vb5 beta released, and...

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Caliburn said:
I don't understand how we can all sit here and slam the vB5 beta so religiously. It obviously has some major flaws at the moment but is making progress. I've been watching it carefully. Remember that it's BETA at the moment and has gremlins.

It's a complete rewrite so let's just see where it goes. It may just surprise us.
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For me, there are two separate issues- the product itself and the business practices around the sale of it.

1) The product- like I mentioned earlier, the underlying coding has been shredded by people more knowledgeable than me. However, I am smart enough to know that more than 100 db queries to load a page is not going to work- no how, no way. The eternity it takes to load a page does not seem to be anything that can be "fixed" through any kind of normal "beta" development cycle. And...one of their selling points (see below) the most mods and addons available- none of them will work with vB5.

2) Business practices- For me, there are three subparts to this:
a) Past track record. vb4 presale and lack of delivery of any promised features that made the Suite what it was supposed to be. I.e., usable CMS, free mobile style, and a million (ok, slight hyperbole) features that never materialized. It took them more than 2 years to just squash bugs.
b) Changing license terms- Transfers (even among domains that you still own) have changed- without warning or notice to current customers. And they still can't answer just exactly what the rule are. Similar thoughts around now paid support (which will only last 30 days IIRC without an upgrade).
c) Pricing structure- Software sales is, it goes without saying, a business. And, yes, vB should get paid for delivery of a quality product. However, given their track record, I have no faith that they will not basically halt development of vB4, pushing everyone to vB5 which is not anywhere near Beta quality much less Gold. Given this, I also have no faith that vB5 will not muddle along without promised features (125+ which they can't describe), until they decide vB6 is next cash grab...assuming they are still in the forum business 2 years from now.

All that said, if someone is happy with the product, likes it, finds it meets their needs...well, I don't get it, but they are entitled to like what they like. I hope it works well for them!
 
Caliburn said:
I don't understand how we can all sit here and slam the vB5 beta so religiously. It obviously has some major flaws at the moment but is making progress. I've been watching it carefully. Remember that it's BETA at the moment and has gremlins.

It's a complete rewrite so let's just see where it goes. It may just surprise us.
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I don't want to.

Honestly speaking, I was having hopes that VB5 would be a good upgrade for my Oracle Forums. It is not the bugs which make me so disappointed in VB5. It is the bad design choices, (for instance, URL's have to separately entered and do not get auto parsed) the terrible code output (have you seen the page's source?) the css and javascript nightmare (dozens of classes on individual tags), the poor poor (very very poor) php coding and lack of standards...

I could go on, but what's the point. Given the state of the current beta, whether or not they announce it as Gold does not matter. Even if they were to fix the visible UI bugs, how and when are they going to fix the code mess? Do you want to kill your site's search engine rankings by putting out a site with eons and eons of nested tags and hundreds of css classes with content somewhere in there? Maybe, and this is a very very unlikely, in about 2 years time someone talented enough would work on it and fix it to a usable state, by when they would be again wanting a new VB6... nuff said
 
digitalpoint said:
If by, "only hundreds" you mean, "also thousands of bugs like vB4", you would be correct.
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Holy fudge.
I don't understand how they can get it so wrong
I mean the code review that was posted on the other admin site, seemed to point at, well, no disprespect intended, but "bottom of the barrel" coders
Is that the reason it's so poor?
 
Caliburn said:
It's a complete rewrite
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Statement by a VB rep:
The link would be more condemning if we ever said vBulletin 5 was a complete rewrite. It isn't and a lot of legacy code is maintained to maintain legacy structures. As more is rewritten more legacy code will be updated and other structures updated.
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https://www.vbulletin.com/forum/sho...-development?p=2342967&viewfull=1#post2342967

Now, if this weren't enough, feast your eyes on this statement:

if it was intended to be a 100% rewrite, the post would be more problematic but it wasn't intended to be so. Maybe 5.1 or 5.2 but not 5.0.
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https://www.vbulletin.com/forum/sho...-development?p=2342988&viewfull=1#post2342988

In other words, they're going to continue with the full re-write, trying to fit it into the incremental forum updates! Without exaggeration, a basic Comp. Sci. student would know that such a plan cannot work! (Compare with XF where the architecture was designed before the forum was even built).


Now we can remember Bob Brisco's statement in Kier's deposition, and recognize it for the hillarity that it is:

Jake Bunce said:
http://shamil.co.uk/pdf/vbsi-xfl/80-1.pdf

30. I told Brisco that the vBulletin 4 product as then planned could not be developed within six months, and in a period of six months we could only develop a very limited set of new features based on the creaky and outdated architecture of vBulletin 3. Brisco replied that only programmers care about software architecture, and that anyone who proposed a project to him with a timeline exceeding six months would be fired. He indicated that if we did not agree with his new direction for developing vBulletin on an accelerated schedule, we were free to leave and not return for further meetings.
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This is why people pile onto vb5. Its not unfair bias of some kind, but rather that they sense that something is deeply wrong with the code and the culture that produced it. The quote dug up by Jake above explains everything, and represents a clear example of a CEO meltdown we've seen in several companies lately. It's the kind of meltdown that fired Steve Jobs and told him he wasn't needed for the future of Apple.
 
robdog said:
So does the release for the vBulletin 5 Beta help the XenForo case in anyway? I mean anyone with SOME type of PHP skills could see the glaring differences in the code base at this point.
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It does help their situation.
(1) It's obvious vBulletin was unable to hire replacements for KM.
(2) With vB5 being sooo bad ... the monetary value of Xenforo Ltd just doubled as KM could take a year off and vBulletin 5 will still be terrible.
(3) if vBulletin 5 can't be made usable, and XF comes back to life (as we know it will !), disgruntled vBx people will move to Xenforo in droves. That's a large potential customer base.

Digital Doctor said:
vBulletin 5 Code review
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robdog: see this post.
 
I'd love to know more why vBulletin 5 sucks so bad .... I honestly still can't believe it.
They really only had to do one thing to establish confidence in their customers - freshen up the user interface and copy how Xenforo did things. C'mon how hard would that have been ? vBulletin saw what Xenforo was like in July 2010. What ? they weren't worried ? They should have been. And they take 2 whole years and they want people to by vBulletin 5 alpha that will take years to fix ? It's slow, ugly, and built with crappy code ? I really don't get it. or I guess I do: Mega company Internet Brands can't manage vBulletin, a forum software product, properly. I suppose it is that simple. Sales of vBulletin are going to tank.

When Kier and Mike left vBulletin ... they must have known from the inside that IB would be unable to run vBulletin. vB4 showed they were right. vB5 is the proverbial nail in the coffin.

I will say, despite Xenforo's recent "issues", KAM must have at least cracked a smile checking out how horrid the vB5 demo is. Things aren't perfect at Xenforo.com ... but they ain't "vB5 bad" (a new level of bad !).
 
Seems I'm a bit late to the party, but I agree with prior sentiments of how god-awful vb5 is (I skipped pages 15-40 though for the sake of time). I wanted to provide a demo to you guys that had an admin/mod login so that people interested in how those tools worked could use them. My impression when setting it up was that the install process is simply horrid. The normal vB install process was never great (you had to manually move config.php.dist to config.php and fill it out with database credentials before being able to enter the installer), now you have to create TWO config.php files. One is in your root vb folder and defines path settings (such as your site's URL because apparently that gets hardcoded in places instead of using relative URLs -- also you have to specify another URL with https:// in front if you want to use that for logins instead of that being an option in the ACP). It also makes you specify the full path to your vB5 files because running dirname(__FILE__) is apparently too difficult in order to get an absolute path. The second file is buried in core/includes and is the standard config.php file you need to modify for previous versions with database credentials, etc. Also, nowhere is there any indication that you need to modify these two files -- the error messages vb barfs at you are all mostly unrelated. Beyond that, install process is the same as before for vB (point to /install, run the stuff, remove /install before the board starts working because they have yet to grasp the concept of lockfiles).

Anyway, I now have another demo up for people to play around with if interested at http://skizzerz.net/vb5demo -- you can either make your own user account or log in with either username 'admin'/'password' or 'moderator'/'password' to log in as a user with admin/super moderator access. I realize that giving people full admin access is somewhat of a security risk since vB5 lets admins insert arbitrary PHP onto pages -- don't abuse that or I'll take down the demo. Demo is using default settings for everything, with a Memcached datastore for hopefully more accurate load times of a "real" site.
 
Color me amazed at those IB revenue numbers. So, if VBB brings in 25+ million per year....and a lot of that is renewals, as opposed to new sales, you can start to see the XF possible numbers. A conservative estimate would be that 5-10 Million US per year would be easy to get to. Not bad for for a small firm.

Some of the sites that VB bought make very little revenue. It must be that many of the good ones (auto) make the big bucks. Good for them. I like it when people make money providing a service.
 
skizzerz said:
Seems I'm a bit late to the party, but I agree with prior sentiments of how god-awful vb5 is (I skipped pages 15-40 though for the sake of time). I wanted to provide a demo to you guys that had an admin/mod login so that people interested in how those tools worked could use them. My impression when setting it up was that the install process is simply horrid. The normal vB install process was never great (you had to manually move config.php.dist to config.php and fill it out with database credentials before being able to enter the installer), now you have to create TWO config.php files. One is in your root vb folder and defines path settings (such as your site's URL because apparently that gets hardcoded in places instead of using relative URLs -- also you have to specify another URL with https:// in front if you want to use that for logins instead of that being an option in the ACP). It also makes you specify the full path to your vB5 files because running dirname(__FILE__) is apparently too difficult in order to get an absolute path. The second file is buried in core/includes and is the standard config.php file you need to modify for previous versions with database credentials, etc. Also, nowhere is there any indication that you need to modify these two files -- the error messages vb barfs at you are all mostly unrelated. Beyond that, install process is the same as before for vB (point to /install, run the stuff, remove /install before the board starts working because they have yet to grasp the concept of lockfiles).

Anyway, I now have another demo up for people to play around with if interested at http://skizzerz.net/vb5demo -- you can either make your own user account or log in with either username 'admin'/'password' or 'moderator'/'password' to log in as a user with admin/super moderator access. I realize that giving people full admin access is somewhat of a security risk since vB5 lets admins insert arbitrary PHP onto pages -- don't abuse that or I'll take down the demo. Demo is using default settings for everything, with a Memcached datastore for hopefully more accurate load times of a "real" site.
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Thanks for the demo, kinda interesting. :)
 
I accidentally typed the wrong password on skizzerz demo and got this:

Schermafbeelding 2012-09-26 om 18.32.52.webp


So had to use the tab key to be able to go to the next field, unable to select with mouse ....
 
skizzerz said:
Seems I'm a bit late to the party, but I agree with prior sentiments of how god-awful vb5 is (I skipped pages 15-40 though for the sake of time). I wanted to provide a demo to you guys that had an admin/mod login so that people interested in how those tools worked could use them. My impression when setting it up was that the install process is simply horrid. The normal vB install process was never great (you had to manually move config.php.dist to config.php and fill it out with database credentials before being able to enter the installer), now you have to create TWO config.php files. One is in your root vb folder and defines path settings (such as your site's URL because apparently that gets hardcoded in places instead of using relative URLs -- also you have to specify another URL with https:// in front if you want to use that for logins instead of that being an option in the ACP). It also makes you specify the full path to your vB5 files because running dirname(__FILE__) is apparently too difficult in order to get an absolute path. The second file is buried in core/includes and is the standard config.php file you need to modify for previous versions with database credentials, etc. Also, nowhere is there any indication that you need to modify these two files -- the error messages vb barfs at you are all mostly unrelated. Beyond that, install process is the same as before for vB (point to /install, run the stuff, remove /install before the board starts working because they have yet to grasp the concept of lockfiles).

Anyway, I now have another demo up for people to play around with if interested at http://skizzerz.net/vb5demo -- you can either make your own user account or log in with either username 'admin'/'password' or 'moderator'/'password' to log in as a user with admin/super moderator access. I realize that giving people full admin access is somewhat of a security risk since vB5 lets admins insert arbitrary PHP onto pages -- don't abuse that or I'll take down the demo. Demo is using default settings for everything, with a Memcached datastore for hopefully more accurate load times of a "real" site.
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Hey Dude ,

Is it possible for you to enable debug mode ?
 
MichaelDance said:
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That made me laugh
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I love how IB decides what my link-partner is best for me. It reminds me of the "Hypotheker", a firm in Holland advising people which mortgages would be best for the customer pay most commission to the guy recommending them.
 
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