How Much Testing Goes Into Xenforo Versions?

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DRE

DRE

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I've noticed that compared to my experience with vBulletin 4, Xenforo's updates usually don't require a fix days or weeks down the road due to a ridiculously annoying bug or security fix in the previous version. That makes me wonder, how is it that you are able to release such solid versions so consistently? Who tests out the Xenforo versions before release?
 
Andrej said:
Maybe its just quality code which results in far less bugs than vBulletin? :)
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The creators of Xenforo are from vBulletin. Were their release versions as solid on this forum software as they were when they worked at vBulletin?
Brogan said:
The underlying code base is solid so that helps.

Incremental fixes and updates are rolled out here before being released as a public build.

Larger updates and add-ons are usually beta tested.
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So we'll see 1.1.5 and 1.2 stuff here before it's released. Okay that makes sense. So we, the community are actually helping Xenforo test out versions before release.
 
Brogan said:
This site is more or less always ahead of the release you are running.

As bugs are marked as fixed, they are rolled out here.
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That explains a lot. I hope it remains that way. It's comforting to know that a forum software is confident enough to release it's beta versions here first instead of selling and releasing them first.
 
DRE said:
The creators of Xenforo are from vBulletin. Were their release versions as solid on this forum software as they were when they worked at vBulletin?
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Everything they did was first approved by Jelsoft, also many ideas, fixes and suggestions were rejected due to Jelsoft. vB3 was a great product, to this day still second best on the market imo. Now look at vB4 what garbage that became from Jelsoft selling and K&M parting ways.
 
Mike Edge said:
Everything they did was first approved by Jelsoft, also many ideas, fixes and suggestions were rejected due to Jelsoft. vB3 was a great product, to this day still second best on the market imo. Now look at vB4 what garbage that became from Jelsoft selling and K&M parting ways.
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Okay that makes a lot of sense. The developers of Xenforo get to implement all their ideas, fixes and suggestions without any hassle since they are their own bosses. Also explains why we aren't on Xenforo 1.0.25 Beta.
 
King Kovifor said:
I'll beat Brogan to the punch and just say it, lets avoid the vBulletin bashing to keep this thread open?
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I won't bash but I will say upgrading on Xenforo is easier and more convenient than my experience in vBulletin. Simply wanted to know why that's all. Now I know.
 
If memory serves correctly, at one point, Kier was not only the lead developer of vBulletin, but also the project manager. So I think for a period of time, at least, he had most of the say in what happened at vBulletin. At XenForo, it's pretty much the same as it used to be at vBulletin, with KAM making the decisions.
 
DRE said:
I won't bash but I will say upgrading on Xenforo is easier and more convenient than my experience in vBulletin. Simply wanted to know why that's all. Now I know.
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I didn't say you were. ;) Just would prefer a valid topic not to go to closed-ville because it turned into the state of vBulletin post-KAM.
 
DRE said:
The creators of Xenforo are from vBulletin. Were their release versions as solid on this forum software as they were when they worked at vBulletin?
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vBulletin 3.0, 3.5, and 3.6 and numerous point releases afterwards were all exceptional releases with no show-stopping bugs and few major bugs, and those that were discovered were fixed within hours. This is back when there were 3 programmers on vBulletin.
DRE said:
So we'll see 1.1.5 and 1.2 stuff here before it's released. Okay that makes sense. So we, the community are actually helping Xenforo test out versions before release.
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Yes, through the vBulletin 2 and 3 series, bugs were fixed and those fixes were pushed to vBulletin.com typically within a day, so we could instantly see the improvements that we would eventually be able to download. Also, we could publicly test and get things fixed very quickly.

Each build of vBulletin 4 and 5 (with a team of over a dozen programmers each) has internal builds, alphas, betas, release candidates, QA, and finally public releases, and still it's been a struggle to get stable releases. There's just a different level of quality.
 
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Besides the obvious (quality of the developer), there's something to be said for people working on code they built from scratch. There's so many developers working on vBulletin, they probably spend most of their time trying to figure out why someone else did something a certain way and then hopefully understand it enough to not make breaking changes to it when modifying it.

When working with my own code, I code faster and with less issues simply because I know the code inside out and backwards since I built it.

If you have 30 or 40 developers like vBulletin has (and as far as I know, they don't have any standardized coding methodology they follow), dealing with code more than a decade old (and probably have had over 100 different developers building that code), well... you are going to end up with exponentially more bugs than if the original authors of the code were working on it.
 
Maybe that explains it. The vB 5 version at IB site is dreadfully slow. Maybe all that baggage? cPanel also uses vB, but not sure which version. It's also unacceptably slow, and that has to hurt. Too many cooks?

I'm not bashing the product; just stating facts.
 
DRE said:
The creators of Xenforo are from vBulletin. Were their release versions as solid on this forum software as they were when they worked at vBulletin?
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Yes.

Versioning changed a lot after K&M left vB. Major features used to be reserved for second point releases (e.g. 3.5 to 3.6) while third point releases were strictly bug fixes (e.g. 3.6.0 to 3.6.1). That meant that third point releases were minor upgrades and were mostly problem-free with respect to addons and customizations. This is the model which XF follows. But starting with vB4 James adopted an incremental rewrite strategy where parts of the core were being rebuilt with each release. So there was never a minor vB4 upgrade. The platform was constantly under construction:

http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/foru...ent-update?s=370d9b656e1feb927c7be8dc17e2ce2f
 
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