Hello,
I operate BladeForums.com, a large and long-established XenForo community founded in 1998. We currently operate an extensive forum-based Knife Exchange with multiple sales, trade, dealer, knifemaker, and Want To Buy sections.
We are researching XenSupport Classifieds as a possible additional system alongside our existing Exchange. We are not currently considering an immediate replacement or migration.
Because BladeForums is substantially larger and older than a typical demonstration installation, I would appreciate some technical information about scalability and production readiness.
- What is the largest active forum currently running XenSupport Classifieds?
If possible, could you provide approximate figures for:
- Registered members
- Concurrent users or normal daily traffic
- Active and total listings
- Listing images or attachment volume
- Offers and completed transactions
- Reviews or feedback records
- Saved searches and listing alerts
Are there any independent production sites we may examine, even privately?
- Has the add-on been load-tested with hundreds of thousands or millions of historical listings, offers, alerts, reviews, and associated records?
Please describe any load testing performed, the approximate dataset size, and any performance limitations identified.
- How are listing searches, filters, maps, seller statistics, reputation summaries, saved searches, and “more from this seller” queries indexed and executed?
- Does the add-on integrate with XenForo Enhanced Search or Elasticsearch?
- Are important database columns and relationships indexed for large datasets?
- Have slow-query or high-cardinality scenarios been tested?
- Is Redis or another caching system supported or recommended?
- How are saved-search notifications, price-drop alerts, expiration processing, review notifications, and other recurring operations handled?
- Are they processed through XenForo jobs or cron tasks?
- Are tasks batched?
- Can batch sizes or processing limits be configured?
- What prevents a popular listing or broad saved search from creating excessive alert fan-out or queue load?
- Can permissions be mapped cleanly to numerous existing XenForo user groups and paid memberships?
BladeForums distinguishes among Registered, Basic, Gold, Platinum, Knifemaker/Craftsman/Service Provider, Dealer/Materials Provider, Manufacturer, moderators, and other account states.
We would need granular control over who may:
- Browse listings
- Respond or make offers
- Create Want To Buy or trade listings
- Sell personal property
- Sell self-made products or services
- Conduct dealer sales
- Leave transaction feedback
- Operate a storefront
- Feature or promote listings
Can permissions also be restricted by category and listing type?
- Can the system operate alongside existing forum-based classifieds?
It must not change or interfere with existing Exchange threads, prefixes, permissions, search results, URLs, or moderation workflows.
- Can the XenSupport transaction-review system be disabled selectively or entirely?
We currently use XenCentral Feedback and would need to avoid confusing members with two unrelated reputation scores.
Is there an integration API, importer, exporter, or supported method for displaying or reconciling external feedback?
- What moderation and abuse-prevention controls are included?
In particular:
- Listing and review approval queues
- Reporting tools
- Moderator logs and audit history
- Deleted or edited listing history
- Review disputes and removal
- Category-specific moderators
- Classifieds-only account restrictions
- Rate limits
- Duplicate-listing detection
- Spam and fraud controls
- Controls for compromised accounts
- Restrictions following recent email or password changes
- How are listing images stored and cleaned up?
- Does the system use XenForo’s normal attachment system?
- What happens to images when a listing expires, is deleted, or is permanently removed?
- Are orphaned attachments cleaned up?
- Can remote or object-storage attachment configurations be used normally?
- What happens to the data if the add-on is disabled or uninstalled?
- Is all listing, offer, review, and transaction data exportable?
- Is there a documented schema or API?
- Does uninstalling remove the database tables automatically?
- Can the system be disabled without deleting its data?
- Is there a supported rollback procedure after an unsuccessful upgrade?
- What is your upgrade and compatibility policy?
- How quickly do you normally support new XenForo 2.3 maintenance releases?
- What is your intended support path for XenForo 2.4?
- Are database migrations designed to run safely on large tables?
- Have upgrades been tested on large production datasets?
- Is there a command-line upgrade path for installations where browser-based upgrades may time out?
- What support is available for a production-critical installation?
- Typical response time for serious defects
- Emergency support availability
- Custom-development availability
- Security-notification process
- Policy for maintaining the add-on if development priorities change
- Is a temporary evaluation or staging license available?
We would want to test the add-on on a non-public BladeForums staging environment using representative permissions, styles, traffic patterns, and data volume before considering any production installation.
We are interested in the add-on, but before proceeding we need to understand whether it has been engineered and tested for a mature, high-volume forum rather than only smaller or new communities.
Thank you.
Hello,
Thank you for a serious set of questions. I will answer them the same way, including where the answer is "not yet", because you will find that out on your own board anyway.
Short version: the feature set is mature and it is built on XenForo's own subsystems rather than around them, but it has not been proven at BladeForums scale and I will not pretend otherwise.
1. Largest install
Classifieds is young, released this year, with a small install base. Nothing I know of is close to your size or age. There is no licence check, no callback and no telemetry in the code, which is deliberate but does mean I cannot quote verified figures from other licensees. I can ask on the support forum whether a licensee will share numbers with you privately, and I can give you a staging licence so you measure it against your own data (point 13).
2. Load testing
No, not at that scale. Every release is verified functionally (every public and admin page rendered and asserted on), not benchmarked against millions of rows. Offer: send me your row counts and data shape, and I will generate a comparable synthetic dataset and profile the browse, search and radius queries. That replaces my opinion with numbers.
3. Indexing and query execution
Listings are a full XenForo content type with a search handler, so they index into Enhanced Search / Elasticsearch with their own tab and a category constraint; non-public listings are indexed as hidden, so approval state is respected at query time.
Composite indexes match the actual access patterns: (status, is_featured, created_at), (status, category_id), (user_id, status), plus (latitude, longitude) for radius. Offers, reviews and custom field values are similarly keyed.
Seller rating and review counts are denormalised into a stats row, and offer counts are fetched per page in one query, so grids do not go N+1.
Two honest weak points at your scale: radius search pre-filters with an indexed bounding box in SQL, then does distance, sorting and pagination in PHP; faceted custom-field filtering intersects ID sets in PHP. Both are robust but are what I would expect to rework first on a very large dataset.
No Redis dependency; it uses whatever cache XenForo is configured with. Maps use a locally hosted Leaflet (no third-party script), capped at 300 points per view, and geocoding happens once at save time through a provider you pick in the ACP (worldwide, France, or off). At your volume I would want a commercial geocoding key rather than the free OSM endpoint.
4. Recurring operations
Three cron entries: listing expiry (daily), offer expiry (hourly), saved-search alerts (hourly). The alerts do not run inline in cron: the cron enqueues a XenForo job that processes saved searches in batches of 50, yields when out of time and resumes where it stopped. Each search alerts on at most 5 new listings per pass, skips the member's own listings and advances a watermark, so nothing is alerted twice. Price-drop and sold alerts fan out through XenForo's alert system, respecting each member's notification preferences. Batch sizes are constants today; I will make them options if you need it.
5. Permissions
Eleven standard user-group permissions (view, create, rate, favourite, make offers, plus six moderator ones), so they map onto your existing groups and paid memberships directly.
But they are
global, not per category and not per listing type. You cannot currently say "Dealers may run dealer sales", or "only Knifemakers may post here". Your eight capabilities across seven account states are exactly what the current model does not cover. It is buildable and well-defined work rather than an architectural problem, and I would rather scope it with you than claim it exists.
Partial mitigations that do exist: minimum account age, minimum post count, and a choice of blocking or force-moderating members below those thresholds.
6. Running alongside your Exchange
Yes. Own route prefix, own tables, own content types, own permission group. It does not touch threads, forums, prefixes, thread permissions, thread search or your moderation workflow. The only additions to existing pages are a nav entry, a Listings tab on profiles and two profile counters.
7. Disabling reviews
Reviews can be turned off with one ACP option, and the rate permission can be denied per group. With it off, no rating UI, no score, no review notifications anywhere. There is no import, export or reconciliation API for XenCentral Feedback, so if XenCentral stays your source of truth the correct setup today is simply to leave reviews off. Surfacing an external score inside Classifieds would be custom work.
8. Moderation and abuse prevention
Present: native approval queue, native reporting into your report centre, full moderator permission set, flood control on all five write paths, account age and post count requirements, a moderate-everything switch, and an ACP with bulk approve/close/delete, an offers view with full negotiation history, reviews and per-seller drill-down.
Not present: entries in XenForo's moderator log (moderator actions are not audited), edit history, per-category moderators, duplicate-listing detection, classifieds-specific account restrictions, and anything tied to recent email or password changes. The audit log is the one I would call a genuine omission at your size, and it is straightforward to add.
9. Images
Stored through XenForo's abstracted filesystem under data://xs_classifieds/, so an external or object-storage adapter configured in config.php is used exactly as for the rest of your data directory. They are not XenForo attachments, so attachment permissions, limits and the attachment manager do not apply.
Deleting a listing removes its favourites, custom values and offers but does not currently delete its image files; uninstalling removes the whole directory. On a board with your turnover that would accumulate, so I am treating it as a defect to fix rather than a design choice.
10. Data on disable or uninstall
Disabling is non-destructive, every table stays intact and re-enabling restores everything. Uninstalling drops all ten tables and removes permissions, alerts and images, which is standard XenForo behaviour and irreversible without a backup. There is no built-in export or REST API; the schema is plain readable SQL, so mysqldump or a SELECT works, and I can supply a schema document. Rollback after a failed upgrade means restoring a backup.
11. Upgrades and compatibility
Targets XF 2.3 and tracks its maintenance releases. XF 2.4 support is intended during its beta cycle rather than after release, but I will not promise a date for software that is not out. Schema changes are idempotent and there is a self-healing schema check that recreates anything missing on the next page load. Upgrades run through XenForo's own system, so the CLI path is available and is what I would recommend for you. Not tested against multi-million row tables; on tables that size the real question is ALTER duration, and I would flag it in release notes.
12. Support
- First response within 24 to 48 working hours, forum or email.
- A defect on a production site takes priority over feature work: diagnosis, then a fix or documented workaround, then a patch release.
- Direct email for an emergency rather than the public forum.
- Custom development available, quoted per project.
- Security fixes ship as patch releases, announced to licensees with the impact stated in the notes.
- Licences are a one-time purchase including 12 months of updates and support, renewable.
- Plain readable PHP: no obfuscation, no encoding, no runtime licence check, no calls home. If I were unavailable, your team or any XenForo developer can maintain it.
To be transparent, XenSupport is one person, not a team. Upside: you talk to whoever writes the code. Downside: bus factor. Shipping unobfuscated code is part of how I answer that.
13. Evaluation licence
Yes, and I would rather you test than take my word for it. A free 30-day evaluation licence for a non-public staging environment, no commitment, extended on request if your evaluation involves other people. If you buy, a staging install alongside production is covered at no extra cost.
Three things to weigh: it is unproven at your scale, permissions are not yet per category or per listing type, and moderator actions are not audited. Two of those three are work I am willing to schedule if you decide to move forward.
Happy to keep answering, or to get on a call if that is easier.
Fixes
