What can the Vbulletin community do for VB 5.x ?

[katie hunter]

Originally Posted by cellarius

No offense - but do you really think vB still has a strong community? Just look at how dead the vb.com forums have become. And, of course, IB did not care at all about bad press in the past, so why should it now? Those ideas you have, they were around years ago, when there still was a very active user base around. Nothing has come of it, and nothing ever will, in my opinion.

There is a difference, in the past all I've seen were hate blogs and topics related to Xenforo Vs. IB, a dispute the community should not have been drawn into or get involved in it from the start. In general it is a lawsuit between two parties and it is not business news or related to leadership and visions - at the end of the day the dispute is resolved in the court of law not by media or hate blogs and there wasn't news worthy of being mentioned in the first place (2 ex developers being lawsuit by the company they use to work in, that is what it was).

But this is different, contacting IB in mass, and initiating an online petition to tell them that they need to show more commitment to VBulletin 5.x in term of good management, leadership, and hiring more developers in order to assist with the development is a business news. No business company would like to hear that they aren't showing leadership and great management, that is the essence of any business and future business or investment.

As for the community, well that is the tough part, the community is there, they aren't just sticking together and they took sides between vb and xf, thinking that xf is actually the escape boat, honestly it isn't by far. 2 developers (mike and kier), not enough financial support and backbone, lack of deep features, and empty propaganda.

If the ideas that I send to Jira are implemented very well with VBulletin system + optimizing it for better speed, Vbulletin will shine, the core issue here is VB needs more expert developers and a management with great vision. VB is a huge and complex project, it is nothing like XF at all.

Originally Posted by Zachery

As someone involved in the day to day, I care. And I'm very happy to see suggestions going into the tracker. If we can get votes on the ideas, we can try to move forward with them.

There are votes but not like 2 years ago, they go anywhere from 5 - 15. There isn't much activity on Vbulletin.com and that is because primarily as i stated on VB, the speed of the forum is one of the main issues, you have 70 performance issues in jira that aren't resolved. Fixing those and i think will improve VB speed greatly and will encourage more activity.

But i think the first thing here is working on features of pages per batch, not work on different things at once, for example blogs/article redesign that i send to jira, they need to be worked on untill it is fully completed and implemented properly, then after that, the developers can focus on the profile and media tab, then after that the header redesign + proper notification system. But working on all these things at once is a bad idea.

On my site when i work on a set of features related to a certain page and release it, everyone gets excited, i also can tackle bugs much easier and faster. Instead of working on many areas at once.

Vbulletin needs to show front-end features, that is what gets customers and communities excited + spread it through the official youtube channel. I haven't seen VB promoting VB 5.x too much on youtube. I have one video that has over 2 million views on youtube, that is a good attention to my site. VB has the social tools, use it well. When members find excited features being implemented, they will spread the words for others to try it, it comes automatically.