How has your community adjusted to vBulletin 5.

[SFC]

Good reads, I'm doing the upgrade today.

[stb74]

One more plus for me, I think my forum is actually running a lot faster than my old board. Maybe thats due to the customization not being there but I am not that worried about them anyway.

[stb74]

Can't really tell yet what the impact has been as my forum goes quite in the summer as the football season is over. But the few that have been on the forum have used it very little so doesn't look good at the moment.

Most of the users that have been mobile users and I can only do so much, some use Tapatalk (not support yet in vb5.0.3) others are now using the vb mobile apps and feedback has been good. Others just user the browsers and some of them I have noticed act differently with some not showing you the reply box when typing.

Overall I really like the new forum and how it works and hop that through time the bugs will be ironed out, though I feel it may have been too soon to launch.

One other thing that disappointing me is the lack of response to topics on this forum that may help me and my users get a better experience from the forum and could potentially help others.

[sailvayu]

I started with VB4 and have never really liked it. I like the direction they were going but the execution was poor at best. The more I used the software and the control panel the more I began to realize it was a Frankenstein program, meaning the developers simply patched bits and pieces of old software code together with new. I looked at the demo of VB5 and see it is just the same old, thrown it together, put a new face on it and hope for the best. It sounds like reading the forums here things are worse not better like the sales department would have you believe. I honestly believe they should just start from scratch and write new code for the whole thing and stop piecing things together. I think I will abandon VB and move on to a WP based program. May not be a perfect solution but It cannot be worse than this. My guess is the accounts are running this company as they seem more intend on selling something, anything, than producing good software.

[tpearl5]

This all looks like another case of pushing something out the door before it was ready. Why not learn from past mistakes IB?

[Doug Brott]

No intention of changing to something else. I'll just stick with vb4 until vb5 either gets better or falls apart.

Heck, even when I came back to this thread I found that going to newpost didn't work. At least I know it wasn't my setup now.

[OhioDave]

Do you plan to stick with the vBulletin brand, or have you started to shop around and look at other solutions?

[SatelliteGuys]

I setup a vb5 test forum for my members to try... they hated it and so did I.

I am so sorry I wasted my money of vBulletin 5.

[Doug Brott]

I've upgraded twice and reverted back to a backup ... twice.

I like thew new look and feel, but it's frustrating to me that simple navigation doesn't work right. With so few people having gone through the pain of upgrading, it's very difficult to find information when I run into problems. My last upgrade was on 6/29 and I just killed it today (7/7) and reverted back to my 6/29 backup of vb4. Fortunately it's a really small forum (~ 50 people), but even with positive thinking the consensus was to dump it and go back.

The absolute biggest problem is that the goto=newpost functionality simply did not work. There's no indication as to why, but it would go to random posts in threads .. something that was probably at one time a 'new post', but was clearly not days later. It was a different post for me than it was for others, but once it became stuck, it seemed to always go to the same new post for that person. Also, going to last post doesn't even exist. Not sure how that one got missed, but it seems like a fairly critical thing for any forum navigation.

While going back to the drawing board may be a bit overkill, there are simply way too many bugs remaining. Speed was not slow for me (vb 5.0.3), but some folks had a terrible time with speed. Seems it takes > 2GB of RAM on the client side to make things work OK. Should be fine for many people, but if your forum has a lot of folks on older computers, you could run into problems. Not sure if future updates can even "fix" this since the methodology is much more script-intensive now than it was with vb4. It's up to the forum owner to decide if this will be problematic or not.

Tapatalk 2 also wasn't working for anyone. This seemed to be related to the newpost issue but I cannot be certain. I don't actually use TT2 myself (shame on me) and was relying on reports from others. In any event, TT2 was installed using the latest software that supports vb5.

Mobile HTML5 looks good on the screen, but I'll need to do a lot of work to make it more palatable from the mobile device. A lot of the icons and headings are simply too small to be easily read ore engaged on an iphone. Sure, I could by the mobile version of vb5, but I tried that once with the app for vb4 - it was an incredibly poor experience and felt like a complete waste of money to me so I refuse to spend money on a "mobile" version of vb5. I'll simply create (of find) and good mobile version when I I finally upgrade.

At this point, it looks like I'm going to have to punt. It will minimally be another 2 months before I try this again, but likely it will be longer. I purchased my vb5 license on 9/27/2012 and it's looking like 1 year will pass before I can even think of using that license. This is very disappointing.

[OhioDave]

You can definetly tell activity has screeched to a halt here

[is_it_me]

Sorry to hear that Bald Bouncer,

In a conversation about the new 30 day support for vB5, on another forum. Most of the old time experts have left the platform and most the people who are left refuse to offer their support leaving current customers at the mercy of so called official forum support, which is much different then what vB customers are use too.

And that answers a different, but similar, question to the one in this thread's title, that being - how has THIS community adjusted to vB5?

The answer is clear for all to see, most people seem to have done an Elvis and left the building.

[rudedog1968]

Sorry to hear that Bald Bouncer,

In a conversation about the new 30 day support for vB5, on another forum. Most of the old time experts have left the platform and most the people who are left refuse to offer their support leaving current customers at the mercy of so called official forum support, which is much different then what vB customers are use too.

[TLMD]

Many times I have looked to reply or start threads but have been put off by what I see to be the highly defensive and dismissive responses given often resulting in threads just being closed with a dismissive comment, I have wanted to leave constructive criticism but again seeing how others have been treated when they point out the multitude of problems with this release I have thought better of it and I can't be the only one who goes to put a reply and just shakes their head and does not bother I think the lack of posts show this.

From what I see there is not really much activity anymore in this forum. I see your point and I agree with your concerns, however I am not sure if the support team really has a choice here. They stick to "their" rules. They said they can't give information on future releases and/or features as they don't know anything about it. The developers/QA/management usually don't show up. All this is bad if you want to generate activity.

[Bald Bouncer]

Good luck Kelly,

How do you feel about loosing ticket and or phone support after 30 days? Do you feel moving forward from 5.0.2 to the latest will be easier and there will be no need for ticket support?

good luck with your community.

Not sure how Kelly feels about it but I can tell you how I feel about it as I never got chance to add my comments after it was closed with the comment *Support starts when you download the software.... It really is as simple as that. If you're downloading it, then you're probably using it somewhere." which is ridiculous, not researched, ill conceived and bordering on arrogant due to the actual sites being live with vBulletin 5, I downloaded one early version to check the download was actually working after being messed about on the payment system. I downloaded as I am sure many have but not activated as I am waiting for the return of much needed features and for the loading speed to vastly increase which by my calculation of the time each revision takes should be around October 2014.

Many times I have looked to reply or start threads but have been put off by what I see to be the highly defensive and dismissive responses given often resulting in threads just being closed with a dismissive comment, I have wanted to leave constructive criticism but again seeing how others have been treated when they point out the multitude of problems with this release I have thought better of it and I can't be the only one who goes to put a reply and just shakes their head and does not bother I think the lack of posts show this.

You can see how long I have been using vBulletin and was also an early adopter of vBulletin 4 but saw a much more proactive engagement of staff and users on the forum then all striving for the same goal and not the brick wall attitude that seems to be endemic of replies now, not even sure this reply will be still here when I check later but at least now I have said something but they do say it's not the ones who complain you worry about so much it's the ones who say nothing and just walk away never to return.

[rudedog1968]

Good luck Kelly,

How do you feel about loosing ticket and or phone support after 30 days? Do you feel moving forward from 5.0.2 to the latest will be easier and there will be no need for ticket support?

good luck with your community.