vBulletin Support - Large Boards.
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I said the logo and everything else. We've made considerably greater changes than just our own logo , and they definitely would be wiped out by reverting a template , depending on which template it was.Comment
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I think what people are trying to say here is that first: yes, we understand vB can't support every third-party mods. But we don't feel we get a sympathetic ear from them when we have a problem. They're not even willing to let us say what our mods are - they just tell us to disable everything and revert back to the original. and JPnyc makes a good point - we can't always just revert back to the original.
Since so often reverting to the original is NOT the answer, I feel vB should be more willing to listen to us - and to try to work with us despite whatever modifications we've made. Often times I've said "I have this mod and that mod - and I don't think that's the source of this problem, do you?" And they write back with their standard email "remove everything, revert back to the original."
They're familiar enough with a lot of these third-party mods that they could have easily said to me "you're right, that's probably not the cause of the problem so let's look at other things and if those things don't work, then we'll go back and disable that mod."
That's all I want from them. A little more flexibility in their support.Comment
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That's roughly the equivalent of telling somebody who has a virus to reformat their hard drive. I understand your point, but the advice is completely useless. You think if you run a commercial forum that has been customized that you can upload fresh templates taking down your company logo and everything else? If that is the extent of their support they might as well not bother.Comment
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I think he's saying the harm is that for some period of time people won't see the site the way it has "always been". They'll see a stripped down version of it whether it's for a few seconds or a few minutes. That confuses and discombobulates people and that's never a good thing.Comment
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I think he's saying the harm is that for some period of time people won't see the site the way it has "always been". They'll see a stripped down version of it whether it's for a few seconds or a few minutes. That confuses and discombobulates people and that's never a good thing.Last edited by JPnyc; Mon 30 Jun '08, 8:12pm.Comment
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We ask you to make a new style with no parrent, we do not tell you to make it avaible to all of your general users.Comment
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For large boards that cannot remove addon features for troubleshooting, we recommend running a duplicate in a directory called testvb on the same server using a copy of the database (though it doesn't have to be exactly up to date) for testing purposes. This copy should have exactly the same addons and modifications and styles installed. It should be an exact duplicate of your live production forum's code and styling.
With such a test installation, it will be possible to troubleshoot, disable addons if necessary and test changes before you go live. There are over 5,000 addons and hundreds of styles available at vBulletin.org and other locations. Even if we know about particular addons, the combinations are overwhelming. We cannot be expected to know the interactions between each and every combination. Add in server configurations and custom edits by the site owners and you have almost infinite possibilities. By stripping an installation down to the basic installation in three distinct steps, we can determine where the issue is caused and by what aspect of your development.
Many times it could be a server configuration issue which only exists on your server however when there is extra code involved that can be very hard to pinpoint and if the developers need to get involved in fixing an obscure bug, there is a lot of time wasted if they have to look through plugin code as well.
So if all files are uploaded correctly and match, then we ask that you check plugins. If temporarily disabling them resolves the issue then you can be assured that a plugin is causing the conflict. You can then re-enable them and test each one individually by disabling and enabling them through the list.
If disabling plugins don't resolve the issue then it can be a javascript conflict, bad HTML structure, incorrrect logic in a conditional or something else in a template. A default style should revert all issues with templates. Comparing your template with a default one can help you find the issue in the custom coding.
If you test all new modifications, template edits and addons on a development/test installation before going live, at no time will your end-users be inconvenienced by disabling plugins or using a default style. This is the entire point of that allowance within the license agreement. We want our customers to have as little downtime as possible. Aside from hard drive space, a test installation only uses resources when it is accessed so it should not have an adverse impact on your server.
The only other way for us to try and help resolve your problem is to duplicate your installation on a new server and spend dozens of hours looking for the cause. This increased workload would of course be reflected in the price of the software and support fees would increase. Even with the current policies we have tickets that require 8 or more hours of dedicated work to resolve on occasion.Translations provided by Google.
Wayne Luke
The Rabid Badger - a vBulletin Cloud demonstration site.
vBulletin 5 API👍 1Comment
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That sounds reasonable actually.
The only thing I would ask is if they KNOW that a certain plugin probably doesn't cause the problem that they would let us skip that step for the moment and see if it's something else. Then go back to that step if necessary.Comment
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We can't ever be certain, thats the problem. Chances are at one point or another we've run into issues caused by all addons.Comment
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What I would like in such cases would be something as simple as "It could be that, check it out". I can understand this wouldn't be of use to the average vBulletin admin, but for someone that uses php, it could be a time-saver. I usually head off to vB support because I think they know the code better than I will ever. I don't want them to try to debug the issue for me, just try to point me to the correct direction, even if its a wrong guess.
Perhaps it would be useful to have a field in the member's area called something along the lines of "technical experience" (possible levels could be: no idea | some html | just html & css | html, css and some php & javascript | html,css and good php & javascript | guru level) and be treated accordingly.Comment
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perfect example here. we even opened a ticket through support, gave the vBulletin representative administrator account access, he poked around for a little while and the determination was "it is impossible to achieve this result simply with the vBulletin files, so it must be something you added".
Thanks, we knew that. Meanwhile we created a new style, completely unaltered, and disabled the plug-in system, and the problem still occurs. Gentleman that's not support, its auto exoneration. The primary concern seems to be proving that the software isn't responsible, rather than trying to resolve the issue. We already know the software isn't responsible. If it were garbage software we wouldn't use it.
VBulletin is far and away the best forum software out there. The most powerful, the most sophisticated, the most well-designed and with the best feature set, but if you should run into trouble, boxer shorts give better support.Comment
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I expect an honest effort to find the problem, not another attempt at acquitting the software of responsibility. I've worked support myself. I supported extremely complicated business software, which also had user scripting capability, and I had to go as far as debugging their scripts on a regular basis. If I couldn't find the problem (which most of the time I could), we got the developers in. That is support.
If you like, conduct a little experiment here. Go to my profile page, statistics tab, and click find all threads by. Just run through some and see how many were actually resolved, and not by me finding the answer myself.Last edited by JPnyc; Sun 27 Jul '08, 1:19pm.Comment
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