The gap between my needs and perceived direction of your development
 

I'm running a large forum (8+ million posts) based on vbulletin. I've started few years ago and vb let me build my community and grow it. I've started with version 3.x (don't recall exactly which one, sorry). Then came vb4 with it's promise of being modern and a host of problems it caused - mainly performance related. It's really hard to configure out of the box for large traffic and the sheer number of requests caused a lot of problems after the upgrade. It took us some time and we got it under control with tremendous help from digitalpoint (a constantly updated list of patches to the script and the only working search solution - the sphinx search). VB4 is getting old fairly quick. The web went far ahead - html5, grid and then responsive design etc. The features I thought were promised (like better blogs, better search, complete functionality in mobile skin/app etc) never really materialized. Blogs are a laugh. Social groups are not even available on mobiles even though they are being used by my users. I was looking for vb5 with hope that it is being planned for sites like mine - who started with vb and got successful. Seems I may be wrong...

I know you guys are optimizing the script for performance now, but I'm afraid it might still be worse than vb4. It seems that there's a long delay caused by a javascript redraw after the site is loaded. What if we add the ads that require additional load time to a much more complcated webpage (we have many more forums on our homepage)? Will the redraw time increase? I'm willing to bet that it does. Also - Sphinx search will not be available even though ip.board - your competitor includes it out of the box, and you just have to know that this is the only working solution for large boards. I really need to know how are you going to solve the problem of searches on boards with more than 6 million posts... And we all know you have tried the sphinx search - there's this half-baked extension which was made available and never really updated.

To sum it all up - I'm torn. After my first visit to vb5 test site I have totally panicked. This is not what I was waiting for. I hoped for vb4 but with better (easier and more html5 standards compliant) skinning, faster performance and maybe new features. A script that would give my users and me what we really need NOW. You seem to require a gamble on my part that I'm not sure I'm ready to take. Currently I'm checking all competitors and I don't think I will upgrade.