I'm a vb forum owner since 2002. vb3 was great, but lacked a CMS and so I relied on vbadvanced for years, plus some good ol' hand-coding. Eventually that got old so was excited about vb4. vb4 was rough going, and IMO never reached its destination, but I got it working, mostly.
I've always been an instant-adopter of new vb software. When vb5 came out I waited awhile because of the ambiguity around "gold" and comments from others regarding whether it was really ready. Plus, I had created at least a couple dozen articles in the vb4 CMS.
In early June I finally went for it an upgraded to vb5... So painful. I'm stopping short of calling it a "mistake" though. I regret the pain I've put the community through (have lost tons of traffic and goodwill over two months), but for me there's no way to go but forward. I'll decide in the coming weeks whether I want to resurrect my old articles via hand coding (again) or wait for vb5 to deliver more robust features around page publishing.
The aforementioned pain was that the site simply didn't work. Posting replies would result in long delays, timeout errors, json errors, memory allocation errors, etc. etc. Pages would disappear and reappear again. After multiple rounds of optimization tweaks (via an epically long ticket in the support system), both with the software and on my server itself, and then upgrading my server (in vb's defense, I was very due for this), I have *finally* got the site functioning again, which is nice.
Now I'm focused on some of the basic issues, which really should be table stakes (not to mention CMS):
- ability for logged in users to quickly view a list of unread posts. Not posts since visit, or posts in the past day, but all unread posts for that user. The vb team really should focus on things that cater to loyal / active vb forum users, such as this one. There should be a widget or whatever for this.
- the file/photo attachment system seems weak, and there is no admincp Maintenance feature to re-do all thumbnails. I have a ticket opened on this, maybe I'm missing something, but right now photo attachments are a huge problem (not to mention the lack of a gallery).
- need to get a mobile strategy underway. The responsive design isn't terrible, though... seems better than what vb4 was offering.
- who's online now doesn't work and it's a known issue? Lame! Anything that blatantly doesn't work should simply be suppressed until it does.
I'm optimistic that vb5 is building toward a more extensible platform, and now that there are plugin tools available, I hope there will be more mods and innovation coming from the dev community for this. I also hope vb will get on a more rapid cadence of updates to its software. Every release seems to knock out 150 bugs or so, which is nice and concerning at once.
Anyway, that's my feedback. Looking forward to each release in hopes of more, better features and less bugs.
I've always been an instant-adopter of new vb software. When vb5 came out I waited awhile because of the ambiguity around "gold" and comments from others regarding whether it was really ready. Plus, I had created at least a couple dozen articles in the vb4 CMS.
In early June I finally went for it an upgraded to vb5... So painful. I'm stopping short of calling it a "mistake" though. I regret the pain I've put the community through (have lost tons of traffic and goodwill over two months), but for me there's no way to go but forward. I'll decide in the coming weeks whether I want to resurrect my old articles via hand coding (again) or wait for vb5 to deliver more robust features around page publishing.
The aforementioned pain was that the site simply didn't work. Posting replies would result in long delays, timeout errors, json errors, memory allocation errors, etc. etc. Pages would disappear and reappear again. After multiple rounds of optimization tweaks (via an epically long ticket in the support system), both with the software and on my server itself, and then upgrading my server (in vb's defense, I was very due for this), I have *finally* got the site functioning again, which is nice.
Now I'm focused on some of the basic issues, which really should be table stakes (not to mention CMS):
- ability for logged in users to quickly view a list of unread posts. Not posts since visit, or posts in the past day, but all unread posts for that user. The vb team really should focus on things that cater to loyal / active vb forum users, such as this one. There should be a widget or whatever for this.
- the file/photo attachment system seems weak, and there is no admincp Maintenance feature to re-do all thumbnails. I have a ticket opened on this, maybe I'm missing something, but right now photo attachments are a huge problem (not to mention the lack of a gallery).
- need to get a mobile strategy underway. The responsive design isn't terrible, though... seems better than what vb4 was offering.
- who's online now doesn't work and it's a known issue? Lame! Anything that blatantly doesn't work should simply be suppressed until it does.
I'm optimistic that vb5 is building toward a more extensible platform, and now that there are plugin tools available, I hope there will be more mods and innovation coming from the dev community for this. I also hope vb will get on a more rapid cadence of updates to its software. Every release seems to knock out 150 bugs or so, which is nice and concerning at once.
Anyway, that's my feedback. Looking forward to each release in hopes of more, better features and less bugs.
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