Goodbye vBulletin

[jeevesbond]

We've been running vBulletin on our forums for a number of years (http://www.webmaster-forums.net). It has served us well, but we seem to have outgrown it somehow. Now vBulletin seems to be working against us, not for us.

I'm going to be moving us off to a Drupal shortly, as long as a public test goes well.

We're not a huge forum and I doubt anyone cares, but rather than just disappearing I wrote an article cataloguing the problems we had. You never know, I thought, someone might just find it useful.

I'm sure that for most people vBulletin is the perfect forum platform, what we want isn't what everyone else wants, so this is not meant to be a flame-fest just reasons why it didn't work for us.

A lot of the article comes down to opinion of best practices, so most of the complaints are subjective, and feel free to refute my maths (it's not my strong point).

[Chase]

Alright... cya!

[Dilly]

No offense, but some of those reasons are silly at best.

[Zachery]

Have you actually look at vBulletins code base to make acusations of it being bloated?

Have you done tests to compare file based templates in comparsion to database based templates?

I wanted to note about the style, I'm fairly sure when vBulletin 3 was in development, Firefox was not even Firefox yet, I believe it was still Phoenix/Firebird. There were no browsers that were totally CSS/XHTML complaint.

Lastly on security, we have a fairly good track history with security issues with generally less than 24 hours between notification to patch. The majority of recent security issues have been fairly hard to exploit and some have been browser/OS issues rather than just vBulletin.

[merk]

I happen to agree mostly with his reasons, though I'm happy enough not to bother making a move to another package.

I would very much like to see a better way of editing templates, and personally a webdav interface would make it possible to use most editors to edit templates, rather than having to constantly copy/paste from admincp.

The only other thing I should say is vBulletin is a forum package. Not a CMS package, so you cant expect it to be like drupal.

[Chousho]

I think having some of the built in things as modules would be a good idea for VB4, and I would have to agree with the cluttered look of the admincp.

Yes, everything has its own place, but it's a bit overwhelming to find something in the mass.

Also, I would really have to agree with the template argument. I'm not arguing for flat file templates, as I much prefer the DB stored ones. I'm referring to the template reverts that usually happen after an upgrade. It would be great if templates wouldn't have to have any edits at least between each subversion (3.6, 3.7, etc).

However, I would have to say that the stability of VB is without question, as well as the security.

I'm quite eager to see what the SN component of 3.7 will be like, as well as what the future brings with VB4.

[class101]

Got luck buddy, me I moved from phpbb to vBulletin and I will stay on vbulletin for life because this is top noch app, near phpbb at least there is no comparaison possible, on phpbb that was a boring moment to configure it, since I'm on vbull I enjoy everyday configuring it, I like the effort jelsoft did put in there products, btw good luck with drupal, hope you will come back

[Alteran Ancient]

Ah, well. Good luck with your transfer, and it's a shame to see you leave the vBulletin way! Maybe, some of the devs will look at your article, and some of them might nod their heads. One thing you are right about, is the now overcrowded admin control panel. IP.Board and phpBB3 all use tabs and stuff now, and there are masses of cries out in the vB crowd for a new admin interface, which will probably come in vB 4.

[Assim]

I wouldn't be crazy in leaving vBulletin, that's quite insane.

Who would leave vBulletin to Drupal.

[BrotherX]

We've been running vBulletin on our forums for a number of years (http://www.webmaster-forums.net). It has served us well, but we seem to have outgrown it somehow. Now vBulletin seems to be working against us, not for us.

I'm going to be moving us off to a Drupal shortly, as long as a public test goes well.

We're not a huge forum and I doubt anyone cares, but rather than just disappearing I wrote an article cataloguing the problems we had. You never know, I thought, someone might just find it useful.

I'm sure that for most people vBulletin is the perfect forum platform, what we want isn't what everyone else wants, so this is not meant to be a flame-fest just reasons why it didn't work for us.

A lot of the article comes down to opinion of best practices, so most of the complaints are subjective, and feel free to refute my maths (it's not my strong point).

I really don't know how can you compare vBulletin with something like this?

http://drupal.org/forum

Don't think that I support here vBulletin team or something like that, but realy show us one single demo example with Drupal forum which is better than vBulletin?

I was purchesed before few days vBulletin licence, and before that I was serached and searched all over the net, and I was also surf on Drupal web sites, didn't found anything interesting on Drupal.

If you want CMS, I am sure that if you go on all 2007 Open Source CMS Award Finalists (CMS Made Simple, Drupal, e107, Joomla and PHP-Fusion)
sites you will read that they are best open source CMS?
I tested almost all of them, and all of them have good and bad things, but none of them have forum which is near to vBulletin forum. Only forum which is some kind of the competition to vBulletin is Invision. All other CMS forums are jokes, compering them with vBulletin or Invision.

Anywhere I don't think that vBulletin team must be satisfied with this. They must modernaise vBulletin, sooner as possible, becouase out there is big competition and soner or later if they don't change something radical, they will be out of the business.

[---MAD---]

What on earth is good about drupal? Look at the demo brotherX linked and compare it to vbulletin's home.. just that makes me think "no way".

I mean if you were switching to phpbb or invision, thats fine as competition wise, they are very high up where as drupal is no where near competitive. Who would switch from paid to free? Theres no logic. Just because you dont have to worry about it being bought by a competitor if its paid, the same can happen to free software. Infact the developers might just stop developing it as they make no money (as its free software). Development would be slow and bugs/security issues would be much higher.

[El_Muerte]

What an odd decision considering Drupal is a CMS with a terrible forum module and vBulletin is a forum. Anyway, I'm know quite a bit of both vBulletin and Drupal (considering I've been working on vbDrupal for quite some time) and I can debunk some of your arguments.

1. Too Many Features!
To be honest, I don't see why this is a problem. Anyway, I've mentioned earlier than you can't compare a CMS with a Forum. A CMS manages content and requires a very modular design in order to provide enough flexibility to present various forms of content. A forum only has one type of content: posts, which usually has a very restrictive layout system. Yes vBulletin is quite monolithic, and optimized for the limited feature set required for a forum. One of my wishes for a future vBulletin is a more modular system. vBulletin comes with a lot of feature included by default, quite some stuff you might not even use. Drupal otoh doesn't come with a lot of features, and a lot of them are even disabled by default. Drupal's admin interface looks like clean on a standard install, but when you install/enough enough modules to get the same functionality as vBulletin includes by default it will quickly become more cluttered. However, you usually don't spend a lot of time in the admin interface.

2. Bloated Code Output
This depends a lot on the stuff you enable in Drupal. However, vBulletin's theme could be made much more simpler.
But you simply can't compare a vBulletin thread with a Drupal forum thread.

3. Constantly Changing Templates
Neither Drupal nor vBulletin implement MVC. Model doesn't imply using a database for storage, a model is more than that. Drupal's code contains inline view elements (the default theme output). And both contain code for view preparation.
But yes, the often changing templates of vBulletin are annoying. And yes, Drupal doesn't have that. But that's mostly because of the way Drupal's theming system works.

4. Other Gripes
- Licensing
vBulletin allows you do change every piece of the software. You can't distribute that. Not a major deal when you're just using.
However there are some things wrong in your list:
"Have the freedom to change code in the software package and distribute as we wish;"
Not true per se. For example GPL has some requirements when it comes to distributing your changes. So, it's not as you wish.
"Not worry that the software is owned by a single company who could go bust, be bought-out by another company with no interest in developing the product, or a competitor who buys the company in order to kill it;"
vBulletin's code is open (one of the reason why I still use it) so you can maintain your forum when vBulletin gets defunct. If the Drupal devs abandon the project you will also have to maintain it yourself.

- Security Issues
Drupal also has quite some security updates (just for the core alone). Drupal 5 had 2 security releases. Drupal 4.7 had 7 security releases.

- SEO
Drupal doesn't include any SEO optimizations at all. It depends on the theme and additional modules. Besides that SEO is smoke and mirrors.


X. Performance
Something you mentioned at various points. vBulletin performs much better than Drupal. For anonymous users performance is about the same (when you enable caching for Drupal and disable various features,). But for authenticated users vBulletin performs much better than Drupal (about a factor 4). The reason for this is quite simple, vBulletin is optimized for it's strict feature set where Drupal has a modular design which has its toll.


Anyway. I don't see why you switch from vBulletin to Drupal. I could understand switching from vBulletin to SMF, they are both web forum software.

[Andy Huang]

I'm not going to comment on a whole lot; because most of the key things have been noted already. However, one thing I will mention which was not mentioned before, is that Drupal does not support auto incrment fields with its default database class.

This doesn't sound that big just up front; but here's the critical flaw in my view.

Because it doesn't support auto incrment, each time it create a node, it must lock the table from write access, calculate number of rows (I've seen a later implementation which takes the maximum value and add one or something), create a new row to assign the auto increment id, and finally unlock the table.

Still doesn't sound too bad... But wait, just about EVERYTHING in Drupal are some form of a node. You have a thread? That's a node; you have a custom page? That's a node; You have a page? Guess what? That's also a node. etc. etc. etc.

The locks and unlocks you are going to be doing which could've easily been done with auto increment fields will probably be more costly than the few kilobytes of bandwidth that you're saving...

I did a test once...
MySQL table1 with 2 fields:
id (should be auto increment, but not)
strValue (a random string, PHP was made to generate a 5 character string)

MySQL table2 with 2 fields:
id (auto increment field)
strValue (a random string, same PHP function as the above one)

I prepopulated the tables with 10000 records each and wrote a small script that triggers 100 hits on my webserver for table1 using Drupal's queries to insert with auto increment; and then 100 more hits after that for table2 using just standard INSERT INTO. The second table with auto increment completed almost instantly, but the first one took 6 seconds to complete.

In other words, if you have 10000 users (a little bit more complex than just two fields eh?), and you have 100 people trying to register at the same time, the person whose request made it to the server last will need to wait upwards to 6 seconds before his request is being processed...

Of course, my test was probably not accurate because of other factors such as people doing things on the shared server cluster, causing loads to flexuate during the tests. But I'd say it still gives an idea as to what kind of delay it could potentially be.

Since Drupal doesn't have a properly implemented database abstraction system, to code a custom database class that actually use auto incrment fields will essentially require you to re-write most of Drupal's queries... That's time I'd rather use for other development works, and administrative tasks...

I'm by no means saying Drupal is bad... It does have wonderful uses for, and a lot of big brand companies / movie studios uses it. I just don't believe the whole scalable claim that they claim. ... at least not with the default drupal package on its own anyways... If you are going to have MemCached and MySQL replication running to make up for these, then you might as well run VB

[ComputerVitals]

Hmm.. I like how some user say,
"we've out grown vbulletin software"

Lets compare:
Webmaster forums
Members: 11,847
Posts: 174,342
Threads: 25,848
Currently Active Users: 47

Another forum I visit:
Members: 717,567
Posts: 9,698,572
Threads: 1,197,571
Currently Active Users: 7153

Somehow I fail to see that..
This 2nd forum I showd stat for has customizations as well. Not really a different theme, but changes have been done.

Perhaps the probelms with your software are from the theme and mods you may be using. Some of those are done in the best of intentions but are sloppy at best. I love vBulletin, I use it as a whole site software, Put a front end on and created new vbulletin pages.

But ultimatly the choice is yours.

[El_Muerte]

@Andy Huang:
Your assessment is not correct.
When using MySQL Drupal uses an table to store counters. They don't calculate the max value + 1 or something. So, with MySQL they read+write from the sequence table. Yes, it's a bit of overhead. But there is no proper way in MySQL to handle sequences. The auto_increment feature is a terrible hack in MySQL to cope with limitations in their implementation. In a proper SQL92 database you would use a sequence and simply use nextval(<sequece_name>) in the INSERT/UPDATE.
For the postgresql database support they will make use of sequences. But due to the MySQL limitation they can't directly use it in the query. However, they could make an adjustment to their query processing to handle that stuff in the background. But so far they haven't done that.

But I don't agree with you that Drupal's database abstraction is bad. It has some bad things (like you are only able to interface with a single database type at the same time, either mysql or postgress (but you can connect to multiple databases at the same time)). But it's not like vBulletin has a proper database abstraction. Actually, the database abstract of vBulletin quite terrible. You can't even use constant string for your queries.

vBulletin:

$db->query("SELECT * FROM ". TABLE_PREFIX ."users WHERE name = '". $db->escape_string($var) ."'"); 

Drupal:

db_query("SELECT * FROM {users} WHERE name = '%s'", $var); 

Also vBulletin is bound to MySQL where Drupal tries to be, at least query wise, DBMS.


And database load balancing and replication is something that the interface software should be oblivious to.


PS, for Drupal performance info check the blog of Dries Buytaert (main drupal dev) for some info and stuff: http://buytaert.net/drupal-performance