[BLOG] How vBulletin lost its course
The past year or two has seen a flurry of updates to vBulletin, but I'm convinced their efforts have been misplaced. Instead of focusing on the quality of their product, Jelsoft has elected to see how many "me too" features it can grab from social media websites. In doing so, it has neglected its core purpose (discussions!), increased its code overhead, and sacrificed time that should have been spent on what it needs most: better usability.
The time spent
So what did Jelsoft do with the last couple years? It added Facebook-style walls and social groups, personal photo albums that are decidedly not Flickr-like, delicious meta tagging, "infractions" for members, better spam management, new Friends functionality, and (finally) upgraded private messaging to include search filters and quick reply. I'm sure they'd argue for a more full list, but those are the marquee items.
Only four of the eight enhancements improved on the core system: spam management, infractions, tagging, and private messaging. Not-so-coincidentally, they're also the only four I'd argue belong in the core product (though I question even Infractions not being a plugin).
Walls, Social Groups, and Albums have no business being in a discussion forum product; they should be official plugins. On Icrontic, I spent days of free time forcibly removing them. Why would I do that? Because a forum community isn't Facebook, and it isn't Flickr. vBulletin's sorry imitations of both platforms has left a bad taste in my mouth. They're just more features to add to a bulleted list rather than a thoughtful addition to their product.
That leaves Friends, which is basically a decent idea with poor execution. Have you ever actually tried using it? Check off the avatars of the people you want to accept invitations from, seriously? It's enough to bring your palm into abrupt forehead contact.
Even if they had released them as plugins, I question whether the time spent hasn't significantly hurt their product. In 2009, I expect web-based software to be user friendly, easily customized, and well-documented. vBulletin is none of these things.
What was sacrificed
The core mission of forum software, I'd argue, is to have discussions. With that in mind, let's analyze having a discussion on vBulletin.
First, it treats categories as "rooms" which is so very 1999. You have to pick your room before you can start talking, and once you're in that room you can only start discussions in that room. Why no universal "Start Thread" button with a category drop-down? I've had to hack something like that into Icrontic to get around it.
Second, why is there a built-in Calendar (for as long as I can remember) but I can't talk about events? Why else would I create an event on a discussion forum?
Third, why is the interface so obsessed with numbers and facts? The amount of over-engineering is staggering. Post counts, thread counts, member counts, posting times down to the minute (even if it was 5 years ago), ratings, and so many icons you need a legend to explain them all. What if we just want to, you know, talk?
Fourth, the learning curve is high. Very few people can figure out how to attach something the first time they try. There's so many check boxes and buttons in the New Post window you'd think it was the control panel for the whole site. Every day, I get a blank private message from someone trying to reply to the automatic welcome PM sent to new members. It's clear that the Quick Reply that Jelsoft added (with auto-quoting filled in) is so counter-intuitive that most people give up or hit the wrong button.
All of these things suggest that a lot more time could be put into streamlining the interface and already-existing functionality... but hasn't. And, this only covers the user-facing part of the forum. I wouldn't even know where to begin in critiquing the administrator control panel. It's so hopelessly broken, unusable, and nightmarish that redesigning it could be someone's doctoral thesis in Web Application Usability. It sucks. Bad.
The result of folly
Rather than focusing on core usability or creating ancillary features as plugins, what we have now is a more bloated, complicated product that's stuck three years in the past. I've already talked about how lacking vBulletin is from a developer's perspective, which doesn't paint a pretty picture of where the forum software is in terms of templating and documentation.
This is a product which was admirably ahead of its time in 2006 but is now woefully behind the times in 2009. I sincerely hope the Jelsoft team stops measuring success on the number of features and starts measuring it on the quality of user experience. I hope this desperately since I am inextricably bound to it, slowly hacking away at problems they should have dealt with years ago.
The time spent
So what did Jelsoft do with the last couple years? It added Facebook-style walls and social groups, personal photo albums that are decidedly not Flickr-like, delicious meta tagging, "infractions" for members, better spam management, new Friends functionality, and (finally) upgraded private messaging to include search filters and quick reply. I'm sure they'd argue for a more full list, but those are the marquee items.
Only four of the eight enhancements improved on the core system: spam management, infractions, tagging, and private messaging. Not-so-coincidentally, they're also the only four I'd argue belong in the core product (though I question even Infractions not being a plugin).
Walls, Social Groups, and Albums have no business being in a discussion forum product; they should be official plugins. On Icrontic, I spent days of free time forcibly removing them. Why would I do that? Because a forum community isn't Facebook, and it isn't Flickr. vBulletin's sorry imitations of both platforms has left a bad taste in my mouth. They're just more features to add to a bulleted list rather than a thoughtful addition to their product.
That leaves Friends, which is basically a decent idea with poor execution. Have you ever actually tried using it? Check off the avatars of the people you want to accept invitations from, seriously? It's enough to bring your palm into abrupt forehead contact.
Even if they had released them as plugins, I question whether the time spent hasn't significantly hurt their product. In 2009, I expect web-based software to be user friendly, easily customized, and well-documented. vBulletin is none of these things.
What was sacrificed
The core mission of forum software, I'd argue, is to have discussions. With that in mind, let's analyze having a discussion on vBulletin.
First, it treats categories as "rooms" which is so very 1999. You have to pick your room before you can start talking, and once you're in that room you can only start discussions in that room. Why no universal "Start Thread" button with a category drop-down? I've had to hack something like that into Icrontic to get around it.
Second, why is there a built-in Calendar (for as long as I can remember) but I can't talk about events? Why else would I create an event on a discussion forum?
Third, why is the interface so obsessed with numbers and facts? The amount of over-engineering is staggering. Post counts, thread counts, member counts, posting times down to the minute (even if it was 5 years ago), ratings, and so many icons you need a legend to explain them all. What if we just want to, you know, talk?
Fourth, the learning curve is high. Very few people can figure out how to attach something the first time they try. There's so many check boxes and buttons in the New Post window you'd think it was the control panel for the whole site. Every day, I get a blank private message from someone trying to reply to the automatic welcome PM sent to new members. It's clear that the Quick Reply that Jelsoft added (with auto-quoting filled in) is so counter-intuitive that most people give up or hit the wrong button.
All of these things suggest that a lot more time could be put into streamlining the interface and already-existing functionality... but hasn't. And, this only covers the user-facing part of the forum. I wouldn't even know where to begin in critiquing the administrator control panel. It's so hopelessly broken, unusable, and nightmarish that redesigning it could be someone's doctoral thesis in Web Application Usability. It sucks. Bad.
The result of folly
Rather than focusing on core usability or creating ancillary features as plugins, what we have now is a more bloated, complicated product that's stuck three years in the past. I've already talked about how lacking vBulletin is from a developer's perspective, which doesn't paint a pretty picture of where the forum software is in terms of templating and documentation.
This is a product which was admirably ahead of its time in 2006 but is now woefully behind the times in 2009. I sincerely hope the Jelsoft team stops measuring success on the number of features and starts measuring it on the quality of user experience. I hope this desperately since I am inextricably bound to it, slowly hacking away at problems they should have dealt with years ago.
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