vBulletin 4.0.4 fix for slow response times

We have a vBulletin installation for one of our customers. (I hope this doesn't surprise you. We use the right tool for the job even if it's not our tool!) After the upgrade to 4.0.4 our performance monitoring tool reported over a 500% increase in our page load times. We saw others having the same problem in the vBulletin forums and after a bit of work we found the problem and a solution and posted it on the thread in the vBulletin forums. The problem is that the vBulletin PHP code is calculating the size of the HTML file but apache is gzipping it and reducing that size. The web browser is waiting for the uncompresed quantity of data to come through and essentially hangs. Our fix is to let Apache report the size if it's doing the compression.

We also went to the support site and reported the issue to them via the paid support channel.  Unfortunately, we received this response:

Hello,

You need to report it in the bug tracker.

Best regards,

Dave (not his real name...)

So their software release causes a huge slowdown in performance, we find the solution and we are told that we are using the wrong channel to report the issue. Wow. Now I understand that you have channels and you try to get people to use them but compare that message with one that would have cost them very little money and not made me want to look for an alternative product:

Hello,

Thank you for this fix. I've added the issue to our bug tracker here <link...> and our team will review it soon.

Please report issues like this in the bug tracker in the future.

Best regards,

Dave (not his real name...)

My version has very little additional work and results in a happy customer. The response also leaves me wondering what kind of issue do I send to the support team? Did we include too much information? Had we just asked the question "My site response time is slow since the 4.0.x updgrade. How do I fix it?" would we have received the same brush off or would we have received an actual response? Maybe they would have sent us to our own discussion board post!

I guess it just proves that even makers of community software can mismanage their own community sometimes.