[Digital Jedi]

Originally Posted by cellarius

Some are riding pretty high horses, here. It is all fine and dandy that you have lots of experience and know how to evaluate software and know all the admin forums where you can get independent opinions.

Guess what? Many of IB's potential customers are not. They see all the crap about market leader and worlds leading community software, with hundreds of new features promised. They may even surf around and find many big forums running vB. That may be vB4 or even vB3, but they see: Hey, that has to be reliable software. Then they may even surf the vbulletin website. But guess what? All the critical feedback is hidden away from them. They may even know that bugs are quite normal in software, but they are probably not used to being sold crap in a state that vB5 was in (and in many ways still is).

That link I posted is the Google search results to the term "vbulletin 5 connect reviews." And that's without quotes. The first third-party review on page 1 is a visible one star review. The next result is "vBulletin is dead." The third is "vBulletin 5 sucks". While I disagree with those points as they are stated, the fact is that basic, fundamental research is nothing new, difficult or special. This is basic consumerism.

Are they to blame in part for not researching even more? Maybe. But what is sure as hell is that IB has sold half baked software not once, but twice. I really don't get how you guys really can be of the opinion that this mess is in the first place the fault of the customer. Said customer has every right to state his opinion, and if they want to do so in a place where it is not hidden away from potential new customers, then this is more than understandable. If that is more than you can bear, I suggest you just skip such threads (given the title of this thread pretty much gives away its content, doesn't it?)

And other customers have the right to be tired of all the complaining. Especially when we either looked into vB5 and decided it wasn't ready for prime time, or conversely, we're running vB5 and it meets our standards for forum software. We get it, already. And as I pointed out above, the reviews are hardly hidden from someone willing to make the most basic gasp of an effort. If someone isn't expecting dissenting opinions from consumers of the opposite opinion, on one of the products official sites, then maybe this internet thing isn't for them.

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Originally Posted by englishtalk

Is this what you'll write on IB/VB's tombstone after they've gone bankrupt? Or maybe "technically they were right and their customers were wrong!"

People were happy with their previous products, are happy with their competitors products, aren't happy with their current product. Does the conversation really have to be more nuanced than that?

That slices a non-contextual portion of my post, and my overall comments, in favor of hyperbole. What I said was, by now, the surprised, disgruntled threads are wearing a bit thin considering the amount of time that's passed, the number of these threads that already exist, and the fact that anyone with a address bar on their browser could have avoided their own hassles.