vB4 seems unfinished... but then again, most software the comes out these days is far from finished.
Having written my own web apps in PHP (and a few in JS/AJAX), I can agree that just about any software out there is a "work in progress". Especially mine! However, there are some minor but very noticeable quirks in the vB4 interface that should never have gotten past the beta stage. I will say that functionally, the whole package does work...but it's minor interface issues that make using the forum a pain.
One that irks me no end is that if you use Quick Reply, you can't tab once over to a "post" button anymore. When I'm replying to dozens of posts per day, I tend to stick to a keyboard, and I use all of the shortcuts. Having to hop constantly over to a mouse to click one button is a huge oversight IMHO.
Most of what I found are minor quirks like that. Having said that, though, I've already found some usable plugins that replace what I have in my 3.x installations.
Quote:
Originally Posted by eoc_Jason
I dunno what the average size vB forum is... But you would think if you are selling a forum product, you *want* your clients to be successful. If that means they are going to hit a brick wall after a few million posts in their DB, then you are severely limiting your market.
I may have said this earlier, but I do know search appears to be more modular now. IOW, even though Sphinx is not built in, it appears that you can now plug in a module for a search and it would appear in the search engine selector (under "dbsearch") in admincp.
The search files themselves are in a new location, from what I can tell, and there are also new tables in the database for search. So, I know it has been somewhat reworked but, like you say, it's still slow, and...
Quote:
Originally Posted by eoc_Jason
Imagine if Google took 5 minutes to return every search you make? How many people would be googling?
I don't think that search speeds of 5-10 seconds are all that bad--as a long-time forum user (as many of our members are), I have come to expect that over the dozen or so years I've been using online forums. BUT...when vB takes 20, 30, sometimes 40 seconds to retrieve an often-used word in our forum, and there's a tool (called Sphinx) that returns same in 0.4 seconds...what choice would I make? Yep, I'd find any way I could to get Sphinx running.
Beside speed, I've mentioned elsewhere in these forums (even in this thread perhaps?) that I can configure what Sphinx indexes. With MySQL, I'm stuck with whatever is set up in the my.cnf file. I could reconfigure it, but then I'm doing customizations on MySQL for only one application (vB) and possibly hampering the performance of others. With Sphinx, our members are happy simply because they can now search for three-letter terms (where previously, it was four), and I've eliminated a lot of words in the stopwords file so that some common music-based titles can now be searched. I'm actually a bona-fide hero now because members can search for "Who's Next"!
Quote:
Originally Posted by eoc_Jason
FYI, Searchlight base cost is $2,000 USD...
Ummm, no thanks. We'd pay a couple hundred bucks, but for something that costs almost what hosting does for a year, and far more than the vB product itself...? We can't justify that, not on our donation-based (and advertising-free) funding. Might be justifiable for forums that are far busier than ours, but we can barely scrape up enough donations to keep going for a year at a time...
--------------- Added [DATE]1262887000[/DATE] at [TIME]1262887000[/TIME] ---------------
You can read it if you want, but basically it allows changing the table from myISAM to InnoDB so it is no longer table locking but row locking instead (if I understand it correctly).
I just read it, and you read it correctly. Although, one thing they overlooked in their description of vB3 is that we had two search choices: built-in vB search, and fulltext. We already had InnoDB table types set up with vB's built-in search, so this is nothing new to us. In fact, it goes back even further when we changed hosts three or four years ago and we hit a brick wall in performance; this was also back when fulltext was not yet an option in vB3.
In a way, it seems vB searching has taken a step backward. *sigh* We're now back to relying on a built-in search.
The main problem is that MySQL just doesn't scale well! Sphinx helps because it bypasses MySQL entirely during the search process. Sphinx isn't that hard to set up, even without root access.
01-07-2010, 02:55 PM
However, there are some minor but very noticeable quirks in the vB4 interface that should never have gotten past the beta stage. I will say that functionally, the whole package does work...but it's minor interface issues that make using the forum a pain. 
Threaded Mode