Has vBulletin Gone Overboard?
Saturday, January 17th, 2009
vBulletin is probably the most popular online discussion board software on the Internet. On the Omani internet, it is probably the ONLY discussion board software used at all! We have recently installed version 3.8.0 at Republic of Code and I can’t really say that I like it.
First of all, the difference between 3.8.0 and 3.7.x is not major, social network features are now just more emphasised. The majority of vB new features over the last two years are just making the whole thing seriously over cluttered, there is no way to disable most of the new features and it is really annoying. vBulletin has been trying to become a blogging platform, an online gallery, a CMS, a social network, and I don’t know what else. The majority of these new stupid services are never used the majority of users.
This problem is not new, when was the last time you used the Calendar feature on your forum? When was the last time you or one of your members ever clicked on the built-in FAQ section? Why the hell do we need to have the total number of posts and threads on the side of the forum index? And now the new “Community” link on the toolbar is just driving me crazy. (You need to log-in to see it)
I know that it is possible to remove all these features by manually editing the templates and removing the links, but that is such a hassle, especially as you might have to update your template manually afterwards each time you upgrade the script.
If I were to start a new forum I would not pay to use vBulletin, I’m waiting patiently for bbPress to take off, but there doesn’t seem to be any progress with that project. It is such a shame.
That is not to say that there aren’t vB features which I like, I love their AJAX implementation and how you can edit posts and thread lists on the fly. I generally like their template structure, I like the PM system, and I LOVE THE TAGGING FEATURES. I took a quick look around a number of Omani forums and it does not seem that anybody is using this feature even though it’s been introduced for a about a year now.
Tagging is the best way for organising content and making your threads link to each other in a logical way. I tag every single thread at the Flash Forum to make it easy for members to find threads with similar problems. My stats say that more and more members are clicking on these tag links and are browsing for threads that way.
I do not think that I will be changing vBulletin anytime soon, but I will surely make some many changes to the toolbar and forum index to simplify things and make sure that useless features do not contribute to the clutter.
