[Ocean]

Originally Posted by Brad.loo

You can never test a patch on every know machine running out there, a good admin knows that when it is time to patch it is time to back up. People and companys that do not do that pay the price in time.

But why is this even of importance in this debate? vB is not sending files to the users as microsoft dose, they are merly doing a version check.

Which is one of the points I brought up earlier. We were not talking about disabling the patching mechanism itself - just a notification message.

Originally Posted by Brad.loo

Support staff pays in time, and time is money. I suppose you could argue that new support issues from new versions could take up more time, espescally if new versions fail on many installs. But as a company jelsoft has to have fath in their product and staff, or they will fail anyway.

You are correct in that time is money - however, what I had stated was that this was no significant burden. The fact is that the need to tell people to upgrade doesn't really come about because they didn't see the "Current Version" listed in their AdminCP. It comes about because they don't research what's been fixed in the newer releases. Just because they have 3.0.1 and vB is up to 3.0.3 doesn't mean that their problem has already been fixed by the upgrade, after all.

The problem there is that the users in question don't research their own problem adequately before asking for help. That's not something that the version check helps with. Especially since in order to ask for help in the first place, they already have to visit the vB site - in which case they see what the most recent version is anyway!

Originally Posted by Brad.loo

I have always thought jelsoft has been fair with the issue, imho if you can not spot and remove the php code yourself then I don't think your ready to turn it off. I know that is alot of ask because of the many newbies that come here to learn without any experance, but that is always how I have felt about the subject.

I understand your point, Brad.loo - but I'm afraid I have to disagree with it. A company exec doesn't have to know how to personally implement IT security schema in order to know that it has to be done.

It's possible for someone to knowledgeably make this choice, and yet not have the technical skills to execute it.

To take an extreme example - it's not practical for Stephen Hawking to make this change (given the difficulty he has typing), but are you going to argue that he doesn't have what it takes to make a knowledgeable decision about the subject?