Questions I would like to see Joe respond to:

[Reeve of Shinra]

vbulletin 4 gold was released today and despite assurances that "the software is stable, robust, and ready for production environments" it appears to be far from it. There are various individual concerns out posted around the forums and as of 4:30pm EST, 11 pages of confirmed bugs, 28 pages of bug scrubs, 32 pages of bugs that have yet to be confirmed and more growing by the hour.

I'd like to hear what Joe has to say about this and what he is going to do to help fix this especially when maintenance releases will be monthly starting February and we have a ton of problems out there.


Question 1: What is IB doing to augment to current resources allocated to development and bug squashing? How soon will that happen?

Question 2: The CMS has queries ranging into the 200+ range, how is this not a show stopper and what is being done to correct this with the interim releases in January?

Question 3: Ray Morgan stated numerous times that IB's extensive team of developers would be carefully reviewing the code to ensure a quality release. Furthermore, we were advised that IB had external resources lined up to review the code as well. What happened to these resources and why did they fall short in this release?

Question 4: What is being done, going forward with the interim releases, to ensure no further bugs are introduced and bugs that are fixed remain fixed.


[Customers, please add your own questions]

[Reeve of Shinra]

Questions from Callie Joe

1. High queries on the cms. You've got to be joking! This is not fixed in gold? Who is running the show around here now? I'd like to know why this was not important enough to fix before gold!! Just because many have begged for "years!" for a vb cms, does not mean they want to kill their sites with it. Feature requests could wait, but high queries should have been fixed asap!
2. Missing features from previous versions...now GONE in 4.0. Example: No custom profiles. Have to wait until a later point release. What? This wasn't a feature request. This was a feature already in 3.7-3.8! Now it's gone in the current release?!? What's the point of upgrading if we lose features? That's insane!! I haven't even checked the blog. Is the customize blog feature gone as well? I wouldn't doubt it!
3. The amount of bugs in the bug tracker.
4. The lack of personalization and friendliness for end users is still lacking after all these years. You can read the old suggestion forum and the new suggestion forum for a list. I thought IB hired inexperienced users to test 4.0. Reading the suggestions forum, you can get that type of info for free.

[CallieJo]

Thanks Reeve of Shinra. I'd love to hear the answers to all these questions. I can't help but feel let down and shocked and angry and disappointed big time all at the same time. Hearing some answers would surely help.

[melbo]

I am a little surprised by the silence myself. I'd like a little reassuring and am in a holding pattern for going live right now.

[Grover]

Thanks Reeve of Shinra. I'd love to hear the answers to all these questions. I can't help but feel let down and shocked and angry and disappointed big time all at the same time. Hearing some answers would surely help.

I feel your big frustration, CallieJo. Join the ever growing club overhere on vbulletin.com (and all over the internet).

[Homeworld'sa]

vB4 is the worst forum solution in my lifetime that Jelsoft/vBulletin Solutions have made. I prefer the other older versions.
I'd like answers as well to all of the above questions.

[Nick]

vB4 is the worst forum solution in my lifetime that Jelsoft/vBulletin Solutions have made. I prefer the other older versions.
I'd like answers as well to all of the above questions.

I don't think they care. As long as they're able to say, "vB 4 Gold is finally out! Even though it is the least stable product on the forum market, it's gold and that's all there is to it. Download away, make some purchases, and let us rake in the cash, y'all!". Or something like that.

[Loco.M]

I don't see why everything thinks the forum itself is unstable?
I agree the CMS is off, but my test forum is running just fine

[smiggy]

I hope no one minds me putting a question forward.

When will the 3.8 series be reinstated?

[Ramsesx]

I don't see why everything thinks the forum itself is unstable?
I agree the CMS is off, but my test forum is running just fine

Yes, you're right, there are no problems on a dead testforum with cms disabled and don't doing anything on it.

[Nick]

I hope no one minds me putting a question forward.

When will the 3.8 series be reinstated?

Huh?

[Joe Rosenblum]

Good questions, thanks. As I mentioned before, 4.0 is a new release and has some of the short-comings of a new release while still also having overwhelming value (in my opinion). I'll try to answer the specific questions above as best as possible:

1. A lot of folks have mentioned the high query count on CMS; I think 'query count' is a misleading metric. The real question is: how long does it take to render the page? We've made a number of fundamental changes to the DB schema in 4.0 that improve performance in a variety of areas, and some of the improvements have changed the way we approach some parts of the application design. In the case of CMS we would rather have a lot of tiny queries that take a few milliseconds each than a few large joins that take hundreds of milliseconds. Our product offers an incredibly rich set of features including our incredibly fine grained permissions, and we don't want to compromise the offering; that said, we can absolutely do better on CMS performance and we will be working on improving this in the future.
   
2. Regarding personalization/custom profiles: look for this in one of the upcoming point releases.
   
3. As far as the QA process and high bug count: our QA process has been improving constantly throughout the last phase of the development cycle. We think we've delivered a better product, faster than anytime in the history of vBulletin and we will continue to drive new feature development while maintaining high quality. We have recently hired more QA and engineering staff to help out. For more detail on the process we have used and are using, please see my previous article.

I hope that helps give some insight into where we are at. I'm very proud of the great work the team has done on 4.0 and I know that there is a lot more to come.

[smiggy]

Joe,

What about an answer to my question if you do not mind?

[icarusforde]

When will the 3.8 series be reinstated?

What about an answer to my question if you do not mind?

If we could understand what exactly you mean, it would help...

[jörg]

Hello Joe,

sometimes i think : You have never seen your own Software.

Why you ignore all this Bugs and Problems? It is not 1 Bug or 100 Bugs.........We have to fight with 1000 Bugs. The CMS is the last Crap, the most things in it will not work. Sample RSS or please create a Article in IE6 or IE8,in your Wonder CMS then you will see, what for crap you have us sold.

Please go Home rent a Server and install your Software on the Server and make a own Test. Then you will see, who fast your CMS is. I can go in the Kitchen and make me a coffe, if i visit the CMS on my Site.If i come back to my PC the Site is finish with loading.

The Forum is Ok, with them iám happy,here are only small bugs. With them i can live. But the CMS...........is crap crap crap......

Joe my Question is : When we become the High Quality, from that you speak always? And the next Question is : Why you publish so a Crap, why you have not worked longer at the Product and make it stable?