What can the Vbulletin community do for VB 5.x ?
 

I have all these great ideas and been sharing them on Jira but then I made this topic on Vbulletin customer feedback section by the title ( Is there a solution for fixing VB 5.x speed? )

http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/forum...g-vb-5-x-speed

Well things for me didn't turn clear, until toward page 2 and 3 and then when I google Internet Brands reviews and I came across this http://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Int...iews-E9344.htm it made me feel really bad about Vbulletin developers and staff.

Vbulletin fell in the wrong hands and we always put the blame on Vbulletin staff and developers when it is out of their control. Probably they can't even talk about it because they are employed by IB.

Would it be possible for IB to sell Vbulletin to a different company? Not sure and if it is possible, which company would be interested in buying it. IB doesn't have any vision for Vbulletin.

VB5 is a bloody trainwreck. They need to just scrap it and try to improve on vb3-4 with vb6.

VB3 code is much easier for me to read but vb4 is a bit harder to work with but has more functionality. It'd be best for both of these worlds to come together in developing vb6.

My topic isn't about VB 3 or VB 4 and i see VB 5 having great potentials, we just need better management and more hired web developers.

Look up these Jiras, if implemented right, VB 5 will shine beyond imagination.

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/external/2014/05/1.gif Profiles Feeds Discover like Twitter (A new Vision, not just a feature)

http://tracker.vbulletin.com/browse/VBV-12337

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/external/2014/05/1.gif Blogs & Articles Redesign [Grid] Vs.[List] mode

http://tracker.vbulletin.com/browse/VBV-12406

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/external/2014/05/1.gif Header redesign + Search bar improvement

http://tracker.vbulletin.com/browse/VBV-12426

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/external/2014/05/1.gif Implementing proper live notification system

http://tracker.vbulletin.com/browse/VBV-12698

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/external/2014/05/1.gif Improving Member's list

http://tracker.vbulletin.com/browse/VBV-12663

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/external/2014/05/1.gif Profile Media Tab + Album Image Views Features

http://tracker.vbulletin.com/browse/VBV-12676

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/external/2014/05/1.gif Vbulletin's Group Redesign

http://tracker.vbulletin.com/browse/VBV-12379

Agreed. If implemented right. Too bad hardly anyone seems to remember when IB implemented somthing right.

Anyway, somehow I really am impressed by your ability to hope a product already sold as final for over a year might sometime, say, three years from now, become a shiny, or at least a halfway decent piece of software.

Somehow I don't get how the subject of the thread fits wiht your first post. Do you expect the community to buy the software? And what about all the time and effort the community already invested into vB (and IB gave a damn about?)

I'd expect for a signed online petition and spread it through the business media and to try and contact IB by phone, email and twitter in mass. Only then, they will worry about their reputation and respond to our demands, but venting our frustration within topics on forums isn't going to do anything because you're not affecting IB, you're affecting VB and they honestly could care less for one of their brands. They own many brands and some probably they make more money with than others.

You really don't know the power of a strong community and when everyone works together for one purpose but everyone has to be serious about it.

No offense - but do you really think vB still has a strong community? Just look at how dead the vb.com forums have become. And, of course, IB did not care at all about bad press in the past, so why should it now? Those ideas you have, they were around years ago, when there still was a very active user base around. Nothing has come of it, and nothing ever will, in my opinion.

As someone involved in the day to day, I care. And I'm very happy to see suggestions going into the tracker. If we can get votes on the ideas, we can try to move forward with them.

There is a difference, in the past all I've seen were hate blogs and topics related to Xenforo Vs. IB, a dispute the community should not have been drawn into or get involved in it from the start. In general it is a lawsuit between two parties and it is not business news or related to leadership and visions - at the end of the day the dispute is resolved in the court of law not by media or hate blogs and there wasn't news worthy of being mentioned in the first place (2 ex developers being lawsuit by the company they use to work in, that is what it was).

But this is different, contacting IB in mass, and initiating an online petition to tell them that they need to show more commitment to VBulletin 5.x in term of good management, leadership, and hiring more developers in order to assist with the development is a business news. No business company would like to hear that they aren't showing leadership and great management, that is the essence of any business and future business or investment.

As for the community, well that is the tough part, the community is there, they aren't just sticking together and they took sides between vb and xf, thinking that xf is actually the escape boat, honestly it isn't by far. 2 developers (mike and kier), not enough financial support and backbone, lack of deep features, and empty propaganda.

If the ideas that I send to Jira are implemented very well with VBulletin system + optimizing it for better speed, Vbulletin will shine, the core issue here is VB needs more expert developers and a management with great vision. VB is a huge and complex project, it is nothing like XF at all.

There are votes but not like 2 years ago, they go anywhere from 5 - 15. There isn't much activity on Vbulletin.com and that is because primarily as i stated on VB, the speed of the forum is one of the main issues, you have 70 performance issues in jira that aren't resolved. Fixing those and i think will improve VB speed greatly and will encourage more activity.

But i think the first thing here is working on features of pages per batch, not work on different things at once, for example blogs/article redesign that i send to jira, they need to be worked on untill it is fully completed and implemented properly, then after that, the developers can focus on the profile and media tab, then after that the header redesign + proper notification system. But working on all these things at once is a bad idea.

On my site when i work on a set of features related to a certain page and release it, everyone gets excited, i also can tackle bugs much easier and faster. Instead of working on many areas at once.

Vbulletin needs to show front-end features, that is what gets customers and communities excited + spread it through the official youtube channel. I haven't seen VB promoting VB 5.x too much on youtube. I have one video that has over 2 million views on youtube, that is a good attention to my site. VB has the social tools, use it well. When members find excited features being implemented, they will spread the words for others to try it, it comes automatically.

katie, I think you're missing the point here. I've been working with vbulletin for a long time and have seen it evolve into what it is now. Trust me, the community is far from what it used to be. It's not just about people not sticking together or not. When IB took over they almost immediately shot themselves in the foot, and that shooting has continued to every other appendage.

It shouldn't take customers contacting IB in mass to get a company to give what their customers want. No one has time for that. They will gladly go to a cheaper, better built platform that has a community and a company that cares about customers behind it.

At this point IB is fighting and uphill battle. If they really want to turn things around they'll listen to their customers, scrap vb5 (or at least release a drastic update), and stop wasting everyone's time.

And here we go again. All this has nothing to do with xenForo at all. You're so fixed on that other software. People did not leave because they liked other software or didn't like developers fired in the first place. They left because vB4.0 was practically unusable at first release (and it stayed that way until up to 4.0.7 at the least), and became halfway good only with 4.2. And many of those staying with vB during the long stony track that vB4 was and prepared to give IB a second chance, were apalled when IB pulled the same stunt again with vB5 - selling customers a software for very good money that would clearly take years to be in state to be used productively.

You see, I have been using vB for years, was a fan, coded lots of addons, did alpha and beta testing, ddicating lots of my spare time to that. The problem was: I did it not only for free, but also for nothing. I (and I'm not alone in this) more and more got the feeling that we were being ignored, much like the support and even dev staff must still feel. Our opinnion on basic pruduct design questions was not valued, our feedback usually was in vain. What do you think with how many of such nifty design ideas we did come up for vB4, or, for that, for vB5? How many of the issues that IB now sells as vast improvements in minor releases were already pointed at in alpha/beta testing? The problem always was: Once the users (including alpha and beta testers) got a look at the product, practically everything was set in stone, including the release date (although no one ever admitted that). The state of the product did come into the matter, neither with vB4 nor with vB5. How else to explain the catastrophic state of vB4 and vB5 at release? A state, that was very well known to IB management, if they only once listened to our feedback?

You see, different from those working for IB, I (and many others) had the possibility of turning away in disgust at that. And given the employee fluctuaton in the last few years, even some of those getting their paycheck from IB did not really fancy working there, or develop any pride in the product. The lawsuit just added to that, but it's not the core of the grudge. As I said in the beginning: Had IB continued to deliver even halfway decent software, many of the old hands would not have turned their back. Really, you don't seem to understand half of the problem here, being all fixed on your own grudge with xF.

I agree to some part about what you said when it comes to IB but i don't hold any grudge against XF. They really are as I described before and you read my previous posts in different threads. Anyways, i won't talk about XF or how they acted. This is about VB 5.x and IB.

Unless things have changed, IB isn't the root of the problem. IB is part of a larger conglomerate held by the Hellman & Friedman group.

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/attachmen...1&d=1400671790

But, when I went to the IB website I found that vBulletin isn't even listed in their list of brands they own. So in my opinion, that is a pretty good sign of where vB stands in IB's opinion of it's own division.

Anyway so far as someone purchasing vBulletin, I don't see that happening for several reasons.

Is vBulletin even for sale? If not, that squashes it right there.

If vB is for sale, what are it's profit margins? Personally I don't see vB operating with a profit. If that's the case, the purchase would have to be done with venture capital. And anyone providing such capital would want to know when they would get their money back. At this point, depending on purchase price I would have to say 3 to 5 years. I don't think any venture capitalist would wait that long.

Finally, if vB were to be sold, there would have to be a major shakeup at the company. In the short term, that could have disastrous results if the fallout within the company isn't controlled. If the company were to survive a major shakeup, then there's the development time for something that's usable. And we're back to my last comment about return on investment. You would be looking at a year or more before a usable product could be developed.

vB4 started the company on a slippery downward slope. It started to recover but then released vB5 which took away any foothold it still had and continued the downward slide of the company.

Unless someone with come common sense steps in and actually reads what the alpha/beta testers were saying before the release of vB5, and makes some major changes, I fear vB5 is the death spiral for vBulletin.

Oh I think IB is the one who is in control of making decisions involving vbulletin. Probably the most accurate review coming from a Software Engineer:

One of the keys to that review is this...

I'm pretty sure I saw similar general statements in several reviews.

Hiring someone fresh out of college is actually a challenge. I've had to do it many times in my career.

The last thing I would tell a fresh graduate before I hired them went something like this...

You can take half of what you learned and throw it out the window because it's out of date or not applicable in real life. And if you can take the other half and apply it properly then you have the job. If you don't think you can do that, tell me now so we don't waste each other's time.

And that's where a good portion of the problem is with vB5. Fresh graduates have grand ideas that just don't work in real life. And there's nobody guiding them back to reality.

But VBulletin developers aren't new graduate college students. The issue here is that we need more, currently I was told we have 4 developers only.

Also there is nothing wrong with new graduate web developers as long as they are graduating from prominent universities like Harvard, Yale and so on, they do have the skills and learn while in college. I guess what I can say is that there are 2 type of web developers, those who relay on everything they learn from college and those who always explore new ideas from outside resources and love to implement unique ideas, the latter is what we need.

Founders of Google, Twitters, Facebook, Disqus and all these unique ideas were new graduate students with visions and ideas that they like to implement and test.

Facebook is a good example of a company that tried something and then backed away from it.

They tried doing everything client side like vB5 is and changed back to server side for the very reasons vB5 doesn't work well. It eats up database query time and slows response way down.

Uhh what? How does doing things client side eat up query time?

Without going into details, here's what I see happening with vB.

1) vB5 sends out all of the page layout, javascript, CSS etc. and it's loaded in the browser. This includes many things that aren't displayed on the page until some script action takes place.

2) The browser sends a request for the information to be displayed to vB5.

3) Because of the massive amount of information needed to display vB5 client side (which includes many things that don't show until a script calls for it), that results in 60 to 100 database queries per client on page load.

Whereas, a per page server side system (with some clientside scripting) would make much more sense since only the data needed to display that particular page would be queried.

Even if that analysis is not fully correct. Anything that requires 60-100 database queries to display needs to be reviewed and re-written. There no need for more than say 15-30 queries for any page to display.

Query count isn't end all be all.

If I can spend .05 seconds doing 100 queries, you'd prefer 10 queries that take .5 seconds?

.05 seconds on what kind of server?

I can fire up my Sunfire 6800 with 24 64-bit processors and beat that time, but most people don't have that available to them. And it's not exactly the most economical server to run for a single small application. :D

Try that on a more common dual or single core server with 5400 or 7200 rpm drives. It's not usually going to be .05 seconds.

Its a just a thought question.

A set of queries, and how long they each take, under load:

100q, 4 seconds
10q, 40 seconds

Which is better? The query time, is insanely low across the application in vBulletin 5, I know this because I run it on a really crappy atom server in house. I'm not saying there shouldn't be less queries. Less queries, when they're better queries, can be better. But less queries for less queries is not always better.

What you said is absolutely correct.

But using your example of 100q, multiply that by 100 clients and now you have a potential problem. Now we both know vB5's queries don't take 4 seconds but the idea is still the same.

Couple that with relying on the clients machine to do a lion's share the work and you end up with a slow system.

The client doesn't do that much work in 5, not processing data wise anyway. WE return html via ajax, and other data. Nothing all that weird.

Any way you look at it, the way vB5 is working, client side rendering creates a heavier initial load with a second request to the server. And then vB5 needs to deal with slower CPUs and rendering engines on the client side. Either one of those is a going to make client side rendering slower.

IE: There's no reason on earth that the vb.com forum should take 8 to 10 seconds to load on initial entry into the forum.

Thats true up to a point, but if you start to get busy, those 100 queries are going to start to slow down and be a bigger issue because a server can only handle so many at a time.

There is a bug in 5.1.1 which means some pages are running hundreds (sometimes over 1000) on that specific page. That many will very quickly become a major issue if lots of people try to load that page.

I know, there are also amplification issues, which I believe is what you're talking about.

I want vBulletin 5 to be faster, I've been trying to work on problems where I can, when I can.

I've voted for all of those, great idea's.

I would also like to see a drop down menu system for the navbar.