[BamaStangGuy]

Originally Posted by Skipsoutdoors

Ok, I'm ranting a little, getting on my soap box, whatever you want to call it.

I've been running vB since the 2.2 something days and getting ready for a major overhaul of the site. I know it needs it and has for a while, that's not exactly what this post is about.

These days if you buy a new computer off the shelf you have to spend a few hours deleting out all the "Software 30 day Trials" "Trial Versions" "Internet Service Options" and other completely useless stuff that takes up space and time.

vB seems to have taken the same tactic as HP, Dell, and every other computer manufacturer. 3.7 has a lot of unneeded, unwanted, and half assed options on it that the majority of us I feel like are going to end up removing, deleting, and replacing.

Most big boards are running some sort of ad management scrip to keep track of the money making advertisements. I've been using Red Tyger's version for over a year now modified quite a bit to suit my needs. 3.7 has ad templates built into it all over the place but no central controlling menu to handle rotating banners, rotating scripts etc. Otherwords, it's not really what we need, just some junk that if you wanted to you could stick an ad here or there. They said they were doing it to make upgrades easier without having to disable plug ins. Yeah, right. Done like most people are operating their boards, they haven't solved anything.

A lot of larger boards are also using a 3rd party photo cataloger such as photopost or photoplog. I'd added photopost to one of my smaller sites in prep for bringing it over to the largest site. Then I see that 3.7 has a built in photo album, but wait, it's a half assed version like that Quicken that came on a new HP that won't balance a checking account unless you pay for a different version. A member can upload phots and create an album but that album doesn't combine with other albums to create a page others can see. People can't even add comments to the photos if they did manage to find them through the member listing. I'm sure someone will come up with an add on that fixes that, but why can't the geniuses designing the software fix this to where it function like 99.9% of the people that use a photo add on set theirs up to do. As is, it will only confuse users as to where they are supposed to upload their photos.

As for the photos, that I can find, they've yet to include a image handler routine using GD or image magic that will resize uploads to the forum automatically preventing someone from loading a 1200 px wide picture and blowing the forums out to the right.

For the ones running larger boards and having to take serious steps to reduce bandwidth, server time, storage, and other issues similarly related, this just seems to me like another issue of having to serve oodlins of HTML and scripts and such that aren't doing anything for us and are really just in the way.

I think I understand their logic. I suppose they want to create a website script that is all things to all users. It does a little bit of everything so everyone can have a piece of the pie. At the same time, it's creating issues for the larger web sites.

What would be nice for us, IMO, is if they would make a basic version of vB and set all this other stuff up as plugins that if you wanted it, you could download it and use, but if you didn't, then you wouldn't have to deal with it being there, having to serve it or spend hours or days removing it such that each upgrade becomes a royal pain in the tail.

Skip

I agree with your post. 3.7 is nothing but bloat imo. vBulletin seems to be half assing a bunch of the new features they throw in. The Tagging system in Beta 1 was absolutely pathetic. So much so that they had to change it because of all the complaints. The "ad management" sucks. The sad thing is that once these features go in they are there to stay. So this bloat doesn't go away. vBulletin 4 needs to be less about new crap and more about paying attention to the people running large forums who are tired of having to hack up their forum to keep it up on serious hardware.

Originally Posted by AWS

I can't believe some of the comments in this thread. Anyone that owns a big board knows vbulletin lacks in performance. You have to shutoff those extras in order to keep the sites online. Search? Forget about it. You have to look for other solutions because vbulletins search chokes on a big board.
I can understand the ops frustration. Nothing to ease the pain for big board owners is this release and because of the closed mouth status of the devs we don't know for sure if anything in 4.0, which is supposed to be nearing the programming stage, will ease our pain. Heck, we've been waiting 5 years for postgresql or sql server support.

Features are nice, but, if you can't use them what good are they?

Unfortunately, even though this is in the description:

Please only post about issues running an existing Big Board here.

No one reads it and it ends up being just a few people who actually run large forums and more people asking dumb questions. That's why you can't believe some of the posts in this thread.