saxhound said:
I would never say "I told you so" but:
I've always been partial to waiting for the dot 1 release, or in the case of the Redmond gang - SP1.
4.0.3 isn't exactly a .1 release, but the nomenclature is variable. For example:
4.0.3: The "4" is generally a major rewrite. The "0" is generally a feature update. The "3" is a bug-fix revision. Usually. Note that we're currently using 3.8.4pl2. The "pl2" means "patch level" -- a fix, in this case, issued to fix a security problem. Following the nomenclature I used in the "4.0.3" example, I would have called it "3.8.5". Or, following some Unix releases, 3.8.4.2 -- and the ".2" entry means, "Not a bug fix, but a fix because of an external problem."
In any event, I probably wouldn't have noticed the search engine problem if I wasn't specifically looking for it, because I rarely use the search engine here.
Because of the reported problems, I did a LOT of research on the 4.0.x vBulletin release and I've not been thrilled with what I've seen. One of the problems seems to have been that they completely changed the way that the product was developed and "farmed out" certain aspects of the design to other folks ... that seem not to have used forums much. Another way of me saying that it's excusable to have a bug where if two people post at
exactly the same time, the result will be disappearing posts from both sides. It's not excusable to have a search engine that doesn't search or returns improper results.
However, vBulletin is a lot more robust than the alternatives and support people are on call to help. I
really like phpBB and IPB and some of the others, but if you b0rk your forum in phpBB, it's your problem. In vBulletin, they're supposed to help fix it.
In any event, provided that vBulletin does release 3.8.5 and still does support this architecture, that works fine for me: I can do more 4.0.x testing. That means that y'all will eventually have a better product!