It’s a sad day when a man like Stephen Fry (@stephenfry)  feels he has to leave a social networking site because of the way he treated by someone else.  I don’t know Stephen personally, but I do follow his regular tweets on Twitter and enjoy the random things he shares with his followers.  The people who follow him range from other celebrities, like the fabulous Derren Brown (@derrenbrown), to nobodies like myself!

Stephen posted a short twitter earlier this afternoon saying

Think I may have to give up on Twitter. Too much aggression and unkindness around. Pity. Well, it’s been fun.

Of course, most people who saw the tweet responded by begging Stephen not to leave and a short while later he did respond with:

Well maybe I’ll see how I feel in a few days. Very low and depressed at the moment and any drop of meanness makes it so much worse. Sorry.

Of course, being the nosy sort I had to track down the source of Stephen’s upset and I did discover a remark by someone called @brumplum saying

@stephenfry I shall have to put more effort into fluid-extraction! *blushes at the thought of S.F. reading my wibbles*

This was closely followed by

My life is complete, @stephenfry has @ replied me, rapidly followed by blocking me. My previous comment clearly hit him hard. Sorry.

I’m unsure whether I’ve missed a comment in between somewhere as Stephen replied to this person but I can’t the original comment he responded to.

Either way, if Stephen does leave Twitter, it will be a sad day as his comments do brighten up the twitterverse and he would be sadly missed.

Please don’t leave, Stephen!

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There’s been so much negative information being bandied around about vBulletin/Internet Brands of late that I felt I would add my voice and revisit my initial post regarding the upgrade to vB4.

In an article posted by The Register, which to be honest I really begrudge linking to but without it my following comments won’t make much sense, it was claimed that IB has banned multiple paying customers from their support forums.  Granted, that was true, but the slant put on this article was that because they were banned from the forum (for ranting, abusing and generally being pains in the arses all ove r the place) they were not, at any time, banned from using the Support Ticket system which is the official means for getting support for a vBulletin forum.

The Register claimed that they contacted vB’s GM, Ray Morgan, who didn’t bother replying to them.  What they fail to add there is that they didn’t give him long to actually formulate a response to the claims being made and, you’d think, being a so-called reporting site, they would understand that you can’t just fire off replies without first taking in what’s being said.  There was absolutely nothing inexplicable about the bannings.   It was quite obvious the reasons behind the bannings was due to the amount of disruption these particular customers were causing on the forum.  So trying to paint these people as innocent is completely and utterly wrong.  They also quoted figures relating to the fees charged by vB and are inaccurate about them too.  The actual pricing can be found HERE.

It amused me that The Register didn’t even bother to try and see the other side of things.  They could have contacted any number of happy vB customers for the alternative view of the way things are going.  But that wouldn’t have achieved the response they wanted at all, of course, but I’m pretty sure they’ll be disappointed anyway as they’ve really done nothing more than make the majority of vB customers look derisively upon their article and the “anonymous” people who’ve complained to them.

Moving on from the idiocy above, IB released vB4 beta 1 on their own forum a week ago.  There was quite a lengthy downtime while they ensured everything was working correct and, as is the norm, there was a multitude of rumours flying around over the reasons behind it.  I won’t claim to know what was going on behind the scenes, but once the forum came back online everything was in place.

It’s actually been nice watching the changes that have been made to the forum over the past week in response to comments/suggestions from the customers using the support forums.  And who’d have believed a single week could have evolved vB4 to such a large extent.

I’ve been lucky enough to be a part of the alpha/beta team and, while I cannot talk about what I know or have seen away from what’s visible on the forums currently, I would like to see it’s been an exciting time and I’m confident that there are good things to come!

My support stays with vB/IB and Ray Morgan and while I do think some situations could (and should) have been handled differently, I am of the view that IB is genuine in wanting vBulletin to remain the best forum software available and that the mistakes that have been made, have been done so because they are still finding their feet.

I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m looking forward to running vB4 on my forums.

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