vBulletin 5 Connect Beta

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

Xenforo vs. vBulletin – 1:0

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  • vBulletin becoming outdated software really fast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