Version 3.7 Rant

Ok, I'm ranting a little, getting on my soap box, whatever you want to call it.

I've been running vB since the 2.2 something days and getting ready for a major overhaul of the site. I know it needs it and has for a while, that's not exactly what this post is about.

These days if you buy a new computer off the shelf you have to spend a few hours deleting out all the "Software 30 day Trials" "Trial Versions" "Internet Service Options" and other completely useless stuff that takes up space and time.

vB seems to have taken the same tactic as HP, Dell, and every other computer manufacturer. 3.7 has a lot of unneeded, unwanted, and half assed options on it that the majority of us I feel like are going to end up removing, deleting, and replacing.

Most big boards are running some sort of ad management scrip to keep track of the money making advertisements. I've been using Red Tyger's version for over a year now modified quite a bit to suit my needs. 3.7 has ad templates built into it all over the place but no central controlling menu to handle rotating banners, rotating scripts etc. Otherwords, it's not really what we need, just some junk that if you wanted to you could stick an ad here or there. They said they were doing it to make upgrades easier without having to disable plug ins. Yeah, right. Done like most people are operating their boards, they haven't solved anything.

A lot of larger boards are also using a 3rd party photo cataloger such as photopost or photoplog. I'd added photopost to one of my smaller sites in prep for bringing it over to the largest site. Then I see that 3.7 has a built in photo album, but wait, it's a half assed version like that Quicken that came on a new HP that won't balance a checking account unless you pay for a different version. A member can upload phots and create an album but that album doesn't combine with other albums to create a page others can see. People can't even add comments to the photos if they did manage to find them through the member listing. I'm sure someone will come up with an add on that fixes that, but why can't the geniuses designing the software fix this to where it function like 99.9% of the people that use a photo add on set theirs up to do. As is, it will only confuse users as to where they are supposed to upload their photos.

As for the photos, that I can find, they've yet to include a image handler routine using GD or image magic that will resize uploads to the forum automatically preventing someone from loading a 1200 px wide picture and blowing the forums out to the right.

For the ones running larger boards and having to take serious steps to reduce bandwidth, server time, storage, and other issues similarly related, this just seems to me like another issue of having to serve oodlins of HTML and scripts and such that aren't doing anything for us and are really just in the way.

I think I understand their logic. I suppose they want to create a website script that is all things to all users. It does a little bit of everything so everyone can have a piece of the pie. At the same time, it's creating issues for the larger web sites.

What would be nice for us, IMO, is if they would make a basic version of vB and set all this other stuff up as plugins that if you wanted it, you could download it and use, but if you didn't, then you wouldn't have to deal with it being there, having to serve it or spend hours or days removing it such that each upgrade becomes a royal pain in the tail.

Skip

[Kittencare]

Well why not just publish it? If it's 5% it's expected, if it's 30% it needs to get out and be looked at.

[AWS]

I can't believe some of the comments in this thread. Anyone that owns a big board knows vbulletin lacks in performance. You have to shutoff those extras in order to keep the sites online. Search? Forget about it. You have to look for other solutions because vbulletins search chokes on a big board.
I can understand the ops frustration. Nothing to ease the pain for big board owners is this release and because of the closed mouth status of the devs we don't know for sure if anything in 4.0, which is supposed to be nearing the programming stage, will ease our pain. Heck, we've been waiting 5 years for postgresql or sql server support.

Features are nice, but, if you can't use them what good are they?

[Awjvail]

Just a question: When stable is released, will a list of all modified templates be included as well?

[ssslippy]

They alware are and there is a listing in the admin CP as usuall and you can even compare the changes.

[BamaStangGuy]

Originally Posted by Skipsoutdoors

Ok, I'm ranting a little, getting on my soap box, whatever you want to call it.

I've been running vB since the 2.2 something days and getting ready for a major overhaul of the site. I know it needs it and has for a while, that's not exactly what this post is about.

These days if you buy a new computer off the shelf you have to spend a few hours deleting out all the "Software 30 day Trials" "Trial Versions" "Internet Service Options" and other completely useless stuff that takes up space and time.

vB seems to have taken the same tactic as HP, Dell, and every other computer manufacturer. 3.7 has a lot of unneeded, unwanted, and half assed options on it that the majority of us I feel like are going to end up removing, deleting, and replacing.

Most big boards are running some sort of ad management scrip to keep track of the money making advertisements. I've been using Red Tyger's version for over a year now modified quite a bit to suit my needs. 3.7 has ad templates built into it all over the place but no central controlling menu to handle rotating banners, rotating scripts etc. Otherwords, it's not really what we need, just some junk that if you wanted to you could stick an ad here or there. They said they were doing it to make upgrades easier without having to disable plug ins. Yeah, right. Done like most people are operating their boards, they haven't solved anything.

A lot of larger boards are also using a 3rd party photo cataloger such as photopost or photoplog. I'd added photopost to one of my smaller sites in prep for bringing it over to the largest site. Then I see that 3.7 has a built in photo album, but wait, it's a half assed version like that Quicken that came on a new HP that won't balance a checking account unless you pay for a different version. A member can upload phots and create an album but that album doesn't combine with other albums to create a page others can see. People can't even add comments to the photos if they did manage to find them through the member listing. I'm sure someone will come up with an add on that fixes that, but why can't the geniuses designing the software fix this to where it function like 99.9% of the people that use a photo add on set theirs up to do. As is, it will only confuse users as to where they are supposed to upload their photos.

As for the photos, that I can find, they've yet to include a image handler routine using GD or image magic that will resize uploads to the forum automatically preventing someone from loading a 1200 px wide picture and blowing the forums out to the right.

For the ones running larger boards and having to take serious steps to reduce bandwidth, server time, storage, and other issues similarly related, this just seems to me like another issue of having to serve oodlins of HTML and scripts and such that aren't doing anything for us and are really just in the way.

I think I understand their logic. I suppose they want to create a website script that is all things to all users. It does a little bit of everything so everyone can have a piece of the pie. At the same time, it's creating issues for the larger web sites.

What would be nice for us, IMO, is if they would make a basic version of vB and set all this other stuff up as plugins that if you wanted it, you could download it and use, but if you didn't, then you wouldn't have to deal with it being there, having to serve it or spend hours or days removing it such that each upgrade becomes a royal pain in the tail.

Skip

I agree with your post. 3.7 is nothing but bloat imo. vBulletin seems to be half assing a bunch of the new features they throw in. The Tagging system in Beta 1 was absolutely pathetic. So much so that they had to change it because of all the complaints. The "ad management" sucks. The sad thing is that once these features go in they are there to stay. So this bloat doesn't go away. vBulletin 4 needs to be less about new crap and more about paying attention to the people running large forums who are tired of having to hack up their forum to keep it up on serious hardware.

Originally Posted by AWS

I can't believe some of the comments in this thread. Anyone that owns a big board knows vbulletin lacks in performance. You have to shutoff those extras in order to keep the sites online. Search? Forget about it. You have to look for other solutions because vbulletins search chokes on a big board.
I can understand the ops frustration. Nothing to ease the pain for big board owners is this release and because of the closed mouth status of the devs we don't know for sure if anything in 4.0, which is supposed to be nearing the programming stage, will ease our pain. Heck, we've been waiting 5 years for postgresql or sql server support.

Features are nice, but, if you can't use them what good are they?

Unfortunately, even though this is in the description:

Please only post about issues running an existing Big Board here.

No one reads it and it ends up being just a few people who actually run large forums and more people asking dumb questions. That's why you can't believe some of the posts in this thread.

[TECK]

Some of the people want to find out more from experts who run huge boards how is it, out of curiosity. But ya, most people don't care this is large forum discussion. I read threads about people posting that they have one server powered by a Celeron processor and they run a "big" board. Ya, right.

[FlyBoy73]

Originally Posted by AWS

I can't believe some of the comments in this thread. Anyone that owns a big board knows vbulletin lacks in performance. You have to shutoff those extras in order to keep the sites online. Search? Forget about it. You have to look for other solutions because vbulletins search chokes on a big board.
I can understand the ops frustration. Nothing to ease the pain for big board owners is this release and because of the closed mouth status of the devs we don't know for sure if anything in 4.0, which is supposed to be nearing the programming stage, will ease our pain. Heck, we've been waiting 5 years for postgresql or sql server support.

Features are nice, but, if you can't use them what good are they?

Simple solution... Add more servers.. Hey, its just money, right?

I know most people use leased dedicated servers rather than buying their own servers and colo'ing them for their "big boards"; however, as vBulletin grows with features and what some call bloat, server performance is growing at a similar or faster pace.

It hasn't been 2 years since I purchased a Quad Opteron server with 6x 15K SAS drives running RAID 10 & 1 (I think, lol).. Back then that was a monster that people in the DC drooled over when I rolled it in and racked it up.. Now days you have Quad Core Chips and 15K SAS drives are more standard.. The price of the new servers with monster specs are less than when my quad opteron was back then and packs so much more processing power. My Quad Opteron still handles my primary Big-Board and a second one that has reached that "status" (according to B-B) and it still handles it quite well. I'm about to upgrade to 3.6.8 and add a bunch of hacks and new scripts etc.. Soon after that I will be adding a dedicated http server and making the existing opteron a dedicated database server..

I guess where I am going with this (loooong winded) is that as vBulletin grows, so does the level of performance with servers (across the board) that host it.. I was speaking about colo'd servers but when you compare leased dedicated servers from 3 years ago and today, you will see improvements for the same $$ as well..

And besides, if you really do have a "Big Board", you should be able to monitize it and afford the hosting that it requires..

Just my 2 cents of course..

David

[AWS]

I've posted several times at vbulletin.com about things need to be added in order for the product to scale on big sites. I've been doing it since my first forum hit the wall 6 years ago. The standard answer I got was add more hardware. More hardware isn't the answer all the time. On my busiest forum I already run 4 servers. Search does not work and pruning, another answer you'll get, is not an option. This is a private forum by invite only and my members would kill me if I deleted any or the 7MIL posts. What is needed is a true archive system with a separate search engine. This would allow us to move older threads out of the db keeping it down to a size that is searchable and fast.
My take is vbulletin only cares about selling the software. They'll add useless features until they're blue in the face as long as it sells the product. What they don't care about, or if they do don't say, is once your forum reaches big board status things start to slow down drastically.
IMHO, they could care less about optimizing vbulletin for big boards because they already got our money.

[FlyBoy73]

Originally Posted by TECK

I read threads about people posting that they have one server powered by a Celeron processor and they run a "big" board. Ya, right.

lol... I wish.. Maybe with 30 second + page generation times.. If at all..

--------------- Added [DATE]1199311534[/DATE] at [TIME]1199311534[/TIME] ---------------

Adding hardward definitely isn't the end-all, be-all.. But, having good equipment definitely does help. Optimizing it is even more important.

Here is an example.. I used to have (3) Dual Xeon servers prior to my purchase of the single Quad Opteron, and the single Quad Opteron blew the doors off the three seperate servers hands down.

Both myself and another forum owner (we both at the time had well over a million posts and usually 1,000++ active members online with a 30 minute refresh) stuidies up and spoke to a lot of people (like Marco VH, Eva2000, etc) as well as other BB forum owners trying to find the right marriage.. We found it with fast hard drives, fair amount of RAM (8 gigs) and good processors.. ((btw,I know this has all been discussed in other threads))
I've got 3.2 million posts now, 132k members, and over 2,400 online at this moment...
I've also got a fair amount of hacks.. And I'm running a load of about 1.56 at the moment.. That also includes sever other forums. (The board stats mentioned above is running 3.5.4)

At least to me... That isn't too bad.. We'll see how it does once I upgrade that one to 3.6.8 status all hacked out.. Oh, and btw.. The other BB hosted on this server is running 3.7 with about 5 hacks..

I'm in no way saying vB isn't heavy on code and modifications out of the box, but I think a lot depends on what you are powering it with..

AWS, What is your PHP Memory Limit set at? I've had to bump mine up a few times to keep the search feature 'happy'.. I agree it definitely is hungry..

Lastly, I will NEVER EVER purge posts... I think it is the cardinal sin (well, one of them) of admin mistakes..

David

Originally Posted by AWS

I've posted several times at vbulletin.com about things need to be added in order for the product to scale on big sites. I've been doing it since my first forum hit the wall 6 years ago. The standard answer I got was add more hardware. More hardware isn't the answer all the time. On my busiest forum I already run 4 servers. Search does not work and pruning, another answer you'll get, is not an option. This is a private forum by invite only and my members would kill me if I deleted any or the 7MIL posts. What is needed is a true archive system with a separate search engine. This would allow us to move older threads out of the db keeping it down to a size that is searchable and fast.
My take is vbulletin only cares about selling the software. They'll add useless features until they're blue in the face as long as it sells the product. What they don't care about, or if they do don't say, is once your forum reaches big board status things start to slow down drastically.
IMHO, they could care less about optimizing vbulletin for big boards because they already got our money.

[alexi]

Originally Posted by AWS

I've posted several times at vbulletin.com about things need to be added in order for the product to scale on big sites. I've been doing it since my first forum hit the wall 6 years ago. The standard answer I got was add more hardware. More hardware isn't the answer all the time. On my busiest forum I already run 4 servers. Search does not work and pruning, another answer you'll get, is not an option. This is a private forum by invite only and my members would kill me if I deleted any or the 7MIL posts. What is needed is a true archive system with a separate search engine. This would allow us to move older threads out of the db keeping it down to a size that is searchable and fast.
My take is vbulletin only cares about selling the software. They'll add useless features until they're blue in the face as long as it sells the product. What they don't care about, or if they do don't say, is once your forum reaches big board status things start to slow down drastically.
IMHO, they could care less about optimizing vbulletin for big boards because they already got our money.

I think the logic is pretty clear. At $125.00 a copy they need to sell volume in order to make money. There are not enough big boards to even come close to paying the bills, but new features help sell to the 1000's of small boards. I have always thought they should have an "enterprise" version with features that cater to the big boards. I would pay significantly more for such a service