SneakyDave.com

UPDATE 1/19: Internet Brands has allowed me a partial refund, minus a $35 “processing fee”, whatever that is, I can’t find it documented anywhere on their site. Oh well, I’ll feel better knowing I’m not locked into vBulletin anymore. The company’s last reponse is at the bottom. Notice how they still refuse to acknowledge that their software is buggy or that customers are complaining about it.

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I too was suckered into taking Internet Brands approach of “taking a risk” (their words) of purchasing their new vBullletin 4.0 Publishing Suite. A purchase Internet Brands encouraged licensed owners to buy prior to seeing anything about vBulletin 4.0.

Well, I got a hold of it, tried to install it to a test server, and after a few database problems, which I don’t know were vB related, or had to do with my version of MySQL or the existing database, I got it almost running.

Almost, meaning the CMS didn’t work as described, which didn’t mean a lot to me, as I’m not too interested in the CMS at the moment.

But then I got a lot of problems with search results. I can’t even figure out why search is only working half assed. It seems vBulletin is indexing only random posts, even after rebuilding the search indexes. This is a known problem even on vBulletin.com forums. Just try searching for something on the vBulletin site itself.  The search speed seemed to be longer also, even getting one PHP timeout, but I need to do more tests on that to see if it’s really vBulletin choking on that.

The other problems I noticed, and confirmed by other people, was various issues the hybrid/threaded modes of the forum. Not many people use this feature, but I do, and some people insist on it, and it was a working feature in vBulletin 3.8. Sometimes the hybrid mode works, other times it doesn’t, and it doesn’t seem to matter what browser I’m using.

The other problems with vBulletin seem to be css related or template issues with other products or customizations, just from the limited experience I’ve had with it.  Note that I haven’t tried to add any modifications or templates to my test base, which is barely functional for a production environment. I’m glad I didn’t try to do a full converstion from 3.8 to 4.0

The Licensed Customer Feedback forum of vBulletin is full of complaints from licensed customers, wondering when the bugs will be worked out. Internet Brands has been trying to release a 4.01 version, but it’s been pushed back.

There isn’t any word about what 4.01 is supposed to include, but hopefully around 100 of the most severe bugs are fixed, resolved, or at least addressed.

All this heartache made we ask vBulletin for a refund for the Publishing Suite which I purchased. Some people had received refunds so I thought I’d give it a try. I was denied a refund by Internet Brands because they thought my reasons for a refund weren’t justified.

So I filed a complaint with the Better Business Bureau (you should too if you’re denied a refund). Here was my complaint:

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If you’re a developer, you know most languages aren’t that much different from each other, it’s just learning how to implement the current function or feature you’re looking for that’s the hard part.

I was reading this article on COBOL still accounting for 80% of business code in the world, and thought about how languages aren’t really that different from each other. For example, I’ll document some common and routine snippets of code from COBOL and PHP. It isn’t the language that’s hard to learn, it’s simple syntax, but the hard part is finding out how to get your favorite language to do what you want.

To simplify things, I’m using PHP’s alternative syntax, which means that, similar to COBOL, you don’t use { and } to enclose some statements, you use statements such as ENDIF and ENDFOR, which is how I learned it.

These should work if you’re using PHP5 and PHP4. PHP’s Object Oriented structure isn’t described here. The COBOL examples are strictly IBM z/OS COBOL, old school, no OOP required, or desired.

One thing to understand about PHP, as this is different from some other languages, is it will do a fairly good job of determining if your variable is a string or numeric, so you don’t see a lot of “wrong type” errors in PHP.

Maybe another day, or another life time, I’ll write about the similarities of CICS and PHP/Apache. They both are stateless protocols, in which in CICS you need a COMMUNICATIONS AREA to or a DATA MAP to hold variables you want to keep, and with PHP, you’d probably use a session to do the same thing. A CICS MAP isn’t a lot different from defining an HTML FORM to a user.

I haven’t included the WORKING STORAGE of the definitions of these COBOL variables, to save space, but they shouldn’t matter very much for these examples. You can define variables in PHP “on the fly”, but you may get syntax notification warnings in PHP if you try to use a variable before its definition.

If you’re a COBOL developer interested in PHP, the best place to learn it is on http://php.net, search or browse through some functions to see some of the things you work with today that could work in PHP. For instance, search for the “Date” function, and browse the pages on arrays to get a feel for how those topics are presented. Each function has user contributed notes too for code tidbits or gotchas

Then, download some PHP code, and see what it’s doing. Try to avoid Object Oriented PHP code unless you’re familiar with those types of structures.

These examples below are pretty simple, if you need more complex ones, let me know. No questions about how to convert any Cobol ‘74 Report-Writer or internal sorts to PHP though!

(btw, in the CNET article, it describes PHP being a “new” language, and Java and .NET, as well as COBOL, as older languages. PHP itself has been around longer than .NET, but what do you expect, it’s CNET).

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