Movin' On Up... Fractal Forum Migration!

Scott Peterson said:
or8ital said:
Its actually pretty terrible software (slow and buggy). Even the large communities they (Internet Brands Inc.) run themselves (such as rctech.net) are really slow especially when there are several users on.
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STRONGLY disagree.

TGP runs with an average load of 2500 users at any given time and any honest evaluation of the larger forum communities on the Web (check http://www.big-boards.com ) shows a large percentage of them use VBulletin. The issue to slow connections are related to the ISP and the servers. The software itself, though FAR from perfect, is also FAR from 'buggy and slow'.
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I STRONGLY disagree with that. Sorry. I am well versed in the subject. It is well known with vBulletin that you have to disable many features on a site with any significant traffic.

You can look here at a site that is owned and ran by Internet Brands Inc (which makes vBulletin) about all the issues it has:

http://www.rctech.net/forum/r-c-tech-site-forum-14/

or just run a google search for "vbulletin performance problems" and see there are 296K hits.

It may work for the lighter load of this site (I'm not sure of its peak volumes) but it really is poorly optimized and buggy when running with full features.
 
Invision Power Board is generally considered the "best" but not quite as friendly to the person hosting it as vbulletin. You need to be a bit more tech savvy.
 
I am not a big fan of the vBulletin company practices, but the board software can do a lot of things.

My own forum runs on phpBB 3 (like this) and it's great, too. Don't forget that the current FAS forum has performance issues, because it is a shared board, hosted by Yahoo. If you run your own dedicated server phpBB is blazing fast.
 
or8ital said:
Invision Power Board is generally considered the "best" but not quite as friendly to the person hosting it as vbulletin. You need to be a bit more tech savvy.
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Have you ever run a busy board? Invision is nice, but not a very robust feature set for administration. "Best" is subjective, but having used it... not the best at all. Sorry.

Sorry, I've got well over a decade running some very active boards - VBulletin has many flaws, but simply is a better choice on many fronts.

No affront to you, or your opinion, but we'll agree to disagree. For the record, I own and run various forums - one being The Gear Page which is a fairly 'busy' (10,000+ new posts a day, 2500Gig bandwidth per month) board where we use all the features of VBulletin. I'm not talking out of school here by any measure.
 
or8ital said:
This person has a good summary of some of the problems with vBulletin:

http://www.fractalizer.ru/frpost_482/vb ... old-anger/
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That's in reference to 4.x which is brand new software and is undergoing a buggy shakedown just months after launch.

This site will be on that version; but note that most large forums are still on the 3.x.x versions which are feature rich and stable. The only issues that come up are security issues and that happens with ALL software regardless of make.
 
You must not have read the entire article. Oh well. Good luck with the decision. Glad I don't have to support it.

Also, please, dont make the assumption that everyone has buggy software with a new version. That is simply not true.
 
or8ital said:
You must not have read the entire article. Oh well. Good luck with the decision. Glad I don't have to support it.

Also, please, dont make the assumption that everyone has buggy software with a new version. That is simply not true.
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It's great that you're sharing your experience and trying to help, but there's no need to take this personally and Scott never said that everyone has buggy software with a new version.
 
tgunn said:
or8ital said:
You must not have read the entire article. Oh well. Good luck with the decision. Glad I don't have to support it.

Also, please, dont make the assumption that everyone has buggy software with a new version. That is simply not true.
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It's great that you're sharing your experience and trying to help, but there's no need to take this personally and Scott never said that everyone has buggy software with a new version.
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I apologize if I misread what he said below. 1008 total bugs & 190 confirmed major bugs (as vBulletin currently has) is a bit much for my taste. In my opinion that would be buggy. Just hate to see this great forum go through all the issues I have seen with other great forums.

Scott Peterson said:
or8ital said:
This person has a good summary of some of the problems with vBulletin:

http://www.fractalizer.ru/frpost_482/vb ... old-anger/
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That's in reference to 4.x which is brand new software and is undergoing a buggy shakedown just months after launch.

This site will be on that version; but note that most large forums are still on the 3.x.x versions which are feature rich and stable. The only issues that come up are security issues and that happens with ALL software regardless of make.
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I read it as referring generally to security issues with web server software - not necessarily relating to functionality, stability or performance and not generic to any kind of software, including "hello world" apps. I even read it as being specific to this particular type of server software and I think he knows what he's talking about when it comes to that (I'm not saying you don't btw). I guess it's all in how you read it.
 
Scott Peterson said:
VBulletin is the premier platform for most larger community based forums on the Internet.
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Unless you're Harmony Central. Then you go with the aptly-named "Jive" platform. :roll:
 
Dunno, I read "buggy shakedown" of a release 9 months after it was released as implying that is OK and typical. Again, if I am misinterpreting that then I apologize.

I have administered 4 forum sites and helped with several others (none are guitar related). I've seen the effects of performance issues, bugs, spambots, etc that a forum can experience. It can quickly ruin a good board. If there is someone there to resolve issues quickly then it shouldn't be a big issue. Frustration builds quickly though and it is amazing how quickly users can turn. Internet Brands bought the RcTech site because it had huge crowds of users. They become unresponsive of issues and the site took a turn quickly and many of the users migrated elsewhere. That may not be a concern here (as this is particularly specialized).

vBulletin has been heading the wrong direction (my understanding is the original creators have left the company).

My last post on the subject. As I said before, good luck!
 
or8ital said:
Dunno, I read "buggy shakedown" of a release 9 months after it was released as implying that is OK and typical. Again, if I am misinterpreting that then I apologize.

I have administered 4 forum sites and helped with several others (none are guitar related). I've seen the effects of performance issues, bugs, spambots, etc that a forum can experience. It can quickly ruin a good board. If there is someone there to resolve issues quickly then it shouldn't be a big issue. Frustration builds quickly though and it is amazing how quickly users can turn. Internet Brands bought the RcTech site because it had huge crowds of users. They become unresponsive of issues and the site took a turn quickly and many of the users migrated elsewhere. That may not be a concern here (as this is particularly specialized).

vBulletin has been heading the wrong direction (my understanding is the original creators have left the company).

My last post on the subject. As I said before, good luck!
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I didn't imply anything, I typed my opinion. As you have typed yours. I did read that thread, and do not appreciate you implying I did not. That's twice you assumed my motivations incorrectly. I value your input and take it at face value; I hope you can at least offer me the same consideration in the future moving forward. Thank you for sharing, and have a great Sunday evening.
 
aleclee said:
Scott Peterson said:
VBulletin is the premier platform for most larger community based forums on the Internet.
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Unless you're Harmony Central. Then you go with the aptly-named "Jive" platform. :roll:
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Well they ditched that after losing about 80% of their internet traffic because it was slow, not compatible with most browsers, navigation didn't work and basically everyone boycotted the place because of it.

They've since upgraded to vBulleting 4 and it's been rock solid and pretty fast. They finally got the old database indexed (we're talking about something like 10MIL posts) and everything seems to be functioning properly.

Every platform has pluses and minuses just like operating systems, but when you are looking at bugs and complaints you also have to consider the number of people using the software to keep things in perspective. I'm sure that Jive doesn't have nearly the complaints that vBulletin has; but that sure as heck doesn't make it better or even prove that it works....at all.

And there are also a lot of people hosting forums that don't know how to administrate worth a crap. Harmony Central (god bless 'em) doesn't even have a dedicated staff. There were a lot of problems with v3 for them and they had to disable a ton of options and even had to reboot the servers every day. I'm not a website admin, but I have years of experience working on computers and most of the time when there are issues like that it's because things aren't configured properly or something got corrupted and if you don't know what to look for then it's going to seem buggy.

Where as there are hundreds to thousands of forums using vB3 that never had those kinds of issues. It's just like anything else, if you don't know what you are doing than it's probably not going to work right.
 
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