XenForo needs a blog with regular updates from Kier & Mike

[TheBoss]

Scenerio:

K&M devote 72 hours none stop to code a blog system , release it as an addon. HURRAY..YEEHAA , everyone jumps up and down coz they got what they wanted.
They then spend 10 hours a day for the next few years trawling through threads/posts to deliver a road map by going off what some customers want and posting about it in their daily blogs...
What happens next...??
Yes , You guessed it.... The same people who moaned about getting the blog system start moaning that the development and progression of XenForo has slowed to a snails pace & start suggesting that K&M stop posting as much in the blog and get back to work...

Let the moaners moan K&M , you do what YOU DO BEST... Code in a fasion that suits YOU & YOU ALONE..

True believers in XenForo WILL wait till its ready.....

PS:
One of the main problems with this site is 99% of people are Forum owners or Webmasters of some years experience & 50% seem to think they know better than anyone else on here.. Some of you want to learn to zip it and learn a little patience.. ALL GOOD THINGS COME TO THOSE WHO WAIT..

Regards..

 

[Wildcat Media]

ppfffftttt... ya love it and ya know it.

Psshhh, this ain't nuttin', honey! (Remember those old Nut 'n' Honey commercials? )

This is a love fest compared to some of the nastiness I dealt with on the "big board" I still run as an admin. I stepped down from moderating for a few reasons, and don't miss dealing with a lot of the "issues" that came up. (It also doesn't help that the forum owner is one of our bigger problems!)

I guess I'm immune to a lot of the abuse. I've seen it from all sides--I've been on the development side, the admin side, moderator site, a visitor to my own sites, etc. So maybe you're right and I do get some sort of weird satisfaction out of this self-abuse.

 

[James]

So maybe you're right and I do get some sort of weird satisfaction out of this self-abuse.

Sadomasochism?

 

[Peggy]

Psshhh, this ain't nuttin', honey! (Remember those old Nut 'n' Honey commercials? )

This is a love fest compared to some of the nastiness I dealt with on the "big board" I still run as an admin. I stepped down from moderating for a few reasons, and don't miss dealing with a lot of the "issues" that came up. (It also doesn't help that the forum owner is one of our bigger problems!)

I guess I'm immune to a lot of the abuse. I've seen it from all sides--I've been on the development side, the admin side, moderator site, a visitor to my own sites, etc. So maybe you're right and I do get some sort of weird satisfaction out of this self-abuse.

mmm mmm my son loves Nut 'n' Honey, heheh.

 

[tmb]

Mike and Kier have built a really good system that is being marginalized by the community here. It is more and more painful to read posts here by the day.

 

[erich37]

as per my understanding, add-on-developers need a roadmap in order not to code any add-ons which might become core-features in the coming future......
it seems like not each coder overcomes the "learning curve" of the XF-code-system....

 

[Digital Doctor]

Let the moaners moan K&M , you do what YOU DO BEST... Code in a fasion that suits YOU & YOU ALONE.. True believers in XenForo WILL wait till its ready.....

This Love Story post is heartwarming but it doesnt outline any reasons why K&M shouldn't communicate defined deliverable plans with it's licensed customers.
All the True Believers have already bought their Xenforo.
Don't you have to be at least somewhat of a believer knowing that Xenforo is being sued by a company that has 5 lawyers for every employee at xenforo ... and you purchased Xenforo anyway ?

We all want Xenforo to do well ... so we are all on the same team.
Let's keep that in mind.

 

[whynot]

ALL GOOD THINGS COME TO THOSE WHO WAIT..

When?

 

[TheBoss]

To the above 2 replies I will simply say read my signature, mainly the bold orange 1st line , but the second line is also true as the question has been answered multiple times.

Regards..

 

[jadmperry]

My thoughts on this issue:

Like most people, I, too, would like to know what the future holds. That said, my desire is tempered by a few facts.

• There has already been an amazing amount of progress with the development of this platform. I may be wrong, but I looked at some posts/announcements and it looks like the beta went on the market on Oct. 5, 2010. It took only until March 8 for the first stable release, XF 1.0.0, to be finished. Take into account that this covered the whole of the holiday season, this was- in my opinion- an astonishingly fast development process. Especially for a first release.
• Not to get too much into comparisons with other products, but, I was one of the suckers who paid for the "pre-sale" of vB 4. Here I am, more than a year and a half later, without the promised product. XF promised me a good forum platform. They delivered- again, in my opinion- and then some. It is a simple proposition. Promise a product and then deliver. These guys exceeded my expectations.
• Kier, Mike and Ashley may be taking a breather and/or are trying to decide what comes next after what must have been a major push to deliver XF 1.0.0.

It pains me to see people attacking others or going overboard in defending the product. It is a great product for where it is at and I have no doubt that it will grow and get better. By the same token, people are justified in stating their desires, their opinions and their preferences. That is simply feedback. Companies spend many thousands of dollars (or Euros) to get market feedback, so I think that customers (present, potential or future) should share what they want. Others should not get all spun up about that. If the product currently does not meet their needs, well, they probably should not buy (at least without taking into account that the future development of the platform to meet all necessary needs will take some time). That said, by my estimation, XF is a bargain.

For those who decry the "change" in attitude around here, I would say this: those who post bear responsibility for the tenor and tone of our community. This goes to all posters, both original and those who respond. Civility is easy. Err on the side of being pleasant. Feel free to voice disagreement, but think about how you would speak to someone in person. Being rude, nasty or unwelcoming, aside from being unpleasant, tends to lessen the message/point you are trying to make.

Of this, I am certain: XF will communicate with us as they see fit. I suspect that once decisions about the future direction of the platform are made, they will let us know what it to come. It is in their interest to do so. If it is not happening right now, that is okay. If it never happens, that is not okay. The distance between those two extremes will determine how many people are happy. My choice is to cut them some slack as they have done an amazing job so far. Don't agree? That is fine. For your needs, you may be right.

 

[whynot]

To the above 2 replies I will simply say read my signature, mainly the bold orange 1st line

"~ Never argue with an idiot. They drag you down to their level then beat you with sheer experience. ~"
How true it is.
I did never and I would never argue with you.

 

[Russ]

Sinking to personal insults will not get anyone, anywhere. I started typing a couple different times in regards to this manner but in the end it's a carousel of arguments. A community manager, public relations whatever you may call it would be nice, that's the case for just about any project I'd say, but again... this software was deemed stable less than 25 days ago, I'm in no hurry. So far I've been extremely pleased with the turn out of the XenForo community from the members, to the moderators, to the owners of XF. I bought this software for what it is; not to ***** at what I hope for it to come.

Jumping ship, throwing fits, dishing out insults gets us no where, if the thread continues like this Mike and Kiers Brogan Bot 3000 will end up closing this, so take care!

 

[Kaiser]

This thread is great, more like this and then I wont have to watch TV to keep me entertained. Everyone should relax. I also agree that everyone should have a right to voice their opinion on the product and not be criticized for it or get "jumped", specially the customers as Kier and Mike are not giving this to us for free as we worked just as hard to pay for it just like how they worked hard to create it.

Customers have the right to want more information since they are paying for it, they also have the right to suggest what they want improved, or implemented and do so in a nice way. At the same time we have to realize that Kier and Mike are only human... and they can only do so much. They are only 2 compared to how "IPB" has a huge team. So everyone has to compromise. Hope I proved my point.

 

[Paul B]

As has already been said, emotions are running high enough as it is so personal insults towards other members isn't going to help matters.

Please remain civil.

those who post bear responsibility for the tenor and tone of our community.

Quoted for truth.

 

[Seba Kerckhof]

Wow, I would have thought most people would of cited IPB as a great example in their regular communication to customers. I sure would have, but I suppose some feel hidden and dispersed information (like a treasure hunt) is perhaps more rewarding? Then they can comment with authority when lost customers ask general questions in the forums.

Sometimes it is easy to get lost in the feeling that those that post are your audience instead of simply a small vocal part of it.

I don't want to hear about the legal stuff. Just occasional heads up on what direction the ship is headed or an occasional musing from the personalities behind the software. It puts faces to the names and shows an active interest in communications.

This may not be the time, but hopefully when it is right, it will be considerd.

Off to go read some IPB blogs to see what they've ben up to recently

². Although I'm not a IPB customer, I find it interesting to see what they are busy with. Also regular updates make the time span between 2 updates seem shorter and more productive.

 

[Kier]

This thread has gone way out of control and were it not for the important points some have raised I would be closing it for the benefit of community harmony.

We have said from the very outset that people should make their decision to buy XenForo based upon what they can see, what we have already delivered, rather than some promise of future functionality. The marketplace in which XenForo resides is extremely fluid and a plan to develop one feature may be shelved at a moment's notice in favour of a feature that we decide is more beneficial. That is a major strength of XenForo - the genuine agility with which it is developed.

With 1.0.0 we have delivered what we consider to be a world class forum system with an extremely robust and flexible add-on system, with the express intention that our limited development resources would be complimented by the development skills of third parties who can develop add-ons that have exactly the same level of access to the system as core code. There is no reason that third party add-ons may not be of equal quality to code released by XenForo Ltd., and in order to foster this third party development we make no limitations on third parties to only advertise free-of-charge add-ons here. We want people to develop high quality commercial add-ons for XenForo.

The issue of effort duplication has been raised. "I don't want to develop Product X because XenForo Ltd. might be working on something similar." This is an occupational hazard, and one shared by XenForo Ltd. themselves. We don't know that certain features we may have planned for the future are not already in development by third parties, and the XenForo add-on system means that we most certainly cannot be sure that the official XenForo version of the feature will be better than the third party version. This is free market competition, and the way to deal with it is to do one's very utmost to ensure that one's own version of a feature is the most desirable.

Like it or not, we are a very small development team doing our best to compete with much larger rivals. Some of that competition is friendly, some distinctly less so. While we develop fast, a great deal of time is spent developing features before any code is written. Often, the amount of time spent writing code is a fraction of the actual development time for a feature. As a result, in order to maintain a competitive edge, it is necessary to keep the development of certain features close to our chest, in order to prevent rivals from benefiting from work we have done before we are able to do so. You only need look at what our competitors have done since the appearance of XenForo to see that this is true.

Is XenForo standing still? Of course not. One need only look around the forums to see that a public request for IPB data has been made, and that the IPB importer is in its final stages of testing. It's possible to look at the bug report forums and see that far from allowing bugs to accumulate, active development work is underway to deal with issues as they are reported. We are at version 1.0.0, and naturally the focus of development is on shoring-up that platform such that work in earnest can begin on our next feature release. To shift focus to 1.1 before fixing issues in 1.0 would be irresponsible and would do a disservice to those already running XenForo in production. When the priority switches, we will make it known in an appropriate way, and we will accompany that announcement with as much information as it is appropriate to release at that time. We have not collected together postings where we have talked about 1.1 features so far, because these posts represent firm intentions rather than a concrete commitment to deliver those features. It is therefore inappropriate to collect them into something approximating an announcement of future development policy.

I'm sorry if some people are unhappy with the speed of development or the information we have released. We have made no secret from the very beginning that we are a very small but extremely dedicated team doing their best to deliver the highest possible quality software. We can't make everybody happy all the time, and all we can say is that you should look to what we have already achieved and ask yourself if there is any reason that our future development would not live up to the same standard.

 

[Slavik]

Hear, hear.

I have kept quiet in this thread as I have worked in design in another industry, whereby after releasing our product that took nearly two years to plan and produce, our competitors had copied and released the basic elements under their name within a month.

I kind of gathered something similar wa shappening here, with only a few guys handling everything with xenforo, by announcing any upcoming features or plans, it means the larger boards gain an instant advantage as they can probably push the development out a lot more quickly simply due to size difference within companies.

I for one am more concerned with the quality of updates opposed to the quantity. Quantity is what got vbulletin into the sh*t state that it is in now.

Updates are nice, you know I think Kier should tweet much more often, I want to know exactly when he goes to the kitchen, which cuboard he opens, what food he prepares, how many mouthfuls it takes to eat etc... however a quality update carries much more substance and excitement with it!

 

[jadmperry]

All of this reminds me of a saying for delivering work product in my line of work (one that is applicable to many):

You can have it fast, you can have it good, or you can have it cheap. Pick two.

This is to say, we have a fantastic product now at a very reasonable price...if we really expected a lot more, sooner, we should be paying 2-3 times what we paid.

 

[erich37]

it is all about product-quality for me, which is the reason I went with XF.
Tired of dealing with buggy software.......

Kier: you guys have the absolutely right approach.
Take your time and deliver a quality product, no need to being rushed into anything.

 

[Peggy]

This thread has gone way out of control and were it not for the important points some have raised I would be closing it for the benefit of community harmony.

We have said from the very outset that people should make their decision to buy XenForo based upon what they can see, what we have already delivered, rather than some promise of future functionality.

EXCELLENT post Kier.