Upgrade to vBulletin 5
- Thread starter Cthulhu
- Start date
The Twilight Mexican
Ex-SeeD-ingly good
- AKA
- TresDias
I couldn't tell you guys the last time I browsed our forum in anything that isn't mobile. I think it already works great.
Ⓐaron
Factiō Rēpūblicāna dēlenda est.
- AKA
- The Man, V
A rather large amount of my browsing is done from my phone as well. I don't mind using the desktop styles on my phone, but I can see why it might bother some people; the amount of resizing that might have to be done could be annoying to some people.
Cthulhu
Administrator
- AKA
- Yop
Yeah, the current style is like, not aimed at mobile devices at all, 
. UI components are too small / fiddly imo.
Also, what I gathered is that after vB 3, the product went into a different direction - idk how much these bulletpoints are related to each other though:
* The original company, Jelsoft, were taken over by some company
* An effective rewrite was announced, changing the back-end code to follow the MVC paradigm, with the eventual goal of making the codebase easier to maintain and expand, especially for people that didn't originally write the code. This in general is a Good Thing, but probably not for PHP - since it's an interpreted language, more abstraction layers means more code and code paths executed, means longer processing time for effectively the same result.
* The original / core developers and product manager (iirc) packed up and left to create Xenforo
* (I think) vB 5 went towards mobile: the product was split into a back-end and front-end component, so that the native mobile client and web client could talk to each other. Again, this is what I consider a Good Thing, and it's how I've build web/mobile apps for the past three years, but compared to the approach in vB 3 it's not any faster.
I mean it could be faster, but they'd have to do some serious optimization and rethinking. Maybe running it in Facebook's HHVM would make it run a lot faster; instead of an opcode cache, it's a complete virtual machine, which can compile to native machine code on the fly / as needed, like the JVM does. I did a quick google search but couldn't find any experiences running vB on HHVM. Maybe I should try and fiddle with that myself.
. UI components are too small / fiddly imo.Also, what I gathered is that after vB 3, the product went into a different direction - idk how much these bulletpoints are related to each other though:
* The original company, Jelsoft, were taken over by some company
* An effective rewrite was announced, changing the back-end code to follow the MVC paradigm, with the eventual goal of making the codebase easier to maintain and expand, especially for people that didn't originally write the code. This in general is a Good Thing, but probably not for PHP - since it's an interpreted language, more abstraction layers means more code and code paths executed, means longer processing time for effectively the same result.
* The original / core developers and product manager (iirc) packed up and left to create Xenforo
* (I think) vB 5 went towards mobile: the product was split into a back-end and front-end component, so that the native mobile client and web client could talk to each other. Again, this is what I consider a Good Thing, and it's how I've build web/mobile apps for the past three years, but compared to the approach in vB 3 it's not any faster.
I mean it could be faster, but they'd have to do some serious optimization and rethinking. Maybe running it in Facebook's HHVM would make it run a lot faster; instead of an opcode cache, it's a complete virtual machine, which can compile to native machine code on the fly / as needed, like the JVM does. I did a quick google search but couldn't find any experiences running vB on HHVM. Maybe I should try and fiddle with that myself.
Obsidian Fire
Ahk Morn!
- AKA
- The Engineer
Oh wow! V5 is a laggy as hell.
AvecAloes
Donator
Everyone else has said it already, but holy clams SLOW.
The latest activity thing is neat, I guess, but I do think I prefer the current "new posts" page to that. I like seeing everything all at once, especially since it can sometimes be a bit of time in between my visits. I see everything that has a new post, whether it's a few hours old or several days old.
I also do most of my browsing on my phone, using the desktop site. I really only have to resize occasionally, as my eyes are still pretty sharp
there are a couple of users whose font is tiny or italicized, which I usually have to zoom in for, but other than those specific posts, I don't have any issues. My phone's browser (safari) does a really good job of snapping things to the screen, though. I never have to move the window around to see posts in their entirety.
The latest activity thing is neat, I guess, but I do think I prefer the current "new posts" page to that. I like seeing everything all at once, especially since it can sometimes be a bit of time in between my visits. I see everything that has a new post, whether it's a few hours old or several days old.
I also do most of my browsing on my phone, using the desktop site. I really only have to resize occasionally, as my eyes are still pretty sharp
there are a couple of users whose font is tiny or italicized, which I usually have to zoom in for, but other than those specific posts, I don't have any issues. My phone's browser (safari) does a really good job of snapping things to the screen, though. I never have to move the window around to see posts in their entirety.
Cthulhu
Administrator
- AKA
- Yop
Yeah, the default style uses just half of the horizontal screen estate (or so), and since phones often have larger resolutions than desktops nowadays (srsly) and large screens, I can imagine it's quite legible.
Anyway, IDK, I guess I'm fine with staying with vB 3 then, as long as it'll keep working with the underlying server software and won't get haxed and shit.
I will say this though: I'm not going to buy another license once this one expires, it's a fuckton of money for either small compatibility updates, or changing / upgrading to a slower system that - as far as I could see - does not offer major and usable new features. Maybe if you'd use it for a full website or something, but then, it'd have to perform a whole lot better.
Anyway, IDK, I guess I'm fine with staying with vB 3 then, as long as it'll keep working with the underlying server software and won't get haxed and shit.
I will say this though: I'm not going to buy another license once this one expires, it's a fuckton of money for either small compatibility updates, or changing / upgrading to a slower system that - as far as I could see - does not offer major and usable new features. Maybe if you'd use it for a full website or something, but then, it'd have to perform a whole lot better.
It's slow. But I have a feeling that its *database*-side. Not vB.
Besides this, i LOVE everything else. Adapting according to screen size, for one.
But it seems as though everyone's ready to shoot it down even before it spreads its wings.
EDIT:
http://thelifestream.net/betaforums...s/2053-final-fantasy-vii-novel-from-acf/page4
Take this page for example. There's only one post in it.
It loads, the post, the profile, and the notification. Nothing else.
Is vB accessing the database in some weird way that takes really long to access the relevant data?
Besides this, i LOVE everything else. Adapting according to screen size, for one.
But it seems as though everyone's ready to shoot it down even before it spreads its wings.
EDIT:
http://thelifestream.net/betaforums...s/2053-final-fantasy-vii-novel-from-acf/page4
Take this page for example. There's only one post in it.
It loads, the post, the profile, and the notification. Nothing else.
Is vB accessing the database in some weird way that takes really long to access the relevant data?
Last edited:
Cthulhu
Administrator
- AKA
- Yop
Well vB and server-side are kinda the same thing, . It's also slow on the official vB forums, which... actually isn't that busy, the most active users they've had online at one point is 335, so it's only a little larger than we are. Probably has more concurrent users though. Anyway, point is, I'm sure they have a beefier server than we do, but it's not noticeably faster.
Like I said, I'd like to fiddle with HHVM for kicks, but I won't guarantee it'll actually make the site faster (or even work, for that matter). Other optimizations might be a caching addon - if one exists for vB 5 already, although I'd expect that to be on the feature list of the software itself. Anyway, I googled around a bit, people all over are saying Xenforo performs much better than (modern versions of) vB, and properly employs caching and shit.
. It's also slow on the official vB forums, which... actually isn't that busy, the most active users they've had online at one point is 335, so it's only a little larger than we are. Probably has more concurrent users though. Anyway, point is, I'm sure they have a beefier server than we do, but it's not noticeably faster.Like I said, I'd like to fiddle with HHVM for kicks, but I won't guarantee it'll actually make the site faster (or even work, for that matter). Other optimizations might be a caching addon - if one exists for vB 5 already, although I'd expect that to be on the feature list of the software itself. Anyway, I googled around a bit, people all over are saying Xenforo performs much better than (modern versions of) vB, and properly employs caching and shit.