How has your community adjusted to vBulletin 5.

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  • Doug Brott
    Member
    • Mar 2007
    • 55
    • 3.6.x

    #31
    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.

    Comment


    • OhioDave
      OhioDave commented
      Editing a comment
      Do you plan to stick with the vBulletin brand, or have you started to shop around and look at other solutions?

    • Doug Brott
      Doug Brott commented
      Editing a comment
      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.
  • SatelliteGuys
    Member
    • Mar 2013
    • 41
    • 4.2.X

    #32
    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.

    Comment

    • tpearl5
      Senior Member
      • Jul 2001
      • 547
      • 4.2.X

      #33
      This all looks like another case of pushing something out the door before it was ready. Why not learn from past mistakes IB?

      Capture more registrations - Advanced Guest Posting & Registration
      Cell Phone Forums | Nikonites

      Comment

      • sailvayu
        Member
        • Nov 2009
        • 39

        #34
        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.

        Comment

        • stb74
          Senior Member
          • Nov 2008
          • 109

          #35
          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.

          Comment


          • stb74
            stb74 commented
            Editing a comment
            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.
        • SFC
          Senior Member
          • Jan 2006
          • 109
          • 3.0.5

          #36
          Good reads, I'm doing the upgrade today.

          Comment

          • feldon23
            Senior Member
            • Nov 2001
            • 11291
            • 3.7.x

            #37
            Originally posted by SFC
            Good reads, I'm doing the upgrade today.
            And he was never heard from again.

            Comment

            • TLMD
              Senior Member
              • Sep 2012
              • 1766
              • 5.6.X

              #38
              Originally posted by feldon23
              And he was never heard from again.
              Haha!

              I really don't know why, but it seems as if you are relatively sceptical towards vB5...

              Comment

              • feldon23
                Senior Member
                • Nov 2001
                • 11291
                • 3.7.x

                #39
                Originally posted by TLMD

                Haha!

                I really don't know why, but it seems as if you are relatively sceptical towards vB5...
                Experience.

                Comment

                • beishe8
                  Senior Member
                  • Oct 2005
                  • 6782
                  • 4.2.X

                  #40
                  Originally posted by feldon23
                  And he was never heard from again.
                  Hopefully his members did not bash him.



                  vB5 is unequivocally the best forum software, but not yet...

                  Comment

                  • DemOnstar
                    Senior Member
                    • Nov 2012
                    • 1912

                    #41
                    Originally posted by TLMD
                    I really don't know why, but it seems as if you are relatively sceptical towards vB5...
                    I am thinking skepticism needs reasons to exist..


                    Comment

                    • TLMD
                      Senior Member
                      • Sep 2012
                      • 1766
                      • 5.6.X

                      #42
                      Originally posted by DemOnstar

                      I am thinking skepticism needs reasons to exist..
                      In this case I used sceptical in an ironic way for sarcastic...

                      Comment

                      • scamtacular
                        Senior Member
                        • Mar 2012
                        • 130
                        • 5.0.X

                        #43
                        It's absolutely killed our forum

                        Comment


                        • OhioDave
                          OhioDave commented
                          Editing a comment
                          Care to elaborate on how??
                      • scamtacular
                        Senior Member
                        • Mar 2012
                        • 130
                        • 5.0.X

                        #44
                        Unfortunately many/most members got sick to death of all the bugs so just stopped coming. It used to be a large busy forum. The speed issues, the fact the site was often maxing out the processor on the shared server (the host blocked access to the site whenever this happened to stop the site slowing down other sites on the server). Members also got very annoyed that lots of attachments they uploaded were not displaying/working.

                        And vBulletin giving next to no support (the forum support is beyond dire, you have to pester for someone to answer a question in a thread!) meant either pay the extortionate price for extended ticket support (yes, I would have to pay for vBulletin to fix their own bugs on my forum) or sit around waiting for days for questions on this forum to be answered (I'm not alone with this). So the issues took a while to be fixed and people gave up coming.

                        Comment

                        • dilbert
                          Senior Member
                          • Oct 2004
                          • 887

                          #45
                          Originally posted by scamtacular
                          Unfortunately many/most members got sick to death of all the bugs so just stopped coming. It used to be a large busy forum. The speed issues, the fact the site was often maxing out the processor on the shared server (the host blocked access to the site whenever this happened to stop the site slowing down other sites on the server). Members also got very annoyed that lots of attachments they uploaded were not displaying/working.

                          And vBulletin giving next to no support (the forum support is beyond dire, you have to pester for someone to answer a question in a thread!) meant either pay the extortionate price for extended ticket support (yes, I would have to pay for vBulletin to fix their own bugs on my forum) or sit around waiting for days for questions on this forum to be answered (I'm not alone with this). So the issues took a while to be fixed and people gave up coming.
                          Wow, I just visited your forum, you mentioned it's running on a shared server. That was very painful. Click and wwwaaaaaiiiiittttttttt. I gave up and left.

                          Sorry for your pain.
                          Cliff
                          PathLabTalk
                          Square Wheels Cycling

                          Comment

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