It’s been a year and a half since I first left my impressions on the two systems. My original post received a lot of negative responses from both communities. I was called an IPB fanboy at vBulletin.org, and I was called a vB lover at IPB’s customer forums. I guess you can’t win :shrug:
Things change.
Over the past year, I have migrated all of my forums over to vBulletin. I’m out of the loop on what’s new at IPB, but a quick browse of their forums tells me nothing new or exciting has happened or been released since I stopped running their software. A couple bug fixes and minor .x release changes. vB has since released their 3.6 series, their project tools, and their blog system. Still pretty much the same system, vB has been pretty minor in terms of new things to the main forum package.
Free softwares are kicking ass. PHPBB3 came out a few months ago in completely table-less CSS driven variety. SMF is also becoming more popular for small sites.
I’m still not happy.
I want features and code quality from a merge of 3 or 4 softwares. None offer me everything I want, but all have a part of what I want.
I want vB’s plugins and products with IPB’s support team and phpbb’s template engine. Is it too much to ask? 😀
There’s been a couple threads at vB.com over the past week or so about customers complaining about the lack of communication and upcoming releases. A big gripe has been the template engine and the antiquated table mash up. The response from staff has been minimal at best, and the ones that have replied have simply stated “it’s something we’re considering” in not so many words.
Considering?
It drives me nuts.
Back on topic, if vB doesn’t do something soon, I might make the move to phpBB. It sounds completely backwards to do so. Most people go from open source to enterprise…. not vice versa.
My rankings are starting to drop some in the SE’s due to my bloated C2C ratio from the forsaken nested tables, and useless inline presentation layer. My average page is roughly 120 KB, before images. 20KB would be easy to accomplish with a better template engine.
Perhaps in a future post, I will compare vB with phpBB3.
I still can’t believe I’m thinking about this…