavoidably leave large room for bug fixes and further code optimization... that is why I usually recommend to wait a few months after a product has gone gold before adopting it in an already existing website. If you are starting now, that's a different story.

Agreed. I keep checking back thinking they've finished the header and fixed the nav bar buttons but it looks the same. I'm super surprised they put out such an ugly design that looks so unfinished an amatuer. Even the free designs for this version look awful. Atleast with 3.0 the header looks finished not cut off at both ends. And the gradient alt1/alt2 makes the forum looks cloudy and hard to read. Yuck, they did a terrible job designing this and I hope the redesign the whole thing.