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.

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[SCRIPT3R]

Originally Posted by alexi

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

bingo, and ditto!

[FlyBoy73]

Originally Posted by alexi

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

I totally agree... And I would definitely pay more as well. I still can't believe they are charging the same as when I bought my first license in 2001..

[Adrian Schneider]

I mostly agree... a feature release which many big board owners will consider bloat.

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

If they want to have a community to back their product, they need to start catering to the big board owners more. They are the ones who have been around the longest, and are the ones who help the new site owners. Maybe they will consider some sort of enterprise version of the software. Less goodies, more performance, with more options for like searching, templates, plugins, etc. All the weak spots. If they don't, admins might turn to actual enterprise level forum solutions.

Adding new hardware obviously helps, but if the software is the weakest link, then it should either be improved or removed.

I've worked with many big boards and efficiency is always the #1 problem. Look at SitePoint... it usually takes me 10-30 seconds to perform a vB search. It's completely unacceptable. Of all sites, I'm sure they have the resources for decent hardware (and use them wisely).

[FlyBoy73]

Is there an enterprise software solution that you believe is better than vBulletin, especially in the resources department? I haven't found one, though I haven't looked in over a year.. In either windows or linux..

I know some big board's that moved to them from vb, such as www.rcuniverse.com a long time ago, and they were much more resource intensive.. At least, the page load times were horrible until they added more equipment..

I'm not all that brand loyal, but vB has been the best that I have seen for a long time.. That and the hack community is incredible..

Always willing to learn more!

[TECK]

Originally Posted by AWS

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

VB 4.0 will have postgresql support. Thank God! We can unleash some real SQL performance.
But when it will be out???

[AWS]

RC Universe uses asp.net playground or some name like that. It is an a .net/mssql forum package.

All the weak spots. If they don't, admins might turn to actual enterprise level forum solutions.

I have moved one of my 2 bigs boards to community server and the one I'm having problems with I'll move as soon as I tweak the import controls for cs3. CS is an enterprise solution and it cost me plenty. Performance gains more than paid for it however.

[TECK]

$2500 for the CS enterprise license. You pay two and half larges but you save the cost of 3 servers, 2 grands a pop... go figure. For sure it is worth every penny. The real solution is to use an Oracle database, Microsoft SQL is simply insulting. So I guess for me the solution is to stick with the upcoming PostgreSQL support in VB4 and hope that a miracle will happen related to performance... unless there is a new piece of software that truly focuses on that important part.

I agree that the best thing CS does is to focus on code performance, not on useless "gadgets".

That's the reason why many people will pay a high price tag for CS. I will pay in an instance a high price like that for an equivalent piece of software based on PHP and PostgreSQL.

Let's don't forget that Facebook is run entirely in Unix/PHP. Only their memcached web cluster has 200 servers with 16GB of RAM per box. So there is room for a good product written in PHP language that is scaled for performance, not crazy options.

Edit: But I don't blame the vBulletin developers, really. The guys work their asses off day and night to satisfy the masses who come up with stupid requests and don't have not even an ounce of experience on server maintenance or programming. If some kiddo starts a trend and wants to have a new facebook on his site, a million others want it also. Those people never think what is the result of their request.

The devs sleep like 4hours/night (sometimes) just to code a stupid profile gadget, because it was requested. I respect them a lot for their white nights... I know that because I passed through this also. That's also the reason why I get mad at people here, because it makes me go ballistic when I see the total lack of interest for code efficiency and server performance. I remember when people used to release hacks here at vb.org that generated 70 queries per page.. simply insane. Heh, what do you expect, those people run vBulletin on a shared account with 5 users online. I want to see them dealing with a farm of 20 servers, while the disks are almost getting on fire, due to the intense MySQL reads.

Those people have no idea what is that an unix box and how hard is to maintain it properly... but they are the first ones to request a ton of crap features... just because they find it "cool".

How many people install here products or code modifications without even asking one second: "Wait a minute, is this thing I just installed good for my server performance?" No, all they care is that it looks good. But they never wonder why none (or maybe 2-3 of them) of the hacks available at vb.org are installed by vBulletin developers or serious programmers.

AWS, I know exactly where are you coming from and I understand totally your frustration.
It justifies totally your move to CS... and your money are well spent, because I know you are a Server 2003 guy, not like me... a CentOS lover.

[Tallis]

I think you should be able to choose the extra features (that you were ranting about) on the same page where you choose what version of vBulletin you want to download, what format you want it to be in, etc.

That would be a nice addition :P

[Kittencare]

I don't understand why features like Tagging, Extended Profiles and those new "Usergroups" aren't released as addons.

I also don't understand why they don't finally pull through with the OO. Classes like Search or UserAuthentication with a defined set of public functions could easily be replaced by other code, allowing easy Sphinx integration or authenticating users from other sources (how old is that thread on vb.com? 5 years?). Not supporting PostgreSQL after so many years is a joke too, they can't be using that many MySQL specific code, and if they do, it's bad anyway.

New features are fine, alexi is correct, they need to, but it isn't all that hard to pay a tiny of attention to the bigger boards. Nobody is asking for a all-in-one solution for all problems but at least some attention would do much.

[Zachery]

Originally Posted by Kittencare

I don't understand why features like Tagging, Extended Profiles and those new "Usergroups" aren't released as addons.

I also don't understand why they don't finally pull through with the OO. Classes like Search or UserAuthentication with a defined set of public functions could easily be replaced by other code, allowing easy Sphinx integration or authenticating users from other sources (how old is that thread on vb.com? 5 years?). Not supporting PostgreSQL after so many years is a joke too, they can't be using that many MySQL specific code, and if they do, it's bad anyway.

New features are fine, alexi is correct, they need to, but it isn't all that hard to pay a tiny of attention to the bigger boards. Nobody is asking for a all-in-one solution for all problems but at least some attention would do much.

Big changes can't happen over night.