Did that thread have to be closed? A “technical question” was asked about the board and the thread got locked without any kind of official answer.
I get it, some rough words were exchanged. Is that it? If every thread that had some kind of unpleasant exchange got closed, this would be a speed contest to see who gets to post at all.
I won’t even bother to speculate why you felt the need to lock that thread without the OP getting an answer, but I will say that, once again, I find it in very poor form.
I might not have closed the thread, but I wouldn’t blame Tuba for thinking the thread was on its way off the tracks.
I feel like we’ve been down the path of “Here’s why we can’t implement every new whizbang from new releases of vBulletin…” several times. First, it’s a customized installation, which means figuring out whether all the customization that’s been applied to this version won’t break the upgrade version. Secondly, IIRC, the SDMB is something of a guinea pig for vBulletin because no one has ever grown a vBulletin community this large before. If I were the tech nerd over at the Reader, I’d probably be hesitant to upgrade until new versions were battle-tested. Thirdly, there’s the bandwidth issues. Some of these community features look like they’d be pretty resource-intensive.
Not to excuse Tuba, but if I’d had that conversation about implementing new features a few dozen times prior to seeing that thread, I might have closed it, too.
Let’s be straight about things, the thread was closed so there’d be no uncomfortable discussion about an upgrade, not because of any perceived rudeness.
ding ding ding.
All it would have taken is a quick reply of “We are not currently considering an upgrade to this version. We will notify you if this changes”. But God forbid they just give a clear answer to anything.
Wow. Seeing all of them together like that makes it almost look like they were AVOIDING the question as asked…seeing as how not-a-one of them even mentioned it…
Just to clarify, the Straight Dope is ranked number 68 in terms of number of posts of internet forums using vBulletin. This is smaller than such notables as
[ul]
[li] Bimmerforums for people who own and love BMWs to talk about how much they own and love BMWs to the tune of 10.9 million posts. Those people really love their BMWs.[/li][li] Hardware Upgrade is a forum for people who want to talk about upgrading their computers and other cool stuff like that. In Italian. There are 19.5 million posts about computer upgrades in Italian. I’ll bet the pope posts there. I hear the Vatican has a gigantic watercooled supercomputer so that the College of Cardinals can play Team Fortress. His Holiness likes to find a dark place to camp your ass, because that’s just how he rolls.[/li][li] BodyBuilding.com for people who really love their bodies. So much so that they want their bodies to become as large and shiny as possible so there will be more body to love. They have 20 million posts in 1.3 million threads and 830 thousand members. If you keep talking trash about their board they might come over and kick sand in your face and then laugh at you. You’ll know they’re coming because the reflection of the sun off their oiled thews will be blinding in its magnificence.[/li][li] Something Awful runs vBulletin. It’s an entire forum devoted to TMI threads, Rick Rolling people, and getting people to accidentally look at pictures of Tub Girl and the goatse guy. They have 62 million posts. I feel like I should emphasize how big this number is, so I’ll write it out: 62,277,105 posts about how gross it was to see that goatse picture again. Don’t even try to imagine it, your head will explode.[/li][li] Offtopic.com is the biggest board running vBulletin. You can guess what they talk about there. How big are they? They have almost 90 million posts. By which I mean, 89 million and change. Yeah, 89,207,006 posts about, you know, stuff. Posted by 181,957 members. That’s twelve times as many posts as the Straight Dope. And they have 10 times as many threads. Three and a half million threads, for those of you keeping score at home. You can register for free and become member number 181,958. Then you’ll be able to say stuff like “Offtopic.com is kind of a guinea pig for vBulletin, as no one has ever grown a community so large using the software before” and I won’t have to come in and contradict you. :D[/li][/ul]
If you don’t believe me, you can look for yourself here at big-boards.com. Those are just the vBulletin boards. You can clear filters to see all the boards. The biggest is something called Gaia Online which is an anime roleplaying community. They run phpBB and have 1,216,711,923 posts. That choking sound you just heard was the hamsters having little rodent sized coronaries at the thought of 1.2 billion posts. Yeah, billion with a b that rhymes with g that stands for ginormous. Also, this October 30th they had 108,596 users online all at the same time. That’s many. That’s more or less the population of beautiful Burbank, California coming together online to talk about anime. Or something. I don’t understand it myself.
Oh yeah, and just because I have open the wikipedia page, the 68th biggest city in the United States is Lexington-Fayette, Kentucky. In terms of post numbers, the ratio of posts on the Dope and posts at Offtopic is the same as the ratio between the populations of Indianapolis and New York City. If we want to look at members instead, you just asserted that Eugene, Oregon was the biggest city in the United States.
As long as we are apparently pitting Tuba, I will add a minor complaint. I asked a simple question, got an answer that said almost nothing and then as two posters made off topic posts, she closed the thread with an effectively incorrect:
BTW: The Question was: **So when was the last time the SDMB updated its vBulletin software? **
TubaDiva, I am one of the last posters to complain. I am accused regularly of being one of the suck ups. Probably true, but I genuinely love this board.
You already know I appreciate the job you and the other mods and admins do, but for crying out loud, your answer is less that satisfactory, assumed I was asking something I was not and could be answered factually.
I suspect that my question was exactly the oddball piece of data that someone like Q.E.D. or **CarnalK ** would actually have an answer for, potentially down to the date and a thread mentioning it. You gave the question no chance to be answered in a reasonable fashion.
Again, this is not a big deal, but I thought as long as you were already being pitted, I might as well add my own minor complaint.
Still, even though SDMB might not be #1, you can’t ignore the fact that it is a massive board. I imagine that figures into the decision as to whether or not to upgrade somewhat.
It raises an interesting question, though. I get the security alerts and whatnot from vBulletin because I purchased a copy a while back for a community site I used to run.
Does the SDMB patch all those security holes if they’re not addressing potential security problems through regular upgrades?
