Please discuss the vBulletin 6 Release Candidate Here.

[Wayne Luke]

Talk about the upcoming release.

Known Issues:

• VB6-111: Channel Display Module shows Likes rather than Reactions and misleading values
• VB6-1: Notification badges do not always appear correctly with large numbers.
• VB6-146: When using Themes, Tabs on the User Profile page do not appear properly.
• VB6-2: Code, HTML, and PHP BBCodes can extend outside the display viewport. Resolved with the deployment of RC2
• VB6-6: Users cannot apply topic reactions while viewing the activity stream. Resolved with the deployment of RC2

[MasterOfNone]

Will you be able to use a reaction on a comment or only a post?

[Wayne Luke]

You can use them on comments as well as posts. They are replacing Likes and it has been a long standing request to be able to like comments.

[zweeper]

Looks promising

Will there be a ckeditor Update?

[Wayne Luke]

At this moment, there is no ckeditor update planned. Future direction may dictate that course though. Development is always fluid so we'll keep you posted if this changes.

[fpostma]

Most of the announcement was about style/color, which is less relevant to me as we use our own styling. This part thus was most interesting to me "To maintain backward compatibility, we have provided a vBulletin 5 Style. If your custom style does not work with the new vBulletin 6 Default, you can use this as a parent style." does that mean we won't have to rewrite styles as we did going from vb4 to vb5 ?

Besides the event queue are there any more technical (non-visual) improvements or changes?

[Wayne Luke]

If your custom style does not work with the new vBulletin 6 Default, you can use this as a parent style." does that mean we won't have to rewrite styles as we did going from vb4 to vb5 ?

This is correct. Unlike the change from vBulletin 4 to vBulletin 5, the underlying template system was not refactored. This allows us to support vBulletin 5 styles. I suggest looking at your style with the new default and if it doesn't work, then move it as a child under the vB5 style. A lot of the work was to move towards the more modern Grid and Flex layouts common today. The end user should really see the results of this but it will provide a better display and hopefully improves rendering across all devices.

Besides the event queue are there any more technical (non-visual) improvements or changes?

Coding standards are an ongoing task that occur in every version. If you compare the /core/includes and /core/admincp directories with their equivalents in a vBulletin 4 install, you will see significant code changes.

vBulletin 6 will have an increased MySQL minimum requirement of 5.7.10. This will allow the developers to take advantage of newer features in the database platform for further improvements to queries and database structure that was not possible in previous versions. However, the software still used MySQLi. There is a desire to convert to PDO and newer tools use PDO extensively. However, that is likely a year long project by itself with development and testing. Likewise, updates in the minim version of PHP will allow the developers to take advantage of newer functions and coding structures to improve the software.

I think the main issue in performance these days are 1) server configuration and 2) Javascript. Javascript is the most troublesome because there are too many combinations of device and browser to test them all. So the developers rely on automated testing and coding standards to work on updating this. This is also an ongoing project.

For the Administrator, we're working on improving SEO and Google's Rich Search results. You should see this in an upcoming minor release.

[floyer]

Since the major version will change, will the new version upgrade cost something ? How much ?

If it costs, how long will the 5.x.x will be maintained ?

[Wayne Luke]

Information about licensing and costs will be posted before the full release is made. This will include information on maintenance plans for vBulletin 5.X.

However, unlike the transition from vBulletin 4 to vBulletin 5, any customizations you have made including addon packages should migrate to 6. Though it may require little tweaking of package settings. As we found out in our own upgrade.

[Mrs.T]

Is the change in design of this forum because it’s been upgraded to 6 ?

If so will our sites be affected design wise when upgraded? (cloud)

loving the reactions 👍

[Wayne Luke]

This is the default style of vBulletin 6. Plus all of the Themes we ship have been updated. However, you should not need to rebuild your style and it won't be marked as incompatible. Your customizations should adapt for the most part. Though some third-party CSS may need to be updated.

If you don't like how your customizations appear with the vBulletin 6 style as their parent, you will be able to move them under the available vBulletin 5 style in your AdminCP. This vBulletin 5 style has been developed using the same newer design techniques as the default style but to continue the vBulletin 5 legacy look that people are used to. Your personal style will inherit its base from its parent.

[Wayne Luke]

To add to this, my Cloud demonstration site has been updated to vBulletin 6 RC1 and uses a custom style. The upgrade wasn't perfect but the style is completely usable. many people may not even notice any of the differences. I have to tweak a few things for the editor still but 97% of the style was exactly the same as when the site was running vBulletin 5.7.5.

[Zips]

Is something like "Related Topics" going to be included for everyone using vB6 or will it be like vB5 and limited to cloud sites and this site only?

Also, what about 2FA for all users and not just admins?

[Wayne Luke]

I won't commit to either. But there has been talk about both.

I'll just give some background about the related topics to cover the issues around it.

In regards to Related Topics, it would have to be implemented in a new way. In vBulletin 4.X it was fairly easy as that used MyISAM tables for post storage and the system used a full text search. When vBulletin 5 was released, the guidance was to use INNODB but this didn't support FullText indexing at the time. So the related topics module was built in complicated way and mainly for the marketing term of Machine Learning. It is only on Cloud and vBulletin.com because these are all in the same network and have access to the language model that powers it. Plus it was used as a Cloud selling point.

Today's newer versions of MySQL support fulltext indexing on INNODB. However, people (meaning hosting companies) were very slow to upgrade their databases until recently. So we could theoretically build a related topics module that doesn't rely on a language model in a specific data center. We would have to rebuild fulltext search again as well and build those indexes on the node and text tables. Things people are reluctant to do because those tables can be huge. But it is possible to do.

Adding a fulltext search module would be needed first. It is something that I have wished they would add for a while now.

[Zips]

Interesting. Thank you very much for the information on both of those topics there, especially about the related topics functionality.

Regardless of what may happen with those things, I'm certainly going to keep an eye on vB6 development in the weeks/months ahead.

[Wayne Luke]

Release Candidate 2 has been deployed on this site. It fixes the following issues:

• VB6-6 - Reactions do not work in the results of an activity stream.
• VB6-4 - Warnings in upgrade beta 2
• VB6-2 - Quotes and code blocks are large as possible

[zweeper]

What's the first version which will be released for customers?

[markdhb23]

Is there anywhere to see a change log of fixes included in this version?

[Wayne Luke]

I will release a list of issues that are applied to the version when it is released. Currently there is some transition with internal systems going on and they aren't available to customers.

[Trevor Hannant]

What's the first version which will be released for customers?

Version 6.0.0

[Trevor Hannant]

Is there anywhere to see a change log of fixes included in this version?

https://forum.vbulletin.com/forum/vbulletin-6/feedback-suggestions/4483629-vbulletin-6-changelog

vBulletin 6 Tracker Entries

[elektro-kot]

Hello
Will the vB6 language pack be very different from the vB5 language pack?
In general, I'm wondering if the vB5 language pack can work on vB6?
If have to edit a few dozen phrases, as happens after an update, that's fine, but if you need to re-translate everything... it's a big problem.

[Wayne Luke]

There have been no changes to how languages are handled at this time. vBulletin 5 Languages and Styles should be compatible.

[dz_khelifa]

I really like the changes to the home page
I asked for this change a while ago
One step left is to make the sub-forums a drop-down list


Is the upgrade simple to this version, or will we face problems such as upgrading from the third version to the fifth version previously.
Also, the cost of the upgrade, that is, the purchase price of the license, will it be high in relation to obtaining an upgrade?
Will we have to make deep modifications to a theme or keep it?

I will work on translating version 6 into Arabic

[Wayne Luke]

When you upgraded from vBulletin 3 or 4, the entire database structure was changed. When people had modified their database structure with modifications, it could cause some problems. When upgrading from vBulletin 5 to vBulletin 6, the changes to the database structure should be minimal. In fact, I think the tables for the reaction system (called Node Voting internally) is already in the vBulletin 5.7.5 database.

We'll have more information on pricing and so forth soon.

We welcome translations and I hope you consider adding your translation to the vBulletin 6 Add-Ons section here on this site.

[WebmasterTurkiye]

Hello, will there be any fees to upgrade from version 5x to version 6x, or can we transition directly?

[Wayne Luke]

Information about licensing and costs will be posted before the full release is made.