Thoughts on vBulletin 3.7.0 Gold

Now that I’ve been running vBulletin 3.7.0 Gold on my forum for 2 weeks or so I figure I can give a decent opinion of the progress of vB.  There are positives and negatives to 3.7, but I do think it is worth the hassle of upgrading templates and files to update.

What Changed?

1. User Profiles
   • Probably the most noticeable change is the display of the User Profiles.  The new Tabbed view with a sidebar to the right with friends lists, albums, etc… is a nice touch and a bit more interesting than the boring 3.6 profiles.
2. User Albums
   • This could have been a great feature (and I hope it will be soon), but it seemed to be added at the last second as a selling point with absolutely no depth or options to really control how albums are displayed.  This could have been the best part of 3.7, but it is actually one of the weakest points of the new build.  You can read more about it below.
3. Friends/Contacts
   • The Friends list is much more pronounced now with avatars of 6 of your friends showing to the right on your profile page.  Most users never even noticed a “Friends list” before 3.7, but they have displayed it the correct way now to gain exposure on each forum for networking.

To get back on my soapbox about the User Albums.  It just seems like vBulletin developers didn’t seem to take the album seriously during development.  There are many oversights that have people on vbulletin.com’s community forums begging for new features, and I think I’m going to start doing it as well.

So what are the oversights?

1. Very, Very Primitive Admin Options.
2. Can’t search public Albums
3. No “All Albums” Viewer for public albums (search vbulletin.org for a mod to allow for this)
4. No “Upload from URL” option that is common among vBulletin uploading, as well as just about any other web album app
5. No option to Rebuild Album pictures (Probably the most important of the list)
6. No BBCode in Album Overview Text, but its allowed in comments?
7. Why Can’t an admin add a Album to a users profile?

   I’m sure I’ll think of more later on and add to the list…

My overall  thoughts are that vBulletin 3.7.0 is an improvement over 3.6, however specific areas need some adjustments and tweaking to make them more user-friendly in my opinion.  I was very excited to see albums included, but really… they weren’t