For some time I was deeply afraid of installing any new release of VBulletin to the forum I administer. But after 4.0.7 came out with several performance bugs fixed I though, that may be it’s time to install it and hoped that installation will go smooth. I closed the forum for 1 hour, blamed myself for writting “1 hour” in the closed message text because surely simple bugfix forum update cannot take longer than 15 mins, right? NOWAY. I was mistaken.

Continue reading “VBulletin 4.0.7: they rocked me again”

Tags: vbulletin

VBulletin 4.0.5 is released. Among some bug fixes (about 50), we’ve got some new ones to laugh at.

If you install this “maintenance pack”, you will happily look at your forum usernames now contain ARG:5 UNDEFINED message. Nice, eh?

But again, as with the bugs in 4.0.4 nothing of this kind appeared on official VBulletin forum which is running 4.0.5 since yesterday. Do VBulletin developers develop bugs especially for our forums?

VBulletin QA team, congratulations on one next epic fail!

P.S. As any VBulletin user you are welcome to install this great new update with 50 bugfixes. As for me… I’ll better wait….

Tags: vbulletin

class_taggablecontent.php of VBulletin 4.0.4 forum engine contains the following code:

Code block

//This seems like a terrible place to put this, but I don't know where else it should go.
if ($vbulletin->options['tagmaxlen'] <= 0 OR $vbulletin->options['tagmaxlen'] >= 100)
{
       $vbulletin->options['tagmaxlen'] = 100;
}

Continue reading “VBulletin 4: “This seems like a terrible place to put this, but I don’t know where else it should go.””

Tags: vbulletin

VBulletin 4.0.1 PL 1 is now out. I was going to install it but… It does not fix any of the Known issues.   Why? Who knows…

Tags: vbulletin

5 days passed since the release of 4.0.4 version. Despite this version contains some critical bugs that break forum functionality, VBulletin team apparently decided NOT to fix them inside 4.0.4 release. Instead they created a thread on the forum in which they are trying to incorporate critical bug fixes. So, customers that were stupid enough (like me) to install this “maintenance release” are left alone with VBulletin Community forum to search for fixes for their bugs.

Damn it, but I don’t understand, why having purchased commercial product, I don’t have any immediate actions on bugfixing, that are easy for me to follow? Why should I search forum, read threads and manually patch forum files? None released updated files in whatever form to assist their busy customers.

My users who use IE reported another bug. Thumbnails stopped showing:

There is no solution to this bug yet (at least I haven’t found it) and my thread on forum is unanswered for several hours already. Thank you, Vbulletin Solutions for your care about customers.

UPDATE 01/07/2010: The cause has been found. In the attachments content-type for all jpeg images should be “image/jpeg”, not “image/jpg”

Tags: vbulletin

I’ve met VBulletin forum engine several years ago. It was some 3.6.x version. I loved it from the first sight. It’s neat plugin architecture, which allows a user to install plugins without changing any VBulletin file made me happy. A huge plugin repository at www.vbulletin.org made me even more happy because I now could do with my forum EVERYTHING I want. VBulletin 3.x code was so nice and easy to read, that I could site and write everything I wanted, that is absent on vbulletin.org repository. And I wrote some plugins indeed.

My happiness lasted until VBulletin 4.0 was announced. I was surprised by price increase for VBulletin license, but I accepted that and upgraded to Suite license to make use of CMS. I waited for VBulletin 4.0 Gold like hell. On 21 of December 2009 my wish came true. VBulletin 4.0 Gold released.

Continue reading “VBulletin Forum 4.x Bugs: My Cold Anger”

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Preface

Actually, I never bothered to optimize my server for VBulletin, because the server we purchased for forum is really powerful. But once upon a time logwatch told me, that smartd told her, that he found several relocated sectors on one of server HDDs. And then instantly I realized, that many time ago when I assembled that server, I configured HDDs to be in RAID-0 (striped mode)… Oh…. When you will make some stupid thing on your server, please keep in mind, that there are some people that can do things even more stupid…. Nothing critical happened, because I, actually, have all database backups. Database snapshots are made on server using this script of mine every hour or so (BTW, database backup on my server of 1.12Gb database (reported at admincp) takes around a minute to complete together with compression).

So, we had to visit datacenter and remove/replace HDDs. To allow our forum users to continue using forum until we fix that, we moved our forum to a new server. After forum move, I upgraded it to v4 to benefit from friendly URLs. And there it started. Server load almost immediately reached 4.0 (server had two dualcore CPUs, so this is almost 100% of standard load) and those were even not peak hours. Of course, that was not because of V4 (I turned off both that huge CMS issuing ~200 queries on home page and blogs). This was because that new server where the forum was moved to was less powerful. Of course, 4.0 is not a heavy load for server (once one of my servers reached around 100.0 and still I was able to login by SSH ).

But nevertheless, that was the moment, where optimization hysteria first visited my head.

Continue reading “FractalizeR: VBulletin 4 extensive optimization guide”

Tags: vbulletin