Why 3.x forums have 5 times more visitors

[Paul M]

Your poll doesnt include all options.
For instance this site is not on vb4, but not for any of the reasons listed.

Your screenshot is somewhat meaningless, one random screenshot proves nothing really, but if you really want to examine it, more people are in the vb4 programming discussions and the vb4 design discussions than their vb3 counterparts.

Heres another one for you
My vb4 install count has now overtaken any of my vb3 versions. It continues to rise at a steady rate. So vb4 must be more popular than vb3 now .. right ?

[BirdOPrey5]

I love my VB 3.8 but even when I do release a new mod for both versions, VB 3.x will get maybe a tenth of the installs and downloads as a VB 4.x version.

I know you say that VB3 users are already running established forums and not looking for new mods- but if that were true the same could be said that they are not looking for help or support so it doesn't explain the higher numbers on your screenshot...

Could have been spiders crawling the VB3 pages... by post count VB4 forums seem much more active.

[nhawk]

I'm with BOP on this one. I coded my vB4 mods to vB3 by request and vB4 versions lead in downloads and installs by 10:1.

It's because of that, that I stopped updating the vB3 versions. I'll do bug fixes, but no new features will be added to them.

Besides, in my opinion vB3 will die a horrible death as coders move to newer versions of PHP. There are already some compatibility issues with PHP 5.3 and in most cases the only way to fix them is to roll back the PHP version. That may work for some people, but then if you run any other sites on the same server with a need for a newer version of PHP, your pretty much forced to change.

[Christos Teriakis]

Originally Posted by Paul M

Your poll doesnt include all options.
For instance this site is not on vb4, but not for any of the reasons listed.

For sure there are many more options, I wrote what came first to my mind. Actually every single webmaster can has its own reason. At least I had to add an "Other" option.

Originally Posted by Paul M

Your screenshot is somewhat meaningless, one random screenshot proves nothing really, but if you really want to examine it, more people are in the vb4 programming discussions and the vb4 design discussions than their vb3 counterparts.

Even if its some weeks now that I'm visiting the Forums section (usally I'm goind directly to Mods), and I noticed this traffic difference, I tool the screenshot just before my post.

Originally Posted by Paul M

Heres another one for you
My vb4 install count has now overtaken any of my vb3 versions. It continues to rise at a steady rate. So vb4 must be more popular than vb3 now .. right ?

Well.. and here my question for you. Why you've your own forum running vB3?

[Adrian Schneider]

Originally Posted by Paul M

more people are in the vb4 programming discussions and the vb4 design discussions than their vb3 counterparts.

Taking myself as an example, I rarely bother with the 3.x programming forums since it hasn't changed and won't be changing anymore. Why would new people want to learn an old platform? I check up on 4.x once and a while out of curiosity.

Numbers are obviously going to favor 4.x but there are a huge number of *large* forums that aer on 3.x and won't move for a very long time. From my own client-base, experience and observations, I'd say there are more *users* using 3.x forums than 4.x forums.

To me, that's a much more interesting and meaningful metric. And not to poke the bear, the fact that IB isn't eating its own dog food the biggest of all.

Cheers

[Christos Teriakis]

Originally Posted by BirdOPrey5

said that they are not looking for help or support so it doesn't explain the higher numbers on your screenshot...

The traffic exists in General discussion and not in the programming where usally members are going for support.

Originally Posted by BirdOPrey5

Could have been spiders crawling the VB3 pages... by post count VB4 forums seem much more active.

The same applies for vB4 pages. Even those few 25 visits can be spiders.

[Paul M]

Originally Posted by ChrisTERiS

Why you've your own forum running vB3?

None of your business, esp as you ask in an ignorant fashion.

[CarlitoBrigante]

We also recommend vB 3.8.x to our clients and/or most of them simply do not want to upgrade to vB4. Among our clients there are some of the biggest vBulletin forums, and most of them are running vBulletin 3; in some communities, the users decided they did not want to upgrade to vB4 as they did not like the interface; in other communities, the move to vB4 was followed to a drop in traffic (in some cases caused by early adoption of vB 4; the first releases of vB4 were so full of bugs that users actually left communities enraged by the change).

vB4 has also many design flaws that are irritating and expensive for a website owner, so some clients do not want to go with it. I am speaking about the lackluster sidebar implementation, the stylevar system (which caused style edits to be more time consuming than on vB3), the separation of the CMS from the forum area (which can be minimized if you use vBAdvanced instead than vBCMS). Especially business minded forum owners consider these things very carefully; hobbyists owners running their forum just for passion often are more willing to upgrade.

None of our clients (we have a portfolio of about 50 forums right now) moved to different systems like Xenforo, as they do not want to force their userbase to a traumatic change.

[Alfa1]

vb4 does not offer significant improvements over vb3. But it does have a lot of bugs and design flaws. In this respect its a bad trade off.
I do think vb4 is getting some more popular than vb3. But also because many do migrate from vb3 to IPB and XF.

Paul, cableforum looks heavily modified. Do you feel its currently worth the time and effort to upgrade it to vb4? You already have an article system, so the CMS may be superfluous.

[Princeton]

We just recently upgraded our big Board site to vb4.

We do not have a typical vBulletin site. The site is heavily modified. We only utilize the forum part of the vBulletin suite.

We are still making some adjustments ... tweaking to make pages faster ... cleaning up code ... tweaking for browser compatibility ... etc

With the upgrade, I also made some changes to our navigation architecture (modified a few, moved a few, etc). The URL restructuring was needed to improve user experience and ROI. I do believe we will bounce back stronger than ever. The next 2-6 months will show this to be true.

Note: We already surpassed same time last year traffic but we are aiming for bigger growth.

Why I decided to upgrade?

1. CSS Table-Less layout - this alone can increase speed of site (or at least the perception of speed) ... bandwidth and page loading improved by 60% vs previous Table layout
2. It was time. Every 2-3 years the site is due for a major upgrade. Most members now accept this as the norm. Negative feedback was good and for the most part it was due to real bugs.