vBulletin 5 Connect Beta

September 12, 2012 by Leave a Comment

What you can expect from vBulletin 5 Connect Beta:

  • vb5 is 3x slower than vb4 – and no, that’s not a server issue. See below screenshot of a post that was removed by vBulletin staff (EDIT: its now back again)
  • vb5 puts a massive load on the database (if you are logged in, 117-121 queries for a single page)
  • A HTML/CSS mess never seen before (40 CSS classes on a single HTML tag)
  • Many features are non-intuitive (e.g. the notifications)
  • It will lack a lot of features when released (stated by vBulletin staff on their forums)
  • Upgrading from vb4 costs you $209 compared to $249 for a new license
  • The end of free support tickets – you only get 1 month free ticket support, after that you have to pay for support tickets at $199 per year

And to top this, Internet Brands has killed their longtime German vBulletin distributor known for superb support.

As a vBulletin customer using the software since its early days (2001) I have to admit, this is a new low mark for Internet Brands.

vBulletin 5 performance

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Another disaster for Internet Brands: Wikimedia seeks declaratory relief

September 6, 2012 by Leave a Comment

After the Xenforo debacle Internet Brands obviously is actively looking for new problems: Wikimedia sues Internet Brands.

Read the full story at http://blog.wikimedia.org/ and https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/File:WMF_complaint_for_declaratory_judgement_September_2012.pdf

Maybe CEO Robert N. Brisco should tell his team to provide better services to his customers (both vBulletin and commnities) than keeping lawyers busy.

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Xenforo vs. vBulletin – 1:0

June 19, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Many forum admins follow the neverending saga about the fight vBulletin (Internet Brands) vs. Xenforo, a competing forum software. vBulletin has lost many customers due to

  • broken promises
  • vBulletin becoming outdated software really fast
  • many problems with software quality

As vb/IB obviously weren’t able to compete on quality they even started a baseless law suit against Xenforo and are trying to suck money out of the small company (see David vs. Goliath).

Now this whole drama has finally become a farce: one of Internet Brands sites, classadrivers.com, was using smilies from a Xenforo site and was even hotlinking to them! When the owner of the site noticed it, he changed the smilies on his site to some nice graphics and suddenly, all the posts on the Classadrivers forum showed this:

Internet Brand vs. Xenforo

How funny is that?

It took some time for the Internet Brand “webmasters” to realize that something strange is going on and they took the whole site down:

maintenance

Internet Brands at its best.

Link to thread on Xenforo

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XenForo – the new king of forum software

March 8, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Today Xenforo 1.0 was released, a new forum software. Boring? No, exciting. Despite being a new software and having 1.0 as it’s version number, it immediately got the attention of many forum admins because it was written from scratch by Kier Darby and Mike Sullivan, two talented coders who where in large parts responsible for the success of the old market leader, vBulletin.

It’s obvious to compare the new kid in town Xenforo to the old market leader vBulletin, so here are the current advantages of vBulletin:

  • Integrated social groups, blog, CMS  (at least if you buy the more expensive suite)
  • Many other features

So the old standard software naturally has more features than the newcomer. But why did I call vBulletin old? Here are the advantages of XenForo:

  • Way more easy to use (and I speak about the average forumuser)
  • Rock solid software as many, many sites prove that migrated to Xenforo during the Beta period and large sites that are planning the migration to XenForo
  • Written from scratch, that means: modern technology and stability and industry standards
  • Experienced, dedicated developers with the vision to build the most advanced forum software
  • Easy styling
  • Alerts, activity stream, likes and many more modern features
  • A company that has the trust of many forum admins

And believe me, the advantages of Xenforo are the disadvantages of vBulletin, a software ruined by a greedy company (Internet Brands who bought the old Jelsoft company). Does the software lack some features? Yes. But will many forums benefit from a switch to Xenforo? Yes.

In the few month XenForo was available as Beta software, the community of addon developers, users and forum admins grew from zero members to more than 6000 members, from 0 posts to 170,000 posts. I never saw a forum growing so fast in so few days. Within a few months dozens of addons where developed or ported to the new software and all report the same: coding addons shows how many thoughts Kier and Mike invested in the basic structures of the software.

Try it yourself, visit the future of forum software.

This review was written by an enthusiastic forum admin with 10+ years experience with several forum software.

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