I have a question about supporting vBulletin on large boards which is where it would seem vBulletin shines. Most of all the large commercial boards out there are all vBulletin. It seems that more often than not when you are having a problem (just about any problem) you get the same answer from support.
Now while this may in fact be a good way to trouble shoot and help you come up with a solution, what do you do when you are using a few mods, portal software such as vBadvanced and have thousands of users on your site? When support finds out that you have a portal or any mods of any kind they seem to run the other way until you disable everything. I mean who really runs totally box stock vBulletin software?
So the question is, how do you go about disabling everything and reverting templates on a live site with thousands of users? How do you troubleshoot forum issues without disrupting members? How do you solve problems with out taking the entire site back to stock?
On the other hand I’m a regular member of rcgroups.com, one of the largest vBulletin boards I’ve seen. We’re talking over 250,000 members and almost ten million posts. At anyone time there are five to eight thousand users on-line. The board is highly customized, rock solid and has been around for many many years. I don’t think I’ve ever seen it down. Are they so big they pretty much ignore vBulletin support and employ their own PHP / vBulletin programmers?
I’m asking all this because I’ve been a long time SMF / Tiny Portal user. I still have two of my sites running SMF/ TP but on the third site I’m switching to vBulletin as this site is going to be a fairly large commercial board. I have the cut-over planned for this Friday but honestly I’m scared to death that once I get the members moved over if I have problems to deal with it’s going to be hell if I have to put vb back to stock every time I need to fix a problem.
There are things about SMF that I love and are far and away better than vb. Forum stats for one (I'm going to miss those), and second a tightly integrated portal that’s the best I’ve ever seen, and third is how you upgrade the software. One click of a button and you are done. Fourth I guess would be that fact that you can get help fixing problems and not have to start reverting your boards back to stock to figure out what the problem us.
The major problem with SMF among other things is their theme system which totally sucks including their default theme, if you want a different look you better be a theme designer or get ready to pay someone. Then if something in their software changes you are screwed again. It’s a real pain.
Now vBulletin kicks butt in these areas. I love the fact you can change up the look just by some simple template edits in admin. The new features in 3.7 are awesome and far superior to anything out there and thank you for finally putting in ad placeholders in the templates. I also like the fact that pretty much anything and everything is configurable through admin.
What I don’t like are the statistics which are well behind the curve as far as usefulness. VB can take a lesson from SMF on this one and for commercial software you really need to address this. The other is their stance on mods. I’ll say it again, who really runs totally box stock vBulletin software?
I pondered long and hard about moving my commercial board from SMF to VB. I hope I’ve done the right thing because there’s no going back. I think I have.
Anyway, what’s your thoughts?
To troubleshoot this, first reupload all the original vB non-image files (except install.php). Make sure you upload these in ASCII format and overwrite the ones on the server. Also be sure to upload the admincp files to whichever directory you have set in your config.php file. Then run 'Suspect File Versions' in Diagnostics to make sure you have all the original files for your version and that none show 'File does not contain expected contents':
Admin CP -> Maintenance -> Diagnostics -> Suspect File Versions
[Note: In some cases you may also need to remove any of the listed .xml files in the includes/xml directory.]
Next, disable all plugins.
Note: To temporarily disable the plugin system, edit config.php and add this line right under <?php
define('DISABLE_HOOKS', true);
Admin CP -> Maintenance -> Diagnostics -> Suspect File Versions
[Note: In some cases you may also need to remove any of the listed .xml files in the includes/xml directory.]
Next, disable all plugins.
Note: To temporarily disable the plugin system, edit config.php and add this line right under <?php
define('DISABLE_HOOKS', true);
Now while this may in fact be a good way to trouble shoot and help you come up with a solution, what do you do when you are using a few mods, portal software such as vBadvanced and have thousands of users on your site? When support finds out that you have a portal or any mods of any kind they seem to run the other way until you disable everything. I mean who really runs totally box stock vBulletin software?
So the question is, how do you go about disabling everything and reverting templates on a live site with thousands of users? How do you troubleshoot forum issues without disrupting members? How do you solve problems with out taking the entire site back to stock?
On the other hand I’m a regular member of rcgroups.com, one of the largest vBulletin boards I’ve seen. We’re talking over 250,000 members and almost ten million posts. At anyone time there are five to eight thousand users on-line. The board is highly customized, rock solid and has been around for many many years. I don’t think I’ve ever seen it down. Are they so big they pretty much ignore vBulletin support and employ their own PHP / vBulletin programmers?
I’m asking all this because I’ve been a long time SMF / Tiny Portal user. I still have two of my sites running SMF/ TP but on the third site I’m switching to vBulletin as this site is going to be a fairly large commercial board. I have the cut-over planned for this Friday but honestly I’m scared to death that once I get the members moved over if I have problems to deal with it’s going to be hell if I have to put vb back to stock every time I need to fix a problem.
There are things about SMF that I love and are far and away better than vb. Forum stats for one (I'm going to miss those), and second a tightly integrated portal that’s the best I’ve ever seen, and third is how you upgrade the software. One click of a button and you are done. Fourth I guess would be that fact that you can get help fixing problems and not have to start reverting your boards back to stock to figure out what the problem us.
The major problem with SMF among other things is their theme system which totally sucks including their default theme, if you want a different look you better be a theme designer or get ready to pay someone. Then if something in their software changes you are screwed again. It’s a real pain.
Now vBulletin kicks butt in these areas. I love the fact you can change up the look just by some simple template edits in admin. The new features in 3.7 are awesome and far superior to anything out there and thank you for finally putting in ad placeholders in the templates. I also like the fact that pretty much anything and everything is configurable through admin.
What I don’t like are the statistics which are well behind the curve as far as usefulness. VB can take a lesson from SMF on this one and for commercial software you really need to address this. The other is their stance on mods. I’ll say it again, who really runs totally box stock vBulletin software?
I pondered long and hard about moving my commercial board from SMF to VB. I hope I’ve done the right thing because there’s no going back. I think I have.
Anyway, what’s your thoughts?
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