Changing 5.0 URL's to match old URL's.

[Jayhan]

I just recently "upgraded" to vbulletin 5.0. And all of my urls are broken. Everything, every where. I spent close to 15-20,000 hours over the last 5 years promoting my website and our research. We "were" number 1 in google rankings for everything we had topics on. Now after this "upgrade" not so much. To say I am disappointed would be the understatement of the millennium. I had Vbulletin 3.8.6 and wanted to go to 4, but it wasn't being sold, had no time to research because of a server change and decided on VB 5.0. Biggest mistake I have made in 10 years. This "upgrade" to 5.0 just cost me about 50% of my entire traffic for the forum. From about 500 an hour to 250.

I need to know the simplest way of making all of my old urls which I spent the better part of 5 years of my life promoting, back into working urls. We have dozens or even hundreds of other issues and problems with VB 5.0 but this is smack dab top of my list of priorities. And it needs to be resolved quickly.

Can you please tell me how to accomplish this? In the simplest way possible? Step by step?

Thank you,
Phil

[Replicant]

You got a license for version 4 when you bought version 5. If you did a backup before the upgrade, you can restore 3.8.6, then you can do the upgrade to 4.2.2 on your backup DB and you will lose the threads and posts since you upgraded to 5. Just a word on mods, if you ran a lot of mods on 3.8.6, you will want to run vb4. VB5 doesn't have a lot of mods available.

[Jayhan]

I am not sure what I am going to do to be honest. I am so frustrated and angry about this product. I feel I got totally ripped off. Just read their refund policy. NO REFUNDS. It would take me a full year and every moment of my free time just to fix the software so it even works.

All of my Admin functions which made me purchase Vbulletin to begin with have been entirely gutted by VB 5.0. My control panel is a joke because I have no control over anything. They took away every feature that mattered and replaced them with nothing. As far as I can tell there isn't even a way to remove the members list from public to prevent other forums from coming and trying to steal members which happens often.

Logins won't work, logins on my phone won't work. My members can't login. Tons of database errors. All URLs broken, like they didn't even care about their customers investment of time into their product and promotion of our websites. I could go on for an awful long time like this. It is an awful product and am hearing that VB 4 isn't a whole lot better except for the mods and plugins compatibility. 5.0 connect isn't even backwards compatible with their own previous versions. And they offer no disclaimers anywhere about all the problems and issues.

My webmaster who is very experienced has had nothing but problems each and every step of the way. He absolutely hates it. Installation was long, hard, difficult and drawn out, saying it was tedious would be quite an understatement.

I have been a loyal customer of Vbulletin for about 7 years or so and used to be a big fan until I just realized I gave a 209 dollar donation to vbulletin for 5.0 connect. I am uninstalling it, and probably going back to 3.8.7 or maybe 4.0 until they don't support it anymore. I have heard 4.0 is sketchy as well so will read all the reviews before installing it.

They even removed CC and BCC from the PM system, an unbelievably powerful tool for administering a forum, small or large. I am coming to the conclusion they just don't care. Not a single response to either of my two posts I made 15 hours ago.

VB 5.0 connect is not an upgrade and should not be sold as an upgrade. It should not be called 5.0 thus giving the impression it IS an upgrade. It should be called VB Connect 1.3 Beta. I honestly like the HTML 5 part of the platform. But it isn't a forum. It is a whole new creature with a watered down forum attached to it. It isn't even backwards compatible with their own previous versions, so in what way is it an "upgrade?"

It should come WITH STRONGLY WORDED DISCLAIMERS AND WARNINGS telling people that their SEO ranking in google will likely suffer badly if they have a lot of external or even internal links that bring traffic. They should tell people in NO UNCERTAIN TERMS that much of the functionality of previous versions just isn't there.

I have spent probably 35,000 hours of my time over the last 12 years, 7 of those with Vbulletin, building up my website and becoming numero uno on google. WE OWNED google rankings for our research topics. WE OWNED google image rankings for our research subjects. Then a few weeks ago I was forced to make a decision in haste, went to VB connect 5.0 and all of that work was flushed down the toilet. Millions of links across the web, email, Facebook and Twitter all flushed down the toilet because of this URL issue.

I have over 400,000 tweets on just two of my twitter accounts, nearly all of those made manually. Do you have any idea how much time and big a portion of my life it took to do that? Then VBulletin does the unthinkable. They forced a NEW URL down my throat like they own it. They decided it was ok to change our URL's and now force the /forum after our URL. The word forum is already in my url, so it really looks stupid when reading the url at the top.

I appreciate the fact they want a new HTML 5 platform. I understand the need for change. It happens. But what I do dislike is the fact they are dishonest about their product, making it sound to the average Joe that it is a continuation of the great VB forums of the past. It isn't. Nothing works and they gutted everything good about Vbulletin out of it. It is a nightmare. Naming it 5.0 gives one the impression it is an upgrade, a continuation, adding more good features and security to the old. Had it been properly marketed with disclaimers and warnings to people then I would have far less issue with this. Plus there is little to no plugins or mods available for it, so we can't even improve upon it.

In my opinion VB 5 is not ready for market. It should be renamed to a 1.2 or 1.3 version and strong warnings given to each prospective buyer informing them of some of the more dire consequences. And they need to put back all of the functions and functionality previous versions had, test it some more, then release it. To force us to change our url and thus break all links on the net is something which should happen only with our full knowledge and consent and come with explicit warnings. It was a really poor decision and from all of the bad reviews and bad feelings here about it I have read in the last week or so, would have to say I am far, far from the only person who feels this way.

I will probably be going back to 3.8.7 or 4.2.2 and unless Vbulletin fixes this lemon, will be taking my business elsewhere when support for those products wanes. I'll be watching. I hope they fix it because I am a huge former fan of Vbulletin. They need to make a product their customers want, need and will love. VB connect 5.0 isn't any of those.

Cheers-
Phil