XenForo 2.0 Discussion
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Hope not, or they will be stuck on that version forever, or have to pay someone to write a custom upgrade script.
Start a resource .. with updates for new additions.
XF 2 is just not doing it for me. It is just an old person who gets a face lift to look young; looks great but is still old. A need to change the future of forum software is really needed, and the team had the opportunity to do so, but chose not to.
You say that as if it's a statement of fact. What's needed and why?
You mean to compete with social networks? They're often completely different use cases and turning all forums into something like facebook is neither wanted nor a good idea.
Better content discovery (through stuff like trending content, etc) is probably needed but that doesn't change the whole forum paradigm, it just makes content easier to find and could be built on top of XF2 easily.
I of course respect your opinion. I've tried the Developer's Preview and I think it's the best forum software I've ever used! And I've tried a LOT, both free and paid. I've already begun saving to get a new license and can't wait for release.
I of course respect your opinion. I've tried the Developer's Preview and I think it's the best forum software I've ever used! And I've tried a LOT, both free and paid. I've already begun saving to get a new license and can't wait for release.
Don't need a new license, just a current active one, unless you're starting a new site
I'm starting a whole new site on another domain. My existing members on my current site have already donated almost enough to get it! lolDon't need a new license, just a current active one, unless you're starting a new site
Maybe I missed it somewhere but what are these other platforms that users are creating successful communities on from scratch? Be nice to have a few live examples.
TPerry
Well-known member
Sometimes baby steps are the easiest way to proceed. If you try to do TO much at once you frequently end up with a shoddier product. Just look at the IPS 4.0 fiasco (released in 06/2015). Two years later in 4.2 it's finally coming to fruition.
Sorry to see you go, I just noticed you deleted a bunch of your resources.
Primarily facebook groups and reddit. The one click join 'group' or 'subreddit' functionality of these makes it a piece of cake to start a community from scratch.
There's a few forums I used to to frequent where they tested facebook groups. Sometimes because a member decided to start one, then the forum admins felt they should have an official group presence, then the traffic shifted from the forum to facebook, then they never went back and the forum is now a graveyard in comparison to the facebook group activity. (one example is a wordpress community I'm a member of)
Some of these groups now have 10, 20, 30, 40k+ members. (Quite a few auto groups are this big, Tesla and some others)
It's not an all or nothing, black and white differentiation though. Many forums aren't completely dead or shut down because of these, but their activity is massively cannibalised by their members stretching their time too thinly between all these different platforms, trying to eek the best features out of each one and trying to make sure what content they post gets seen and engaged with by the most users. Guess which platform wins for that? Facebook, because they shove the content from other members you interact with into your feed, into your notifications, pushed to your phone.
Not that this is always a good thing, but it gets posters the most feedback, quicker than if they shared it on any other platform, so they post there first, and often only there.
Even phone messaging apps are cannibalising forum activity now. What'sApp group chats, as basic as they are, after all they're just a single threaded conversation, work incredibly well for small groups. Half the activity from one of my small gaming clan sites is us just 20 of us shooting the breeze in What's App now when we don't feel the need to create a specific topic on the forum.
Why? It's instant, it's mobile, it has push and we can easily share photos and videos. Now you can get 256 users in a single group chat.
Why you'd really want to do that, I'm not to sure, I'm guessing that would get a bit manic. But, if you want to create a small community to directly connected to every members pocket, for free, in seconds, with reliable service and rich features, then it's a no brainer.
Same with facebook messenger group chat, I'm in some large group chats that I pop my head in from time to time. I'd say 100 people in a group chat is still a community, even though it's a very informal one. When I want an answer quickly, I can post in there and get responses in seconds.
If they outgrow that then they'll make a facebook group, still free, still great features, speed and UI, but you have threaded conversations.
Who is going to spend the time these days to drop $200 on the bare minimum to get a brand new forum community off the ground when you've got all this functionality for free elsewhere? The answer is fewer and fewer people.
It's the communities and facebook groups that make it to tens of thousands of members that I then see considering the return to a more structured forum format. When it makes sense to have a way to organise and filter the content.
Facebook sees this explosive growth in groups and local communities, users are logging onto facebook less often to post status updates, and more often to check in on and engage with the communities on there. Mark has made it clear that community is at the heart of facebook going forward:
(This articles is ludicrously long, but you can get the gist, community...community...community...)
https://www.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/building-global-community/10154544292806634/
They are going to be pushing community and groups hard going forward. I would not be surprised if facebook puts a massive emphasis into fleshing out and adding features to groups over the next 12 months. In order to stop these much larger incredibly active groups from migrating away from the platform they will need additional functionality to manage the huge amount of activity.
It does concern me that if they do start to do this, even doing something as simple as allowing the creation of nodes in groups for categorising content, then it will be harder and harder for these groups to migrate to a self hosted forum where the admin has the ability to monetize or add any custom non-facebook sanctioned features, as even the 'basic' facebook features and ease of use just won't be there and the members won't follow. (Basic features such as push, video upload, event creation, being able to invite members to events - features that help cultivate real life communities off line).
Bionic Rooster
Well-known member
^^^^^^^^^^^^^
I don't get it, nothing above answers the question quoted.
I don't get it, nothing above answers the question quoted.
Simple question really. Reddit is a nightmare. I own /r/Mustang and all it is is people posting pictures of Mustangs really. It compares in no way to the Ford Mustang forum I built.
I did answer the question - facebook groups, reddit and messaging apps to name a few. They're all platforms and tools that people are using to create and partake in thriving communities that take away from forum traffic and contribute to the increased difficulty of new forums from taking off at all.
I often see vibrant communities on there that either would have been dedicated forums in the past, or part of much larger forums.
Take your niche, motorcycle riders. Your ISRA forum has been around for at least 7 years from what I can gather. You have 635 members and 8k posts, with the last post on any public forums being nearly a week old. Yet you also have a facebook group with 25% of your forum membership count. I'd be interested to know how much activity there is in the facbebook group compared to your forum.
Search for 'motorcycle riders' groups, I get mainly groups for certain brands and geographic locations. These are the member counts for the first 10 results:
2k, 10k, 8k, 6k, 11k, 2k, 1k, 2k, 0.3k
These are all individual groups with thousands of members each. It's not hard to find ones with tens of thousands of members and lots of active posts.
Facebook groups along with other tools are tearing apart lots of forum niche's (particularly local ones), because users want more than just a message board. The want better community features such as events and a platform that works seamlessly and fast on all their devices.
XenForo markets itself as 'A Compelling Community Experience', that may have been the case 7 years ago, but it certainly doesn't feel like it at this moment in time. "A compelling message board experience with fantastic extensibility if you have the money to pay a dev, and a pretty decent add on ecosystem", sure. But not a community experience.
Please don't get me wrong, I love forums, communities and XenForo, I think the team here are really fantastic and I have really high hopes to start seeing more new features in 2.x in addition to some of the tweaks they managed to slip in 2.0. But it does feel like forums in general are falling behind when it comes to the tech and features available in other communities software, and there's no strong visible signs that they're currently on track to catch up.
But just by observing the behaviour of people in my circles on different community sites around the web, out of the box forum software doesn't do it for any of them anymore, and even some of the expensive add ons just aren't good enough.
Take Nobita's Groups add on, potentially an absolutely killer add on for a forum. It lets user create and mange their own groups and even create their own full fat sub forums. It's a feature that gives them a reason to invest their time and energy posting content to your site, get together local or other subsets of the community. This idea is going down a treat in the IPS 4.2 preview, admins and users seem to love it.
Lets go back to Nobita's, it's half the cost of a XF licence and generally okay as a group add on goes, but it's also got some major issues. There's a privacy bug that exposes group media galleries to the rest of the site that's not been patched for over a year. How have the other people that bought it put up with that for this long?
I spent hours and hours testing creating bug reports and UI improvement suggestions to make the add on more user friendly. Probably 30 threads worth of stuff that just stood out to me when testing, many of which I felt were confusing UI issues. I shouldn't have to do that for a $70 add on. Please don't take this wrong way Nobita, if you're reading this - I know you're only one person and it's a complex add on, please keep up the great work, we need devs like you making feature rich add ons like social groups! But the fact that we have $50 - $100 add ons that feel so 'unfinished' is a reflection of the state of the add on ecosystem. So few of the complex ones feel up to scratch.
The polish and quality just isn't there, even with some of the expensive add ons. Heck, I love Son B's gallery, but we haven't even had an update in 5 months. It's been 3 months since the new XF HTML5 uploader was release and we don't have integration in the gallery yet - where it's most needed.
Can you blame users from not choosing forums in their current state for starting a new community when not only is the core starting to feel dated, but the expensive add ons have so many bugs, don't feel finished, don't have the features your want or don't live up to expectations in any other way?
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