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

qnkov

qnkov

New member
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 I understand that some may find this nostalgic, but it looks incredibly outdated and is not visually appealing.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.
 
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At least should be undertaken

arn

Thread 'Allow nested replies in Q&A Threads'

Context:
xenforo.com

XF 2.2 - Forum and thread types

Forums contain threads and threads contain posts. It's been the essential framework of forums on the Internet since the public migrated from usenet to the web. The structure is well known and well understood - though the origins of some of the terminology are lost in the mists of time. Who ever...
xenforo.com xenforo.com

The Q&A thread naturally lends itself to "post comments". Now, I never thought threaded conversations really worked well in the traditional forum setting -- I recall vBulletin's attempts at it. But, when you are talking about a Q&A where the A's are pieces of votable content itself. There is naturally going to be discussions around the A's.

The problem with the flat structure is what happens when someone replies to an Answer? That answer's reply gets its own Vote button, which doesn't make...
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I remember when vbulletin 2 introduced threaded, hybrid, and linear modes (I think I remember this correctly.)
But ultimately most people used linear as most of my users (and myself) didn't really want to spend the time to maintain the threaded view by carefully replying to a specific post and preferred reading the linear conversation as more natural/comfortable to read. Possibly I didn't get into the threaded view heavily enough -- I made it optional and left linear view default, and was waiting to see how many people chose it before embracing it.

Maybe reddit is on the right track, and maybe people now are used to reading things in smaller bits on cell phone screens so maybe this is the time vs. 20 years ago when people were used to reading more "flat" conversations. I still enjoy reading threads on xenforo more though than on reddit where it still feels like more of a "game" of small thought bits vs. a more natural conversation read. Maybe there is a new way to accomplish both.
 
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Digital Doctor said:
People can be give the choice: Is my reply to the TOPIC (a legit branch of the topic) or to a post (a comment).
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From experience: Many (if not most) users won't get the concept or will be too lazy to follow it. Judging from posts in many forums as well as on reddit I am wondering how the respective authors manage to survive at all, given their very poor cognitive abilities...
Digital Doctor said:
When you buy a new addon and you want to read the discussion on it, you are forced to read 23 pages of nonsense. Ideally the discussion could be divided up into topics. Xenforo puts first commenters as the most important information. It's nonsense.
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If you have 23 pages of nonsense in a thread on a regular basis you have an issue with all three: forum culture, user behavior and moderation.
Digital Doctor said:
Xenforo addon discussions are a great example of ... is your discussion data structure useful ? What is seen for Xenforo's own structure is that the discussion content isn't useful and the only thing that makes it bearable is people don't read it.
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It is to a huge amount a question of the culture of the forum how dense and how useful threads are.
Digital Doctor said:
There is NOT one topic here.
There are 20.
Each of them needs a place on the first page to filter out the key parts.
Click to expand...
This is called off topic. If you have 20 topics you should have 20 threads, not one. Easy. That's why you need moderation and a forum culture where your users don't post off topic continuously w/o thinking.
Digital Doctor said:
If someone wants to have a forum that will actually help inform people with structured data (and your forum members are capable of it) you need structure. Threaded threads is an obvious improvement.
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What you want has been the standard in the usenet for decades and it worked well. Personally, I always found the lack of threading in forums a downside. Using a good client-software it was possible to digest usenet discussions very fast and effectively including filtering out parts of the discussion you were not interested in. However: This concept needed awareness and discipline of the users to work and both got lost with pages like facebook and other social media. By concept as well as they opened up the world of internet discussions to the majority of people that do have neither a clue of nor awareness for things like discussion culture - let alone an interest in it. It won't come back. In fact forums were the first step in opening up to a wider audience with the consequence of having unaware and undisciplined users.

In earlier days there were forum softwares like phorum that offered both: linear and threaded views. It turned out (at least to me) that threaded views (as good and fast as they were in the usenet) were and are a nightmare to use in forums - time intensive and chaotic. As you can still see in some old forums and also on Reddit. There is probably a reason why the standard for forums has become the linear view.
Lee said:
Linear views like xenforo enable the conversation to flow better in my opinion.
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Yes - but in theory threaded views could be better, just that with a html-page load times are a total killer.
Digital Doctor said:
At least should be undertaken

arn

Thread 'Allow nested replies in Q&A Threads'

Context:
xenforo.com

XF 2.2 - Forum and thread types

Forums contain threads and threads contain posts. It's been the essential framework of forums on the Internet since the public migrated from usenet to the web. The structure is well known and well understood - though the origins of some of the terminology are lost in the mists of time. Who ever...
xenforo.com xenforo.com

The Q&A thread naturally lends itself to "post comments". Now, I never thought threaded conversations really worked well in the traditional forum setting -- I recall vBulletin's attempts at it. But, when you are talking about a Q&A where the A's are pieces of votable content itself. There is naturally going to be discussions around the A's.

The problem with the flat structure is what happens when someone replies to an Answer? That answer's reply gets its own Vote button, which doesn't make...
  • Like
  • Love
Click to expand...

Did you give this a try?

Post Reply truonglv

Post Reply

Allow reply to thread in more levels

Has been available for quite some years already...
 
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smallwheels said:
It is to a huge amount a question of the culture of the forum how dense and how useful threads are.
Click to expand...
A good example of non-threaded threads being bad information tools is:

Xenforo Resource Manager Addon threads.

They contain useful information, but you have to manually go through the entire thread. Their only saving grace is they are short and the thread readers are motivated to read the entire thing.
 
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Fora uses threaded threads.
I think Fora makes stock Xenforo better in more than a few respects.
1722702142033-webp.307904


Thread with more than one level of nesting.
www.painttalk.com

Fine Paints of Europe

Does anyone have experience with this line of products? Designer wants the Brilliant 98 above wainscot in a sun room. About 200 sf wall space so I'll give it a try. Just looking for some feedback. Thanks! https://finepaintsofeurope.com/shop/hollandlac-brilliant-98/
www.painttalk.com www.painttalk.com
see the:
1760011981178.webp

Digital Doctor said:
DEMO: https://www.painttalk.com/threads/exterior-texture.101092/

PaintTalk.com uses Fora.
Fora has threaded threads. (as above). works great.

fora.com

Fora | About us

Enable the world to share expertise and discover knowledge on subjects they love.
fora.com fora.com
Click to expand...



Dad. said:
Replying to your point has, in some small way at least, broken the flow of the discussion stemming from the OP. Only you should get a notification that I've replied to you, not everyone following the thread. Im replying to YOU and your points, not the people who replied to OP or OP. Its very natural and far more human to take you aside (without the burden of creating a DM), and not derail the main conversation.

We can disagree about what is good UX or not I suppose, but its at least my opinion that generally speaking this type of ux is now a solved thing and there is no reason not to support it. XenForo or any software thats been maintained for 10+ years may have arguments against it such as resources or lack of energy or will, but there really are not too many other good reasons. Simply look at just about any major long form and many short form discussion platforms that are mainstream. Any comments system, slack, discord, reddit, they cannot all be wrong.

Back to on topic, and I have to state as such since the conversation is linear...we can say silly things like "forums are not reddit or are not social media" but this is simply a ridiculous argument. Reddit is almost exactly a forum, if you ignore the size of it and a few other liberties. Its just a very very successful one. And social media is effectively just hyper optimized engagement platforms, which forums would benefit by learning from. We can debate this another ten years but its just simply misinformed. Many things can be true at the same time. Forums need to be highly engaging (a la modern social platforms) , offer new ways to interact with others such as short form discussion, all while maintaining traditional long form discussion support.
Click to expand...

An interesting happy medium in the threaded vs non-threaded threads is .... just one level of nesting.
There is almost zero reason to avoid one level of nesting.
 
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Digital Doctor said:
Fora uses threaded threads.
I think Fora makes stock Xenforo better in more than a few respects.
1722702142033-webp.307904


Thread with more than one level of nesting.
www.painttalk.com

Fine Paints of Europe

Does anyone have experience with this line of products? Designer wants the Brilliant 98 above wainscot in a sun room. About 200 sf wall space so I'll give it a try. Just looking for some feedback. Thanks! https://finepaintsofeurope.com/shop/hollandlac-brilliant-98/
www.painttalk.com www.painttalk.com
see the:
View attachment 328268







An interesting happy medium in the threaded vs non-threaded threads is .... just one level of nesting.
There is almost zero reason to avoid one level of nesting.
Click to expand...
I must admit I do like the way they have approached their nested comments.

The post bit is nice too, very social in appearance.
 
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Digital Doctor said:
A good example of non-threaded threads being bad information tools is:

Xenforo Resource Manager Addon threads.

They contain useful information, but you have to manually go through the entire thread. Their only saving grace is they are short and the thread readers are motivated to read the entire thing.
Click to expand...
They are indeed a good example - but IMHO not for what you state but something different.

First, the threads are a tab of the according resource. From the experience in my forum the whole "tab"-thing does not work. I have it in the resource manager, I have it in the event manager that I am using, I have it with AMS. Always the same thing: People to not find the discussion or they join the discussion and to not find the according ressoure/event/article.
XF must well be aware of this issue of miserable UX as when the discussion thread is automalically created along with a resource in the first post there's a link to the resource.
Here in the forum I typically dive through the ressource-discussion forums but only accidentally visit the resource section directly. So the whole UX is kind of a nightmare in terms of visibility, usability and logic. Zero stars on a amazon-like scale.

Secondly, the threads here within resource section here in the forum serve serveral purposes at once: Pre sales questions, support questions, bug reports, feature requests, an loads of off topic. This is just a bad structure - which leads to chaos. I do not think that threading would change a thing here. I don't know if you ever tried to search something in a treaded forum, to find a post that you read before or anything like that. it is simply a nightmare - does not work.
Threading cannot fix bad culture, bad structure, lack of user discipline and lack of moderation.

Surely, threading could make it easier to split up subtopics - but why not split them into a entire new thread if there is so little tiedence to the initial thread topic that one would not need to read the subthread? The more as to know that it is not worth reading the subthread one has to read the subthread first. And as users post everything whereever they are answers would typically not relate to the post the should relate to. You would have to change the editor/answer-box/mechanism to improve this which will create a myriade of new UX problems.

I was always curious to try out the nested comments add on that I mentioned but was reluctant and did not do so b/c I came to the conclusion that the downsides would overweight the upsides.

The only good way working with nested comments was - as mentioned earlier - in the usenet with a client called "Mac Soup". It gave you a graphical overview about a topic and the subthreads and a very fast way of navigation via cursor keys on the keyboard plus very fast filtering and subscription options through shortcuts.

MacSOUP.png


All was done in the client, based on the headers of the posting. Unbeatable back then - not really an option with a html-based forum and even less so given modern mobile devices.
 
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Digital Doctor said:
An interesting happy medium in the threaded vs non-threaded threads is .... just one level of nesting.
There is almost zero reason to avoid one level of nesting.
Click to expand...

There is one. You have to go back to previous pages already read in order to see those replies. Nested discussions can create as many problems as they solve.
 
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Wildcat Media said:
IMHO, if people want something like social media, they can go stay on those platforms and leave my forums alone.
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I would like to make the gentle observation that, well, Internet users have overwhelmingly collectively left our forums to social engagement platforms.

Do any of us actually expect XF to overhaul the forum layout to match social engagement? No. But there are clear benefits to personalized feeds and engagement features which they can selectively incorporate.
 
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Digital Doctor said:
The "comments" (nested replies) always appear under their parent post.
Click to expand...

That's exactly what the problem is.

At least with linear threads, if you've been following since the start, you only need to go to the last page you left off at. When a nested reply can be inserted in any random page in the thread, you have to go back through the prior pages.
 
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AjayJunkies said:
I would like to make the gentle observation that, well, Internet users have overwhelmingly collectively left our forums to social engagement platforms.
Click to expand...
Never, in our experience. Don't paint every forum with the broad "the Internet overwhelmingly collectively leaving forums" brush, as it's simply not true.

Most of our members complain that users on social media are, basically, either the less enlightened who have nothing useful to say, or prone to start arguments just to get others worked up. Just comparing the niches on the forums I'm an admin for, social media groups are dumbed-down versions of the topics our forums discuss, and are also full of argumentative individuals. Reddit only takes those same attitudes and amplifies them; Reddit is also overrun with AI-generated posts (generally rage bait) in some of its most popular subs.

Even on the few forums I participate in, where I'm not on the staff, the same holds true. Memberships are growing, and members often mention they're happy to be there as opposed to the stupidity they see on the greater Internet.

We gain and retain users from social media because of this intelligence, moderation, and common decency we offer in forums. IMHO the greater Internet (especially social media and Reddit) is a mess of anonymous opinions with algorithms pushing content at visitors that will gain them the most advertising dollars. A select number of those who will want something beyond everyday stupidity and rage bait (and being targeted by algorithms and Big Tech) once they've gotten fed up with circular arguments and being subjected to flame wars. We want no part of that crowd, but we'll gladly take those in who want serious discussion without the side dish of rage bait and bull💩.

I've been in this for decades. The oldest forum I admin (and own) dates back to 1996. The busiest I manage started in 2002, and is growing faster than staff can keep up with it, with tens of millions posts. I've been moderating forums since before the general public even heard of the Internet, and were using dial-up for services like CompuServe, GEnie, etc., long before AOL came along, or even the private "bulletin boards" accessible via dialup, back when 1200 baud was the blazing fast new technology. Even Usenet functioned as a forum of sorts, but its "open" platform allowed anyone to post, including spambots, and it quickly lost its usefulness once that happened.

If forums were as dead as some here are suggesting, XenForo wouldn't even bother existing. They've been around in one form or another since before a few on this board were even born. One might even joke that the forum discussion format is the cockroach of the Internet--nothing seems to kill it, and the number keeps on multiplying.

I'm bowing out of this conversation, as I'm tired of repeating myself.

Carry on.
 
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Wildcat Media said:
Don't paint every forum with the broad "the Internet overwhelmingly collectively leaving forums" brush, as it's simply not true.
Click to expand...
Thanks for that. I'm also tired of this claim. In fact forums have a somewhat different audience than other social media and do serve a somewhat different purpose. They can - by design - do some things better than average social media and some things worse. If you want to be social media and like social media and all you are interested in is user numbers and posts per day you will probably always be unhappy als facebook, reddit and alike use techniques you don't have and never will have and have more money to spend on a single feature than you earn with your day job per year.
If you focus on what forums can do better like quality content, real trustful communities and other things like that you will always win. No doubt XF is somewhat oldfashioned and clearly they are in many aspects years behind any modern standards - but if you expect that to change you will realistically always be unhappy as this is not going to happen.
In fact the biggest issue on my forum is not a lack or loss of users but new users coming from other social media platforms and behaving like they are used to, this way destroying the quality of the content and the discussions. I don't care if my forum grows and how fast it grows - I care for the quality of the content and the culture of the discussions. The privilege of not having to earn money with the forum.
 
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MySiteGuy said:
That's exactly what the problem is.

At least with linear threads, if you've been following since the start, you only need to go to the last page you left off at. When a nested reply can be inserted in any random page in the thread, you have to go back through the prior pages.
Click to expand...
You weren't the intended target.

You can't read every post.

Forinstance, i'm replying to you, why should an entire thread of participants need to know about this conversation ?
 
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I believe that XenForo should implement a similar commenting solution to that used on Fora. At the moment, their hybrid nested messaging system is just what fans of classic forums and those accustomed to nested comments like on Reddit need. Without a similar system, forums will continue to look like sites from a bygone era for people over 40 and continue to die out.

Fora really tried to combine the best of both worlds.
 
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Lee said:
Because dialog between the two of you might bring benefit to the thread as a whole. If it’s doesn’t, that’s what direct messages are for.
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The person replying has two options:

(1) comment directly to someone
(2) reply to the whole thread.

The person replying knows which is the best option.

This also cuts down on excessive notifications - which people turn off - because they get too many of them.
 
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