Every now and then I head over to the official vBulletin customer forum to see how things are going. And every time I think: maybe it’ll be different this time.
Sadly, it is not.
I remember how rediculous it seemed a year ago, when people were predicting this very situation. These days I hardly read any threads on vB’s Customer Feedback Forum. The subjects haven’t really changed since late 2009. People are complaining and asking when things might improve.
One particularly good example on the state of vBulletin and the quality of the software seems to be a thread with the subject: “Statistically – When are you going to fix all those 1,346 +/- 413 Bugs?”
I mean, I get the point. Nobody is going to give a serious answer to that question. But some of the answers in there are particularly stupid. Like saying that “no software is bug-free”. Wow, amazing insight!

And what I find even funnier is IB’s Zachery’s response to the post, stating that the complete vBulletin 3 branch has ~6500 bugs. Which, I suppose, is meant to tell us that vBulletin 4 is better for only having a measly few hundred bugs. Isn’t that like comparing Windows Vista and Windows 3.11 and saying: “Wow look, Win 3.11 won’t even run anymore and is FULL of security holes that are still not fixed! We really have improved! Vista is almost god-like by comparison!”

Maybe someone should tell poor Zachery that vBulletin 3 is EOL and has been for years. The only even halfway fair comparison is comparing vBulletin 3 and vBulletin 4 at the time of launch or at the same version points. Since I don’t have any reliable about the amount of bugs at the time when vBulletin 3 was at 3.0.3 – I’m going to compare vBulletin 3 at launch day and vBulletin 4 at launch day.

vBulletin 3, on the day it went Gold (official launch), had exactly 0 bugs. That’s zero. How about vBulletin 4? 10? 20? How about one and a half thousand? I can’t remember the exact number, but it was somewhere in the region of 1500 bugs. Even vBulletin’s official German distributor refused to recommend the switch from 3.8 to 4.0 to their customers.

And what should be mentioned is that vBulletin 3 was a complete code rewrite. vBulletin 4 was not. It had a new templating system (StyleVars) and some improvements in search and the attachment systems. Even the step from vBulletin 3.0 to 3.5 was bigger than that.

So what does that tell you about vBulletin? What it tells me is that either the devs at Internet Brands are useless (compared to Kier Darby and the old crew) or that management is giving them impossible tasks and not enough time or manpower. But wait. The vBulletin team is bigger than it ever was. And according to vB staff, “everyone is working on vBulletin 4.” So really, that only leaves one conclusion.

I remember that just before vB4 went “gold” (i.e. “It’s buggy as hell, but bleh, whatever – give us $195/285″) there was a poster who said some thing that virtually nobody believed. He said that, having spoken to some people “in the know”, he was told that the code in vBulletin was getting worse and that vBulletin 4 would be a very badly coded piece of software. Most people laughed at him. I didn’t laugh, but I found it hard to believe.

Certainly, looking at the number of bugs and the amount of time they have had these huge amounts of bugs, he seems to have been saying the truth.

I was going to speak about a few other things like the fact that IB promised things like addon developers incentive programs, a market place and so on. Things that were promised months ago and were never delivered. I was also going to mention Kier Darby and his alleged plans for world domination a new forum script.

But in all honesty – it’s such a depressing subject. I’ve been working with vBulletin for many years (5-6 years is a lot in Internet time) and it really breaks my heart seeing it in the state that it’s in. It was the single most exciting piece of software I ever laid my hands on on the Internet. No competition.

As for Kier’s project – he’s not commenting. But if he does say anything, I will update this article.

I would like to express my respect to those who still have the heart and energy to stay on the vB.com forums and make themselves heard. Keep it up guys and girls!