The Official Staff Blog, as run by the Lead Administrator. This blog hopes to cover all the latest news in both the gaming and DS Ultimate world, and also my ramblings about stuff I like somewhat.
vBulletin 4... The Sheer Chaos Continues
Posted 1st November 2009 at 07:22 PM by cheat-master30
Tags internet brands, vbulletin, vbulletin 4
As you should already know, the vBulletin 4 announcement has led to disaster for Internet Brands. Whether they made money is pretty much besides the point now, the fanbase is not happy, the Twitter posts are slamming their business left and right, and at least two anti vBulletin blogs have been set up recently (vB Truth, vBull). It's a disaster of almost epic proportions here, with the same level of panic as that time in 2008 when Nintendo's big E3 game was Wii Music.
So what can I say about all this? Well, I'm more than a tad annoyed. My blog license that I paid good money for and is very, very obviously in constant use? Pretty much worthless now, as it does not even give a freaking discount for the Suite. There I was expecting the active license holders reward to be 'if you have blogs or project tools, here's a free upgrade to the vBulletin 4 Suite'. Now I have a ridiculous upgrade fee of nearly $200. There is no way I can just upgrade to the forum only license either, sorry. I'll be kind of honest here, I don't particularly like Wordpress or Movable Type. No real verification measures to stop spam, which bridging this blog with the forum seems to have done well with.
Sadly, this seems like only the most minor aspect of the PR disaster that is Internet Brands recently. The support forums going down for about three days? What kind of horrific maintenance is that? For comparison, these forums here have never been down for over an hour for upgrading. This is with about fifty modifications installed, not disabled and often no real care to the process. How you can have a forum down for three days using your own apparently top notch software is pretty much a joke.
Nor do I particularly like the fact that they were rushing people to upgrade to a product that is, at this time a beta, and at the original time probably just Vapourware according to most people.
However, unlike a few other people... I don't hate the software itself. I like the beta that's on vBullletin.com, and I don't mind the style in general. Sure, the original smilies looked horrendous (but so did the original vBulletin 3 smilies), and some of the icons and button images looked downright awful (report, redirect forum and post button images) but the style itself seems fairly well designed. At least, everyone at DS Ultimate when asked thought this site upgrading to that version would be a great thing and that the style looked nice. Similarly, I don't get the whole criticism about the style being hard to use or too bright or a lack of contrast. Maybe it's just my having played video games for days on end having changed my definition of 'eye hurting'. Or maybe that this blog used to use white text on a black background and with so many gaming websites having horrible contrast and eye hurting styles, that I've got used to pretty bad usability for websites now.
Okay... I'm kind of laid back about this whole vBulletin 4 thing, bar the mild anger at having to pay a few hundred dollars for an upgrade that should be free. It's just difficult for me to complain much about a company's business practices when half the other companies I used do the exact same kind of thing. Nintendo does pretty much the exact same thing as Internet Brands business practice wise (ignoring customers, delays, no roadmap, no public beta testing, not giving out information in advance), so that has pretty dulled away any sense of thinking anything bar the upgrade fees are ridiculous.
Just my random thoughts, as someone who still goes to the vBulletin support forums, still reads the vBulletin rant websites and someone who has a decent amount to lose for not getting the upgrade free or at a fair cost.
So what can I say about all this? Well, I'm more than a tad annoyed. My blog license that I paid good money for and is very, very obviously in constant use? Pretty much worthless now, as it does not even give a freaking discount for the Suite. There I was expecting the active license holders reward to be 'if you have blogs or project tools, here's a free upgrade to the vBulletin 4 Suite'. Now I have a ridiculous upgrade fee of nearly $200. There is no way I can just upgrade to the forum only license either, sorry. I'll be kind of honest here, I don't particularly like Wordpress or Movable Type. No real verification measures to stop spam, which bridging this blog with the forum seems to have done well with.
Sadly, this seems like only the most minor aspect of the PR disaster that is Internet Brands recently. The support forums going down for about three days? What kind of horrific maintenance is that? For comparison, these forums here have never been down for over an hour for upgrading. This is with about fifty modifications installed, not disabled and often no real care to the process. How you can have a forum down for three days using your own apparently top notch software is pretty much a joke.
Nor do I particularly like the fact that they were rushing people to upgrade to a product that is, at this time a beta, and at the original time probably just Vapourware according to most people.
However, unlike a few other people... I don't hate the software itself. I like the beta that's on vBullletin.com, and I don't mind the style in general. Sure, the original smilies looked horrendous (but so did the original vBulletin 3 smilies), and some of the icons and button images looked downright awful (report, redirect forum and post button images) but the style itself seems fairly well designed. At least, everyone at DS Ultimate when asked thought this site upgrading to that version would be a great thing and that the style looked nice. Similarly, I don't get the whole criticism about the style being hard to use or too bright or a lack of contrast. Maybe it's just my having played video games for days on end having changed my definition of 'eye hurting'. Or maybe that this blog used to use white text on a black background and with so many gaming websites having horrible contrast and eye hurting styles, that I've got used to pretty bad usability for websites now.
Okay... I'm kind of laid back about this whole vBulletin 4 thing, bar the mild anger at having to pay a few hundred dollars for an upgrade that should be free. It's just difficult for me to complain much about a company's business practices when half the other companies I used do the exact same kind of thing. Nintendo does pretty much the exact same thing as Internet Brands business practice wise (ignoring customers, delays, no roadmap, no public beta testing, not giving out information in advance), so that has pretty dulled away any sense of thinking anything bar the upgrade fees are ridiculous.
Just my random thoughts, as someone who still goes to the vBulletin support forums, still reads the vBulletin rant websites and someone who has a decent amount to lose for not getting the upgrade free or at a fair cost.
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