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I actually believe vBulletin 3 is where it’s at! With modern forums, it’s mostly the UX that sucks. PWAs that never recover from errors, endless scrolling, stu

by fuzzy2 4y ago

I actually believe vBulletin 3 is where it’s at! With modern forums, it’s mostly the UX that sucks. PWAs that never recover from errors, endless scrolling, stuff like that. Also * Falsehoods forum developers believe about network reliability – did you know the network can be down? Then up again? * Falsehoods forum developers believe about time – did you know that time can jump forward, by huge amounts, because the page was suspended for whatever reason? Turns out, if you try to do the browser’s job, that’s a lot of work! Just don’t. Performance is usually good enough for me, even with all the JS and whatnot.

tiffanyh 4y ago
> I actually believe vBulletin 3 is where it’s at! Curious, what about vBulletin v4 and v5 do you not like?
- Ralfp 4y ago
  Developers of vB 3 left the company and started new forum software named XenForo. They were then sued by Internet Brands (vB owners) for IP theft - IB claimed XenForo was next vBulletin. In court hearings we’ve learned that IB plan for vBulletin development was to fire all but lead dev, and have this lead dev only delegate and review work to outsourced devs in Asia. We’ve also heard that „only developers care about quality of code” and trying to keep code good is „waste of time”. And then vB 4 landed and turned out to be insanely poor launch - forum index was plugin based, but it was very easy to end with index page that did 700 mysql queries, which took forever to execute without relying on full page cache like varnish. Today its supposedly much better, but Internet Brands uses internal version of vBulletin 3 (3.8) to run their sites instead of v4 or v5.
  - phendrenad2 4y ago
    I wondered why vbulletin v4+ seemed like such a radical shift. vB 3.x was a true platform. There was a rich ecosystem of plugins (including many paid) and many sites were heavily customized. Every vB 4+ site looks exactly the same to me IMHO. This also explains why all of the paid plugins moved to XenForo. Interesting...
- fuzzy2 4y ago
  It’s just the feeling! :-) vBulletin 4 was also okay in the end, but I always thought vBulletin 5 was trying to be too many things at once. It’s just too modern! I understand, of course, that the online community landscape has changed since back then and vBulletin has to adapt to remain competitive.
snek_case 4y ago
Why do people hate endless scrolling so much?
- paulryanrogers 4y ago
  Impossible to jump pages, know how much there is, often breaks native scrolling in awkward ways without recourse.
- luispauloml 4y ago
  Someone posted this on HN last month and I think it summarizes very well what people dislike the most about infinite scrolling: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32789617 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32789617
- whartung 4y ago
  Because it’s like swimming across a large lake finding yourself exhausted in the middle with little alternative to swimming back. Now on my phone it’s relatively easy to jump to the top of the page. It’s also almost done impossible to jump to the bottom. On a desktop I can at least mash the END key or play silly reindeer games with the scrollbar thumb. On mobile it’s very hard to Leap or Surge or Jump. If I’m madly fanning the page with my thumb or, worse, my fingers because I’m tired with my thumb, I pretty much just give up at that point. I also like having non-endless scrolling because I can use the scroll bar as a gauge of how much is left of the article. Being constantly fed is just a bad experience.
- ratww 4y ago
  Well, first, it's not reliable. If the network goes down and it doesn't have some form of recovery, you gotta start from scratch. Second, it's not bookmarkable (except for the odd case), so you can't send specific pages to anyone, you often can't start navigating in it one day and continue on other, or in another device. Third, you lose navigation and exploration features, like navigating to the first page and seeing the oldest stuff, or going into the middle. But the biggest reason people hate as a matter principle is because it is in 99% of cases done without any UX research and without any care from developers, and that's in the best case. The worst case is to cause doomscrolling, which is nefarious in its own. It is disrespectful to users. If you don't want people seeing old content just fucking delete it.
ZuLuuuuuu 4y ago
Although it is undeniable how good vBulletin was, UBB (original Ultimate Bulletin Board written in Perl, not the newer UBB.threads) will always have a special place in my heart. I always loved its esthetics, maybe because of the memories of nice communities using UBB I was part of. I even wrote an ASP forum script that mimicked its style. Back in the day, UBB was the most popular forum script but when vBulletin came out with its extremely comprehensive administration panel and constantly improving features, it started to replace UBB very fast. Then appeared free alternatives like phpBB, which probably became the most popular alternative for a long time and also there was a popular alternative written in ASP: Web Wiz Forums.

by fuzzy2 4y ago

tiffanyh 4y ago

> I actually believe vBulletin 3 is where it’s at! Curious, what about vBulletin v4 and v5 do you not like?

Ralfp 4y ago
Developers of vB 3 left the company and started new forum software named XenForo. They were then sued by Internet Brands (vB owners) for IP theft - IB claimed XenForo was next vBulletin. In court hearings we’ve learned that IB plan for vBulletin development was to fire all but lead dev, and have this lead dev only delegate and review work to outsourced devs in Asia. We’ve also heard that „only developers care about quality of code” and trying to keep code good is „waste of time”. And then vB 4 landed and turned out to be insanely poor launch - forum index was plugin based, but it was very easy to end with index page that did 700 mysql queries, which took forever to execute without relying on full page cache like varnish. Today its supposedly much better, but Internet Brands uses internal version of vBulletin 3 (3.8) to run their sites instead of v4 or v5.
- phendrenad2 4y ago
  I wondered why vbulletin v4+ seemed like such a radical shift. vB 3.x was a true platform. There was a rich ecosystem of plugins (including many paid) and many sites were heavily customized. Every vB 4+ site looks exactly the same to me IMHO. This also explains why all of the paid plugins moved to XenForo. Interesting...
fuzzy2 4y ago
It’s just the feeling! :-) vBulletin 4 was also okay in the end, but I always thought vBulletin 5 was trying to be too many things at once. It’s just too modern! I understand, of course, that the online community landscape has changed since back then and vBulletin has to adapt to remain competitive.

snek_case 4y ago

Why do people hate endless scrolling so much?

paulryanrogers 4y ago
Impossible to jump pages, know how much there is, often breaks native scrolling in awkward ways without recourse.
luispauloml 4y ago
Someone posted this on HN last month and I think it summarizes very well what people dislike the most about infinite scrolling: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32789617 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32789617
whartung 4y ago
Because it’s like swimming across a large lake finding yourself exhausted in the middle with little alternative to swimming back. Now on my phone it’s relatively easy to jump to the top of the page. It’s also almost done impossible to jump to the bottom. On a desktop I can at least mash the END key or play silly reindeer games with the scrollbar thumb. On mobile it’s very hard to Leap or Surge or Jump. If I’m madly fanning the page with my thumb or, worse, my fingers because I’m tired with my thumb, I pretty much just give up at that point. I also like having non-endless scrolling because I can use the scroll bar as a gauge of how much is left of the article. Being constantly fed is just a bad experience.
ratww 4y ago
Well, first, it's not reliable. If the network goes down and it doesn't have some form of recovery, you gotta start from scratch. Second, it's not bookmarkable (except for the odd case), so you can't send specific pages to anyone, you often can't start navigating in it one day and continue on other, or in another device. Third, you lose navigation and exploration features, like navigating to the first page and seeing the oldest stuff, or going into the middle. But the biggest reason people hate as a matter principle is because it is in 99% of cases done without any UX research and without any care from developers, and that's in the best case. The worst case is to cause doomscrolling, which is nefarious in its own. It is disrespectful to users. If you don't want people seeing old content just fucking delete it.

ZuLuuuuuu 4y ago

Although it is undeniable how good vBulletin was, UBB (original Ultimate Bulletin Board written in Perl, not the newer UBB.threads) will always have a special place in my heart. I always loved its esthetics, maybe because of the memories of nice communities using UBB I was part of. I even wrote an ASP forum script that mimicked its style. Back in the day, UBB was the most popular forum script but when vBulletin came out with its extremely comprehensive administration panel and constantly improving features, it started to replace UBB very fast. Then appeared free alternatives like phpBB, which probably became the most popular alternative for a long time and also there was a popular alternative written in ASP: Web Wiz Forums.