VB5 Demo Feedback

[smackLAN]

I'm going to keep my feedback short and simple. I was seriously considering returning to designing for vB again with the promise of vB5. After seeing what I have seen, that thought is nixed. I wouldn't attempt to design/code for this version under any circumstances. Sorry guys, just being honest.

[Hemanth]

God... I waited and stayed on 3.8 for 2+ years for this abomination. I feel old and thinking of leaving the forum business altogether.

But then again vB6 ought to be good, right? right?

[DaPro]

Wow, I honestly didn't believe it could get much worse. When I first heard about 5 Connect, I believed we would see something pretty cool. Not necessarily amazing, but I was hopeful for a lightweight product refined by today's standards in UI and coding practices, but instead we get this. I try not to jump on the bandwagon of vB bashers, even though I'm an XenForo client now, but if you were hoping this product would attract people like me back, you failed...miserably.

These are a couple of things I've noticed without even registering and logging into the demo site:

• The homepage takes extremely long to load. I'm not sure if that is purely just your server being hammered by people viewing the product and playing around...but this is a turn-off. You should have put this on a beefier server if that was the case.
• When the homepage takes too long to load you can clearly see instances where the individual tabs for "Latest Activity" shows up for a few seconds and the page looks like a mess. Pretty gross.
• There is no large call-to-action button to get users to register. There is of course a login/sign up bar at the top...but the biggest thing in that overlay is the login form with a TINY link to "register". I would look for a new designer.
• The activity listing tab is EXTREMELY confusing. It's hard to tell where one item begins and where one item ends. I'm not sure who is on your ALPHA team testing this, but please make sure in the future to include experienced web designers with solid portfolios.
• I don't know how better to describe the default style than...it's ugly. I actually think that vB4 looks better than vB5 in some instances.
• We don't need slow moving slide effects using jQuery on every tool. It's nice to have things fade in and out QUICKLY, but slow moving slide toggles are killing the user experience.
• I'll generalize the blogs as horrendous. I know it's not extremely helpful to just put that, but I don't know how much I can write while at work on how bad it is. My advice would be to start over.

Boy oh boy I don't really know why I'm so upset about this. I'm not even a vBulletin customer anymore but this almost feels like a slap in the face. Not only do you put a BETA product on sale that this horrendous, but you actually expect people to pay for it? Let us be real here for a second, this product looks bad and I haven't even registered yet. If I were just an end-user coming across a forum using this software, I wouldn't be there for long. It's slow, unintuitive and ugly. I don't expect the perfect software guys, it's impossible to create...however I do expect something decent. You might not have the "best looking" software in the world, but if it's intuitive and fast I might purchase it. You guys need to pick one area to focus on for this release and nail it. My suggestion would be to figure out how to make this product more lightweight and optimize it in any areas you can. Once you have this performing better than vBulletin 4 standards, you should move onto the next area of focus...the UI. This will probably take the longest to nail, but it would be well worth it and you can attack sections bit by bit. C'mon guys...get focused and get serious.

[Sador]

This is considered beta, not a very early build.

If this is going the same route as vB4 went down, I doubt we'll see too many serious changes to what the demo is right now.

[sadikb]

Man... I tried to use this again and it is unbelievably buggy. I had a notification with thread title missing (it showed Untitled) and when I clicked on it, it took me to a single post page (a huge SEO disaster, with duplicate content everywhere) and it showed me Page 1 of 2 and I clicked on the next arrow to go to page 2 and it magically became page 1 of 1!

WTF?

You expect any sane individual with any internet or website experience to buy this for over 200 bucks? This is making me glad that VB4 at least had VB3 code refactored. Seeing the view layer is so buggy and disastrous, I am very scared how the controllers and models are coded.

[Lizard King]

This is considered beta, not a very early build.

This reminded me of an old story sadly

[Pope Viper]

It really reminds me of the VB 4 cash grab. I stupidly bought into that, and I'm like Sador, I feel that for those that have suffered for the past 3 years with such a incomplete product as VB4, with its promise of a CMS solution, that I feel like I'm being screwed.

I'm certainly not going to buy in for just a 40 dollar savings.

[cellarius]

This is considered beta, not a very early build.

[sadikb]

I am hoping someone from IB can comment that this is a very early build and most of the quite obvious bugs and performance and design disasters (no header tags, infinite number of nested divs, dozens of classes) will be resolved. You guys are sitting on a marketing disaster here, unless you fix these, the bad press you are already getting everywhere on VB5 will kill any prospects of a successful VB5.

[Sador]

Okay, just tried it.

Initial load time was around 18 seconds (seriously? On a 100mb/s connection it takes 18 seconds?)
Then I moved to a second page. Around the same speed. The third one too.

Turned off as I was I closed the website. No point in trying, I thought.

But then, that wouldn't be very fair, now would it? So, let's open the site again. Surely, stuff must have been cached now, surely it will load quicker this time.

about 18 seconds later:



I also got to see some replies being loaded, then disappearing again. What's that about? Oh well, if you don't want me to watch it, I guess I won't bother. Thanks for the demo I suppose, it's a step forward from the vB4 stuff. Then again, the pricing for existing customers is a utter joke, I feel very undervalued right now.

[Fready]

It looks rubbish, feels like rubbish not going anywhere near it.
What a waste of time making that was

[Pope Viper]

This is quite scary. Really, really scary.

And this is supposed to be released something in the next 2.5 months? Really? In this state?

[Lizard King]

Thread sort functionality is also gone so we will not have ability to sort threads according to view, replies , etc...

[rudedog1968]

Here's another one:

Go to main page of forums, then select topic (so you can see all the threaded topics) now enter a thread. Hit the back button to see thread topics again and you're redirected to the silly "latest Activity".

Can this activity "feature" be turned off? or better yet removed completely?

Can someone with admin privileges add some sub forums to see how it looks?



Heads over to my forums and kisses the screen where it says powered by vB 3.8.7

[smackLAN]

One positive thing I will give IB on, at least they have put this out there for everyone to see and mess around with in advance of calling it Gold.