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.
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.
Comment