Why do people still hate vBulletin 5

[Up2Vex]

I was wondering why do people hate vb5?

I understand when it first came out it was slow and very buggy

But in the years since then its gotten ALOT better and loads a lot faster, and most bugs have gone, It feels a lot more polished now, but people are still recommending not to upgrade to vB5..

 

[Pete]

When it first came out it was missing features that people considered pretty important that earlier versions of vB had, like a member list and a warning system, and it was a slow and buggy mess.

Now, it has the features back but I see no evidence that it's significantly better as a product than it was - remember, vB5 when it debuted was competing with XenForo and IPS of 2013 or so - and both of those platforms have moved on significantly since then.

The other thing is that it's not clear what vB's future looks like. Is there a vB 6 coming? All signs suggest otherwise. Which means for a long term community you need to be looking at what platforms are likely to still be around in 5 years as actively developed, actively maintained - vB is certainly not actively developed in any form that anyone would recognise (compared to XF or IPS).

And as far as I know, for a lot of vB 3 and vB 4 users, it's *still* a downgrade for them to move to 5.

 

[zappaDPJ]

I'd argue the self-install version of the product is not suitable for a production site. vBulletin's tracker lists 3272 issues of which 1553 are classed as bugs. That's a lot of bugs, some of which have been around for many years. It's also running on a lot of old code which dates back to vBulletin 4 or earlier.

There's also almost no third party support in terms of themes and add-ons, and as has already been pointed out, the future is very doesn't look particularly promising.

Another reason why the product is generally not even considered by most is the past behavior of the management company.

 

[LeadCrow]

I was wondering why do people hate vb5?

I presume thats because the improvements have never been quantified in reviews easy to follow. Their announcements are poorly written, feature only changes that have an issue tracker filing, and are almost never elaborated on in either blog entries, public discussion threads or elsewhere.

For the sake of illustrating the difference, wed need 5.0.0 compared with the latest on standard webhost stacks, both out of the box and using the same data of a forum so we can compare performance, ressource usage, and user-facing loading times (really one of the most important metrics for a visitor). We'd ideally also need an additional reference using that same imported data using another current script like xf.
Anyone did this before or interested in doing so ?

I'd argue the self-install version of the product is not suitable for a production site

Curious as to why. The once lively modding scene and specific niche features are the most commonly missed, but even an addonless script can work for many communities, like those that are not updating from a previous vb versions or depend on features not available in vb5 or not covered for migration by impex (seriously they need to work on importers or noone will come even if vb5 becomes the best forum software ever made).

 

[mysiteguy]

From a database point of view the product is a horrible mess. And that's being kind about it.

 

[zappaDPJ]

Curious as to why

There are number of reasons which taken in isolation might not appear to present an issue but become far more of a problem when added together.

A few examples...

The amount of legacy code has made PHP 8 compatibility a major task. The current release candidate which is supposed to provide support still has bugs e.g. error messages being displayed at the top of a rendered page and missing page breaks in some content.

Although a lot of bugs get squashed, the high bug count grows because new bugs get created on every update. In fact, by graph, far more bugs are created than fixed.

Support for CKEditor 4 is not guaranteed beyond 2023 and there are no plans to upgrade to version 5 of the editor. According to a member of staff 'Upgrading to CKEditor 5 is a major upgrade. It would most likely be in a vBulletin 6'.

There is no vBulletin 6.

vBulletin has been hacked numerous times.

Customers are encouraged to log and vote for bug fixes and improvements in order for the developers to concentrate their efforts on customer priorities. In reality these logged issues rarely get implemented e.g. the top voted issue given 'major' priority was logged just under ten years ago. This in conjunction with the lack of third party add-ons means the software is missing basic functionality.

The in-house development team appear to be a team of just two and the mobile app is outsourced. The outsourcing is particularity problematic because it puts a wall between the customer and the developer.

It's late, I've run out of steam and I'm sure I've missed a few things but it gives some idea of why I wouldn't want to use that particular version.

 

[zappaDPJ]

From a database point of view the product is a horrible mess. And that's being kind about it.

Yep, I missed that.

 

[Fait]

Not to mention Xenforo has taken over the market, Foundered by one of their lead ex-developers.

 

[LeadCrow]

There is no vBulletin 6.

vBulletin has been hacked numerous times.

'vb6' is still a possibility. The codebase of vb scripts is now too old and complex to improve further.

In the days, it wouldve been necessary to waste years and big funds to come up with a working script to sell or make a SaaS using. Nowadays theres many actually good scripts with permissive licences (BSD, MIT, apache...) that allow vendors to use them as the basis of whatever they plan commercializing. Permissive licenced working software is pretty much free labour for vendors looking to limit their expenses to increase the profitability of their services.
Given vBS tries moving the bulk of its operations towards SaaS/company-hosted forums, its really the best course forward to quickly produce a 'vb6'.

 

[zappaDPJ]

Given vBS tries moving the bulk of its operations towards SaaS/company-hosted forums, its really the best course forward to quickly produce a 'vb6'.

I think that's probably the only way forward in terms of survival. The question on my mind is whether the parent company understands that and if they do how would they go about it.

It would need a new or expanded team which is contrary to how they have been operating for many years now.

 

[LeadCrow]

Do they even have a project manager now? Recalling the notorious lawrence cole as their latest that dared speak in public, then complete radio silence on that front.

 

[zappaDPJ]

Not that I'm aware of. As far as I know there's Kevin Sours the lead developer and Jin-Soo Jo another developer. Aside from that there's one full time support staff member and a couple of part timers. There's also a sales department but that seems to be about it.

The Cloud version back-end support is probably outsourced but that's conjecture on my part.

 

[Up2Vex]

Guess that makes sense, thanks for the reasons, and holy **** I did not realise they have over 3000 bugs not resolved like WTF..

Guess ill stick with flarum lol

 

[KimmiKat]

Maybe it's time to take vB out back and put it out of it's misery since most have moved on to Xenforo, Invision and other mboard platforms that are more up to date.

 

[Ramses]

Even Internet Brands the owner of vBulletin hates vB5, check it out:

Automotive - Internet Brands

www.internetbrands.com

 

[Up2Vex]

I asked vbulletin about the slow page load/queries issue

This was their reply

vBulletin 5 database Queries Question - vBulletin Community Forum

Hi I had a question about vbulletin 5 Originally when the software was made it was running 100+ queries just to load the first page/home and was extremely slow. I was wondering if there have been any optimisations done and how many queries it runs now

forum.vbulletin.com

 

[Pete]

271 queries? Whoa. And it comes 50% of the page runtime, that's pretty awful all in all.

 

[Alpha1]

However, the number of queries isn't really a number that is ever focused on.

That says all you need to know. Its right in line with the statements of the CTO who said query count is a misleading metric. That was in a time when Google was not counting every millisecond for SERP ranking. While the statement at the time was completely ludicrous, now such statement is even more bizarre.

 

[Pete]

Query count can be misleading but if we were talking about 10 vs 25, I might stretch the point. Even 10 vs 50 is probably not tragic and within the bounds of 'misleading'. But 270 is a full order of magnitude out.

 

[zappaDPJ]

For comparison, the landing page on one of my forums which consists of a long list of forum categories plus a lot of custom coded bits and bobs weighs in with a query count of 14.

Joe Rosenblum, the CTO whose somewhat uninformed nonsense was linked above hasn't even viewed vBulletin's official forum for over 18 months let alone posted. In fact a lot of his drivel has been moved to trash. I know this because a bug in the software lets me read it.