Any news about Xenforo 3.0, can we expect modern forum?

[qnkov]

Hello. For half a year, I have been looking for a modern forum system to start an anime/manga site with various features. For example, a video system for watching movies/episodes, a way to add manga/anime as pages with information about them, topics with posters, etc. I saw that all of this is possible with Invision Community.

I waited to see version 5, but it turned out that the self-hosted platform is extremely expensive and has functionality limits. They also changed the way we acquire add-ons, significantly restricting options, and almost no themes exist for their latest version.

On the other hand, XenForo seems like a better alternative in terms of user base and price, but the forum and themes, in general, look like they’re from the early 2000s. I understand that some may find this nostalgic, but it looks incredibly outdated and is not visually appealing.

That’s why I’m wondering what exactly to expect with version 3.0. Can we anticipate a modern interface similar to Invision Community? I really don't want to go to invision as they may drop self-hosted in next version, as they aim for big comapanies, not common users now.

 

[jul]

Easy:



Depends from what you consider "dark". The official state of things is atm:
• They target to release 2.4 within 2026, so while this is not a promise (and has taken long and the timeframe has been shifted in the past) they are well within the communicated time frame.
• We do know for the most part what will be contained in 2.4 based on the various HYS threads from the past
• We do know that with 2.4 there will come a new editor and a more or less massive overhaul of the legacy code base (which probably is one of the reasons if not the main reason for the delays)
• We do know that 3.0 will (obviously) come at some point after 2.4 and that 2.4 is the release where the focus lies currently
• We do know that 3.0 will bring a new style and that this will be the main feature. We do not yet know what this means in detail (which seems fair as the focus is on 2.4 currently).
• We do know that 2.4 will not include any of the social-media-feed alike thingies that some people loudly demand in countless variations (that partly outrage each other anyway)
• We do know (or rather can safely assume) that whatever the new style of 3.0 will bring will not be a Reddit/Facebook/Tiktok/Instagram clone, so those who demand those things won't be happy anyway and won't stop moaning
• We do know that XF reacts to known and new security issues fast (as they did this in the past and also recently)
• We do know that the company is financially sound due to the success of the cloud offerings
• We do know that there are no plans to ditch self hosting
• We do know that XF traditionally has a pretty solid architecture and code base and that the team holds to that for the future as well - so we can have trust that this will persist.
• We do know that XF has always declared itself to be a traditional forum software and within that to deliver a solid core and basis, that can easily be extended and customized through add ons rather than XF trying to become everybody's darling and to integrate each and every functionality into the core
• We do know that they want to extend that even more in direction of becoming a framework to build upon, possibly to make it easier to use XF as a foundation for things left and right of plain classical forums
• We do know that they have started use AI support in a responsible way to help with coding
• We do know that they are in the process of overhauling and improving the existing documentation
etc.

I would not call this exactly "being left in the dark".

What we don't know:
• When exactly 2.4. and later 3.0 will be released (no wonder, as it can be assumed that the XF crew does not know this either)
• What exactly any given dev of the XF crew does at any given moment in time (which is not our business anyway)
• What exactly the XF crew is currently working on on a feature level (would not change anything if we knew it)
• How much money XF as a company currently makes per year (again: not our business)
• How exactly the new style of 3.0 will look (the interest in that is understandable but on the other hand it is simply not relevant as long as 2.4 has not been released and 3.0 is not in close sight)
• How many people really code at XF and if this is full time / the main job or rather a side business (would really be nice to know and help to adjust expectations, but in the end it is the outcome that counts, so more transparency would be beneficial but absolutely it is again not our business)

While a bit more transparency and regular reporting about the current state of things would no doubt be nice and somewhat helpful to create a loose planning horizon for the own forums it seems somewhat understandable given the hysterical debates here on the forums that they rather prefer to communicate things when they are done and ready instead of communicating assumptions and probabilities that will then be taken as promises by some and lead to new aggressions and hysterical debates.

While I agree that - especially with the history of 2.4 and depending from that 3.0 - there is reason to question the speed of development and to ask for the reasons for that as well as for improvement in communication and reliability of it it is also clear that 2.2 and 2.3 do work w/o issues and there is no urgent need for a massive update from a technical perspective. And also that forums that do not do brilliant today in terms of users and engagement won't have a sudden change and become vastly successful because of 2.4. and later 3.0 once they will be released as the reasons for unsuccessful forums are clearly not within the delay of those releases but in those forums themselves. But as some are not willing to take the responsibility for the success of their own forums and rather direct that to XF again the moaning won't stop.


You should better have a closer look. Also, as recently a couple of bugs have been closed it could possibly be that we may be approaching another release as this happens typically not too long before one.

... you have a pretty strong opinion about developing/coding.

Are you really just going to repost the features of HYS and call it as "not left in the dark". We have seen it, for months/years yes. I never asked nor mentioned the development for 2.4 nor 3.0 as part of my concern. Nothing you mentioned is part of my concern apart from:
"• How many people really code at XF and if this is full time / the main job or rather a side business (would really be nice to know and help to adjust expectations, but in the end it is the outcome that counts, so more transparency would be beneficial but absolutely it is again not our business)".

This entire thread is was build around the OP wanting to know expectations. Pretty much the entire pre-sales forum is build around expectation questions. I don't see staff replies, just a nice community selling Xenforo or providing information. I don't think that knowing the size of the staff team and them (/one person) considering Xenforo as a main/parttime job is just considering an 'expectation' and 'nice to have but none of our business'. To me (please let me have an opinion), it shows the difference in how well maintained Xenforo is. The staff list mentions 5 xenforo developers which 3 of them have thousands of posts regarding development/bug reports/future features requests. Two of them havent posted for at least a year. I personally can't see how that doesn't affect just 'expectations' but also the amount of bug reports/feature requests and security reports can be handled. All of this next to the development of 2.4 and 3.0. With 26 pages of a pre-sale question without staff reply I do think we are left in the dark. Again, I am pro Xenforo with a recent license update but no reply from any staff is 'ridiculous'. This thread should really have been closed ages ago.

I wasn't referring to myself about developing/coding.

 

[smallwheels]

Pretty much the entire pre-sales forum is build around expectation questions. I don't see staff replies, just a nice community selling Xenforo or providing information. I don't think that knowing the size of the staff team and them (/one person) considering Xenforo as a main/parttime job is just considering an 'expectation' and 'nice to have but none of our business'. To me (please let me have an opinion), it shows the difference in how well maintained Xenforo is. The staff list mentions 5 xenforo developers which 3 of them have thousands of posts regarding development/bug reports/future features requests. Two of them havent posted for at least a year. I personally can't see how that doesn't affect just 'expectations' but also the amount of bug reports/feature requests and security reports can be handled. All of this next to the development of 2.4 and 3.0.

Well, you have those people that are listed as part of the team on here. As you recognized, some have fallen silent. It is no secret that XF is a small company, so expectations should be adjusted adequately. If you want to know more you can simply check the publications at companies house. You'd learn that XF had 2 employees in the financial year ending on June 30th 2025, according to the published accounts. You'd also learn, that according to companies house Kier and Mike are both directors of the company (which may explain why Mike is listed as staff on the forums) and that Kier, Mike and Ashley all hold more than 25% of the company. Given the financial snapshot that the publications show you can also guess that they are doing ok financially but won't employ dozens of free lancers (but probably some, as one can see from the staff list on here). The staff list also lists three forum moderators, one of which has never done a single posting and the other two are barely seen on here or rather vanished over the last months after they both insulted paying customers on here. Yes, there is clearly a lot room for improvement regarding transparency. One should not have to dive into public governmental records to get an idea of the company.

No doubt part of the communication problem of XF is the webpage: In most companies you will find a list of staff along with their functions, which here is outdated, misleading and buried in the forum member list. The forum is a customer forum and - from what one can see in practice - not an official support channel (they even phrased it like that somewhere), despite it rises the expectation it would be. It is massively under moderated, neglected by staff, barely actively used by them apart from release announcements, flooded with bots and basically serves mainly as a self-support forum for customers. In its current state it is in my eyes not a good show case or advertisement for XenForo. Active, stringent moderation by a person with some politeness, engagement and knowledge of the product could change this mess to the positive probably pretty quickly.

These are all different aspects of the communication issue to the outside world that XF has. Chris is a brilliant communicator, when he communicates - friendly, comprehensively and to the point. But he has a different job an overall XF is a developer based shop, not a marketing or product based shop. On the one hand we can be thankful for that (as it enables the technical quality the product has), on the other hand there is a price for that and this price is communication and (not) cuddling the customers, sadly.

With 26 pages of a pre-sale question without staff reply I do think we are left in the dark.

To be fair: at least 24 of these 26 pages are completely off topic for the question. And the question was about details 3.0, risen in March 2025. So about a future release the contents of which have until today not yet been lifted as it is future and to this day basically a "company secret" if you wanted to phrase it dramatically. So the best answer (and I agree that it would have been adequate to give it, the more in a timely manner) would therefore have been:

"XF 3.0 is a planned future release that is currently in the works and will, based on today's planning, indeed contain a new and modernized style. Details have not been released yet and there is no target date set for their release or the release either. Our next release will be 2.4 and we are currently focussing on that. Please understand that we thus cannot communicate more details about 3.0 publicly at the moment."

Something in that direction. Would not have been too much work to write and would not have needed a dev to write that either. But it would not have lifted the darkness you complain about either.

Again, I am pro Xenforo with a recent license update but no reply from any staff is 'ridiculous'. This thread should really have been closed ages ago.

Agreed. Given that they seem to see the forums as customer self support in opposite to the public impression that those forums rise they possibly don't care too much. Still, as much as the codebase may profit from its current overhaul the public image and the forum would profit from a conceptional overhaul of the communication and the publication of a vision. It is not an easy life with small companies - neither inside nor as a customer outside.

 

[jul]

Well, you have those people that are listed as part of the team on here. As you recognized, some have fallen silent. It is no secret that XF is a small company, so expectations should be adjusted adequately. If you want to know more you can simply check the publications at companies house. You'd learn that XF had 2 employees in the financial year ending on June 30th 2025, according to the published accounts. You'd also learn, that according to companies house Kier and Mike are both directors of the company (which may explain why Mike is listed as staff on the forums) and that Kier, Mike and Ashley all hold more than 25% of the company. Given the financial snapshot that the publications show you can also guess that they are doing ok financially but won't employ dozens of free lancers (but probably some, as one can see from the staff list on here). The staff list also lists three forum moderators, one of which has never done a single posting and the other two are barely seen on here or rather vanished over the last months after they both insulted paying customers on here. Yes, there is clearly a lot room for improvement regarding transparency. One should not have to dive into public governmental records to get an idea of the company.

No doubt part of the communication problem of XF is the webpage: In most companies you will find a list of staff along with their functions, which here is outdated, misleading and buried in the forum member list. The forum is a customer forum and - from what one can see in practice - not an official support channel (they even phrased it like that somewhere), despite it rises the expectation it would be. It is massively under moderated, neglected by staff, barely actively used by them apart from release announcements, flooded with bots and basically serves mainly as a self-support forum for customers. In its current state it is in my eyes not a good show case or advertisement for XenForo. Active, stringent moderation by a person with some politeness, engagement and knowledge of the product could change this mess to the positive probably pretty quickly.

These are all different aspects of the communication issue to the outside world that XF has. Chris is a brilliant communicator, when he communicates - friendly, comprehensively and to the point. But he has a different job an overall XF is a developer based shop, not a marketing or product based shop. On the one hand we can be thankful for that (as it enables the technical quality the product has), on the other hand there is a price for that and this price is communication and (not) cuddling the customers, sadly.


To be fair: at least 24 of these 26 pages are completely off topic for the question. And the question was about details 3.0, risen in March 2025. So about a future release the contents of which have until today not yet been lifted as it is future and to this day basically a "company secret" if you wanted to phrase it dramatically. So the best answer (and I agree that it would have been adequate to give it, the more in a timely manner) would therefore have been:

"XF 3.0 is a planned future release that is currently in the works and will, based on today's planning, indeed contain a new and modernized style. Details have not been released yet and there is no target date set for their release or the release either. Our next release will be 2.4 and we are currently focussing on that. Please understand that we thus cannot communicate more details about 3.0 publicly at the moment."

Something in that direction. Would not have been too much work to write and would not have needed a dev to write that either. But it would not have lifted the darkness you complain about either.

Agreed. Given that they seem to see the forums as customer self support in opposite to the public impression that those forums rise they possibly don't care too much. Still, as much as the codebase may profit from its current overhaul the public image and the forum would profit from a conceptional overhaul of the communication and the publication of a vision. It is not an easy life with small companies - neither inside nor as a customer outside.

Thank you for this response! I appreciate the effort.

Eventually time will tell. At the end of the day I just want more people to purchase Xenforo > more traffic for third party developers > more new content.

When it comes to making choices between Invision, Xenforo, myBB etc… one of my personal factors would be activity from staff/developers and their engagement with the community. This shows me I could trust in buying a software product that is maintained and more likely will be in the future. Just like the OP wondered if we can expect a modern look and perhaps some features. If I were the one considering forum software and scout around the forums, look through staff members lists latest posts… To me that shows an abandoned product (which it isn’t ofc).

Pretty funny to think they are selling a communication platform.

Anyway, I now notice I myself am not really contributing to this thread nor the image of Xenforo and perhaps be considered spam so I’ll stop. Really hope the best for Xenforo though.

 

[smallwheels]

one of my personal factors would be activity from staff/developers and their engagement with the community. This shows me I could trust in buying a software product that is maintained and more likely will be in the future.

When I decided to choose XF for my forum over the competition one important aspect was the active community. This was just four years ago, but the forums on here were (or looked) dramatically more active, helpful and constructive as with the others. This has changed, the most massively regarding constructiveness. So if I had to choose again today XF would clearly get a way lower ranking in this aspect than back then.

Just like the OP wondered if we can expect a modern look and perhaps some features. If I were the one considering forum software and scout around the forums, look through staff members lists latest posts…

A famous German comedian said decades ago: "Predictions are difficult, especially those regarding the future."

 

[briansol]

We all agree that development is slow.
We all know that it's been addressed in the past.
We all know that XF is still the best platform on the market due to the aftermarket support and the framework of which xf is built upon.
If it were my company, I'd run it differently. But if it were my company, i don't think we'd be having this conversation 10 years in either. What xf did is amazing, and i look forward to seeing what future versions bring. I'm not excited about a lot of addons going native as the biggest have you seen's as all of that is available anyway. I want different things. I want more speed/less markup, etc.

We would all like more transparency.
We would all like more communication - or even just appearances of key players in the forums to give us visibility that they aren't dead/left for other music projects permanently.

A lot of that is because:
We are all in 'trouble' in certain terms with competition from AI stealing our content and our search traffic, social media groups taking our users, and bots hammering our servers and we need to come together to fight this change by adapting to the flux that is today's internet with different tools, techniques, and community sharing of ideas to win.

We can be toys R us, radio shack, or blockbuster and not adopt to the changing market and be done in a few years, or we can try to keep things going by listening to change, improving the software, supporting the addon developers to do custom things, and so forth.

XF has a part
aftermarket has a part
we community members have a part

Only if all 3 contribute positively will we all be successful in the long run.

 

[smallwheels]

even just appearances of key players in the forums to give us visibility that they aren't dead

This would be good. And easy to achieve. They could create a thread where each team member posts a simple "I'm not dead" message every monday morning. If this can calm the mood I am all for it. Sadly, the XF crew being devs, it would probably be automated after less than a week and thus not warrant anything.

 

[Miri]

Chris is a brilliant communicator, when he communicates - friendly, comprehensively and to the point. But he has a different job an overall XF is a developer based shop, not a marketing or product based shop.

I don’t doubt his talent, but I’ve lost confidence. I no longer believe what he says about the XF product roadmap. It has become a bit like The Boy Who Cried Wolf: after the same kind of promises or hints are repeated for years without meaningful results, people naturally stop believing them. At this point, I see those posts more as marketing than as real development updates. And let’s not forget that many of the bugs reported here are found by exceptional people like @Kirby . Personally, even if I found a bug, I wouldn’t really feel motivated to report it anymore, considering how things have been handled.

 

[MySiteGuy]

When I decided to choose XF for my forum over the competition one important aspect was the active community. This was just four years ago, but the forums on here were (or looked) dramatically more active, helpful and constructive as with the others. This has changed, the most massively regarding constructiveness. So if I had to choose again today XF would clearly get a way lower ranking in this aspect than back then.

A famous German comedian said decades ago: "Predictions are difficult, especially those regarding the future."

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Extra! Extra! Read all about it!​

In today's news, a study found that forums that have the same questions repeatedly answered are less likely to have them asked again, as more people easily find answers without having to ask.

Its also been found that cloud based products generally require no installation support and less overall setup support.

Who'd have guessed?

---

 

[smallwheels]

forums that have the same questions repeatedly answered are less likely to have them asked again, as more people easily find answers without having to ask.

Which could be true if people would actually use the search function. Most don't, as you can see by the amount of duplicate threads on here - go and count the number of "huge amount of guest threads" that haven been opened over the last couple of months alone.

Its also been found that cloud based products generally require no installation support and less overall setup support.

And this leads to a decrease in constructiveness and a rise in rudeness within the customer forum? I do have my doubts. The changed tone is what I mentioned, not the amount of posts.

 

[smallwheels]

after the same kind of promises or hints are repeated for years without meaningful results, people naturally stop believing them.

Understandable. They have lost a lot of trust especially in last autumn. But then: What you care about is the release. The talking not so much as you don't believe what they say anyway. The current state is, quoted from Dec. 5th 2025:

I apologise for the recent silence. Work on XenForo 2.4 is ongoing. A new HYS is coming soon, and we are targeting a release for some point in 2026. As for 2.3.8, we’re aiming to release that before Christmas, or shortly after the New Year.

• not one new HYS has come but one for 2.3.8, four for 2.4 and another one for 2.3.10
• we are in May 2026. So they are still well within their targeted (not "promised") current time frame for 2.4 and have not even consumed half of it.
• 2.3.8 was released on Jan. 22nd, so definitively not before Christmas (2025 ) and possibly not exactly "shortly after the new year" - but maybe within a stretch zone. And since then 2.3.9 and 2.3.10 were released.

These were the 3 predictions that Chris made on Dec. 5th. Two have come true (and more than that), one is still open (but within the time frame). Seems not totally bad to me. Rather the opposite and way better than last year.