vBulletin 4... What we now know due to the Temporarily Live Forum

Just yesterday, an Alpha copy of vBulletin 4 was put up on a live website, albeit without the permission of Jelsoft/Internet Brands. So, before it was shut down in the inevitable time that would take, I took screenshots of near enough everything on that demo site, showing every possible page that I could think of at the time.

Now, a few things to note. I do not see any law or rules this is breaking, since I am not a member of the Alpha Testing team for vBulletin, and as such, I did not agree to any contracts or non disclosure agreements. I am also heavily against trying to hide information that should be visible online, as can be seen by my extensive linking to Japanese Super Mario World hacking resources, extensive distribution of cheats and glitches clans have tried to hide, and my ranting against people trying to run 'secret' or private websites for keeping information to themselves.

So here are some screenshots and observations about vBulletin 4 that I have taken/made. I have censored out things like profile information, to respect the privacy of the person who's profile I took the photo of, and I have censored out the URLs from the pictures in question, due to the URL both not working and having potential liability issues.

Thread Display/Poll



Now, what can I see from the above. Well for one thing, the buttons look more than a tad ripped off from Facebook, and share the same style as the button used for the Facebook Connect modifications rather than somewhat more stylish ones Kier showed many months back. A tad unimpressive, but this is an alpha version mind.

There's also a 'Promote To Article' button. I don't think I even have to say what this does. It probably makes a topic into an article (Captain Obvious).

The more info link showed a drop down (not pictured) when I visited this page, and apparently has things like home page, blog and search posts links. This has moved from being the result of clicking on the user's username, which seems like a fairly interesting move.

The title of the topic looks pretty stylish with a light blue background there.

You can also see some obvious image changes. Oh, and the poll, which is quite funny. LOL at the 'vB4 is fail' option.

I probably should have tried out more on this page to be honest, I only just noticed the thread option menus and such like to the right while writing this article.

Registration Form



Here's the register page. I never filled it in, because let's face it, this leaked demo is on a pretty limited legality website, and one I have no interest in being part of. But still.

I always thought this page looked a bit underwhelming to be honest, and it still does. From a forum admin's viewpoint, I can also assume that due to idiotically using image verification, that this board would have been spammed half to death by spambots in about two days if it wasn't shut down. Does vBulletin 4 still have question and answer verification? Hope so.

Blog Entry

http://dsultimate.net/Avatar/vB4blogs.png

Here we have the blogs, at least an entry in one. You've got a list of entries, that looks to be in real time and powered by AJAX to the right, the blog to the left, and it looks fairly more modern, and like Wordpress or another piece of blog software rather than a forum thread.

On another note... where the freaking hell is my image resizer gone? I added a mod to do that, yet it's doing absolutely nothing to the images posted to this blog. Damn it.

Calendar



Here's the calendar. Looks pretty damn generic to me, and I know a lot of people on .com will be mega unimpressed by it if that's anything like the finished quality.

CMS Home Page



This is the CMS. Okay, this is a BLANK version of the CMS, because whoever was running this site posted absolutely god damn nothing as articles, which meant the page simply said 'no content'.

From the vBulletin.com home page, the CMS pictures there show it far better, and I'm actually impressed by the vBulletin CMS from what I've seen of it.

Oh, and Home > Site. This is not a good sign for what vBulletin consider important on a website. Should be the site as default, not the forum.

FAQ



The FAQ. Doesn't look much changed, bar the CMS section, and to be fair, I think the old knowledge base/wiki idea was better than this attempt. I also checked BB code and smilies while there... but I forgot to photograph the latter, and the former has literally ONE new BB code... video. Yeah, vBulletin should have added some of this as well:

http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=150454

Forum Home Page



The vBulletin 4 home page. Looks pretty much like the old one, although the category icons look much improved. It looks a bit boring to me, but then again, it might be because either I'm used to DS Ultimate, which has more going on at any one moment, or because most sites have more than one forum available.

Profile



A profile. Looks basic, but the forum that had this version of vBulletin 4 obviously didn't enable most social networking features. You can see a full profile on vBulletin.com, which has a lot more decoration and is a lot more like the profile style likely to found at AdminAddict and DS Ultimate.

http://files.vbulletin.com/images/ca...er_profile.png

Finally, a picture of the Today's Posts search page:

Today's Posts Search Page


Looks pretty nice, and I quite like the little envelope icons to the left.

So, that's about it really. You can see a lot more screenshots on the vBulletin official website under screenshots, and until it was taken down, you could have searched Twitter or vBulletin Setup or AdminAddict for the link to someone's publicly accessible version of the vBulletin 4 Alpha, but I guess we'll be waiting until beta to find out even more.

I hope this hasn't utterly killed any chances of me not getting banned at the support forums/.org, or being able to actually buy vBulletin 4 in the future. That would suck.