My Opinion
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I'd like to hear from anyone who thought I was talking about two separate code bases. I mentioned in the post above that there should only be one code base for the "forum" and that it should plug into the CMS. I think we all figured that one day we'd have a forum with a great CMS but I think the focus has moved to vBulletin being a great CMS with a forum. There are lots of better choices out there for a CMS. NOT SO MUCH when you talk about forums. Why? Because vBulletin has cornered the market. Honestly - what forum software is better? None. That is going to change if we keep going down the road we're on.
All I can say is, that the greatest forum script I've ever used is going to suck because the owners don't listen to their clients opinion anymore... I am not in the mood to write my a** off right now because I see no meaning for doing this but to me everythig looks like that a lot of people will move sooner or later to another forum software, that's for sure.👍 1Comment
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Selling my BigBoard GamerzNeeds.net/forums Threads: 193 502, Posts: 1 540 045, Members: 718 566 It is listed here http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showt...3#post18297060
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rose-coloured glasses (British & Australian) also rose-colored glasses/rose-coloured spectacles (American & Australian/British)
if someone thinks about or looks at something with rose-coloured glasses, they think it is more pleasant than it really isComment
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Not everyone's opinion has to match yours. There is no need to be snarky when someone disagrees with you. It is comments like the ones above that cause people to completely disregard what is said by certain individuals. The comment on rose colored glasses absolutely no merit nor is it constructive or provide any benefit to the community at large.Translations provided by Google.
Wayne Luke
The Rabid Badger - a vBulletin Cloud demonstration site.
vBulletin 5 APIComment
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There is no better forum software out there. But I completely disagree about having 2 separate products. Sorry. I think that if you want to turn all the features off and just run the forum, go right ahead. Conversely you should be able to turn the forum off and just run your CMS, Blogs, and Groups. I want one integrated seamless solution, and honestly I think vb has gaged the market right if that is the direction they are going in.
I do agree that vb is currently failing as a CMS, Blogs, and Groups, but I am waiting for final judgement on vb5 even though I am currently disappointed. Still, I think asking them to go back to the way things were is completely counterproductive. They aren't going back so it's time people got over that, and the sun doesn't rise and set on 3.8 either. 4.2 is better. If it's too complicated for you, then you should get professional developer help or move to a software that is within your difficulty level.Comment
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Which is the frustrating part. I remember when I first purchased VB4. I thought, "Wow, great that they integrated a blog and CMS but they sort of suck compared to WordPress or Joomla." All they had to do was copy successful products.
I think the big problem here is not that IB is including a CMS and blog with the forum software but that the CMS and blog aren't anywhere near as good as other products on the market. It's one thing if you're going to include a blog and the blog is on par with WordPress or Blogger. But if it's not on par, why charge a premium for including features people can get for free elsewhere? And seriously, if they released the blog component alone, they wouldn't be able to sell a single copy of just the blogging part of the software.
Not only do these additional features cost more but they detract from the core product development. I would have been much happier if instead of spending their time trying to build a blogging and CMS platform they simply built hooks into the product so you could bolt on that functionality via WordPress, Joomla, or whatever. Then they can get out of the CMS and blog business (where they have no place) and focus on building a great forum product.
At this point VB is sort of reminding of my experiences using the big "enterprise" level CMS systems with six figure price tags. On paper they look like nirvana but they never quite compete with freely available open source products. For instance, in the enterprise CMS systems stupid things like RSS feeds are a separate module (which you have to pay for) and leave almost zero ability to customize (like, if you wanted to omit certain types of content from the RSS feed). And then you look at some free product it either works beautifully out of the box or it's easily customizable to do what you want.
I'm actually currently dealing with a situation similar to what I just described. Some people want to continue on the enterprise CMS but everybody who actually has to use it on a day to day basis wants to get rid of it and move to an open source solution. It's so difficult to explain to the business side that most of the features being sold as modules or add-ons in the enterprise CMS don't measure up to the blogging and CMS tools most of the authors use on their own personal blogs for free. It's sort of hard to justify why we're paying several hundred thousand dollars for features that aren't as good as you can get for free.
Likewise, the VB blog and CMS lack a certain polish that one would expect from a premium product. It's not very exciting to hear that I have to pay to upgrade to get another suite of products that won't be on par with where things like WordPress were when VB4 initially launched.
But that's at the micro-level. From a macro perspective, a lot of forum owners are struggling with things like Facebook and other challenges for social eyeballs. Most of what's in VB5 does little to address this. VB5, on the social media competition side, is sort of in the same state as the CMS and blog parts of the VB package. In other words, it's adequate enough you can call it social media integration but it's already being done better in other products (i.e. WordPress).
And that's a shame. I would pay handsomely for a product that helped me get back some of the eyeballs that are currently going to Twitter and Facebook. Seriously, I would pay 4x or 5x what VB costs today if they could deliver a product that made my job easier in that regard.
I guess the funny part is that it's now become obvious that VB will never be a fully integrated site platform. The blog software won't be on par with WordPress. The CMS won't be on par with Joomla. Basically, even though it's being sold as an expensive package, the only thing it does well is act as a message board. That puts everything back at square one again.Community manager at Thailand FriendsComment
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I thought, "Wow, great that they integrated a blog and CMS but they sort of suck compared to WordPress or Joomla." All they had to do was copy successful products.
I think the big problem here is not that IB is including a CMS and blog with the forum software but that the CMS and blog aren't anywhere near as good as other products on the market.
As I said a few times before, Vbulletin is a forum, it excels at making forum software, or did, until IB took over and changed the brands direction.
Now instead of excelling at a product, they've lowered the quality of the forum from Excellent/The best, to "Ok", with a poor CMS and Blog system which bolts on.
They could've reversed that trend with VB5 and learnt from the 2+ years since VB4 was released, but instead they seem to have not only repeated that mistake, but actually done a worse job of it, lol
I often wonder how awesome the forum product would've been, if they'd focused on releasing/maintaining a professional integration/bridge option for CMS and Blog software, rather than trying and failing to reinvent the wheel in both regards, thus, lowering the overall quality of the Vbulletin brand substantially.
I mean it's taken some 2 years (post gold status) for VB4 to get near an "Ok" standard, but it's far from the professional quality veteran customers like myself were used to, pre IB takeover.Comment
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And that's the issue
As I said a few times before, Vbulletin is a forum, it excels at making forum software, or did, until IB took over and changed the brands direction.
Now instead of excelling at a product, they've lowered the quality of the forum from Excellent/The best, to "Ok", with a poor CMS and Blog system which bolts on.
They could've reversed that trend with VB5 and learnt from the 2+ years since VB4 was released, but instead they seem to have not only repeated that mistake, but actually done a worse job of it, lol
I often wonder how awesome the forum product would've been, if they'd focused on releasing/maintaining a professional integration/bridge option for CMS and Blog software, rather than trying and failing to reinvent the wheel in both regards, thus, lowering the overall quality of the Vbulletin brand substantially.
I mean it's taken some 2 years (post gold status) for VB4 to get near an "Ok" standard, but it's far from the professional quality veteran customers like myself were used to, pre IB takeover.Community manager at Thailand FriendsComment
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how do you not have a graph on the control panel homepage with basic stats on signups, active users, etc that you can take a quick glance at and see how things are going. Yes, you can look at the raw numbers but I want to see trends over a week or a month or year over year so I can see how changes have impacted various key performance indicators.Translations provided by Google.
Wayne Luke
The Rabid Badger - a vBulletin Cloud demonstration site.
vBulletin 5 APIComment
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The CP homepage should be something like that. A thirty-day view of your traffic, signups, uniques, new threads, etc. Then you would be able to see at one glance what activity results in what user behavior. Maybe you notice that 3 days after a big sign-up day (maybe you ran some ads), there are a lot of new posts. Great. If that pattern keeps repeating, maybe you schedule to hit everyone with an email 4 days after they signed up if they haven't posted. Or maybe one of the metrics is pictures added to albums and you notice that when lots of new pics are added to albums it corresponds with a rise or fall in another metric.
Or, an attrition curve graph. Showing how long people stay active on the site. Maybe in month 1 there's an X% drop off. In month 2, you lose another Y%. Then you can experiment with various campaigns and see how your efforts impact the attrition curve.
This is the kind of actionable data people can use. Most of what's on the CP homepage is a static snapshot. While helpful, unless you are keeping a separate spreadsheet or running your own DB queries to get the data yourself, the data isn't all that useful.
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I mean, if you look at cloud computing, Amazon hosting, apps in the cloud, pay for what you use apps, etc, the overall trend is exactly the opposite.
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There is no better forum software out there. But I completely disagree about having 2 separate products. Sorry. I think that if you want to turn all the features off and just run the forum, go right ahead. Conversely you should be able to turn the forum off and just run your CMS, Blogs, and Groups. I want one integrated seamless solution, and honestly I think vb has gaged the market right if that is the direction they are going in.
I do agree that vb is currently failing as a CMS, Blogs, and Groups, but I am waiting for final judgement on vb5 even though I am currently disappointed. Still, I think asking them to go back to the way things were is completely counterproductive. They aren't going back so it's time people got over that, and the sun doesn't rise and set on 3.8 either. 4.2 is better. If it's too complicated for you, then you should get professional developer help or move to a software that is within your difficulty level.
I don't think anybody is asking them to go backwards. Considering the modular nature of the architecture it should be quite easy to segment the functionality and offer people only the parts they want. That's not backwards. Giving your customers what they want is usually what most of us consider to be progress.Community manager at Thailand FriendsComment
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Something that is awesome is Mailchimp (Vertical Response isn't). I'd be happy to see better integration of MailChimp with vB5, via a plugin if necessary.Comment
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