Choose vBulletin or Xenforo: popularity

G

grunnerdie

Member
Hi, I am making my decision to purchase a forum software for my new site. I don't care much about functionality but instead I want to make sure my site has a best forum software in the near future.

Xenforo is growing, what is its usage compare to vBulletin now? marketshare? Is is going to beat vBulletin in the near future?

Do you have estimation how many new license purchases Xenforo have each day? and vBulletin? (now & future)

Thank you for reading my post.
 
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3.8 was OK but it did start to look tired and the admin side was chaotic
4.0 series I heard too much horror about so I never touched it.

Had to wait ages with one last forum stuck on 3.8 because of transferring a mod/ addon to XF but last year finally became 100% XF and was most relieved.
I even use XF to make static sites with articles because the admin on design and setup is so good, and I get to write pages in the frontend editor (Xenzine)
 
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i am switching from vbulletin and i miss some great features

1. xenforo lacks tick and delete feature in search or any type of moderating from search.
You have to go to each thread open it and delete one by one if someone post something bad all over your forum.
Which is extremely painful process. Actually this keeps me guessing about the switch.

2. people can abuse like system very easily and there is no way to limit them like we had in vbulletin reputation.

3. there is no update post counts, complex prune methods and missing some other maintenance features essential for a large board.

there are some other features but i don't miss them.
 
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Max said:
i am switching from vbulletin and i miss some great features

1. xenforo lacks tick and delete feature in search or any type of moderating from search.
You have to go to each thread open it and delete one by one if someone post something bad all over your forum.
Which is extremely painful process. Actually this keeps me guessing about the switch.

2. people can abuse like system very easily and there is no way to limit them like we had in vbulletin reputation.

3. there is no update post counts, complex prune methods and missing some other maintenance features essential for a large board.

there are some other features but i don't miss them.
Click to expand...
1. XenForo has an inline moderation feature which allows you to selects lots of threads from the forum menu, just like vB3. xF also has a spam cleaner that lets you prune a user's spam posts very quickly.

2. What do you mean by "abuse"?

3. XenForo does not need maintenance features because the system self-maintains. If you really need to clean up, the Rebuild Caches page will do what you need.
When will you ever need to use such "complex prune methods"?
What "maintenance features essentials for a large board" are you missing?
 
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Prior to switching from vBulletin to xenForo I wrote a review (which can be found here). Several other people have also provided their input and experiences with the company. It is posted on webhostingtalk. I still have my vBulletin license which is inclusive of both vBulletin 4 and 5. It cost me $250 yet I still choose to pay annually for xenForo as opposed to downloading the garbage excuse of a forum software vBulletin is. They have also had 2 major vulnerabilities discovered within the past 6 months on both vb4 and 5.

Also popularity should not be the deciding factor on forum software. Features, security, performance, and flexibility should be. When zero day exploits are being sold over the internet for vBulletin for $1k usd :p popularity won't make you feel better or your members
 
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evilmaniac said:
Prior to switching from vBulletin to xenForo I wrote a review (which can be found here). Several other people have also provided their input and experiences with the company. It is posted on webhostingtalk. I still have my vBulletin license which is inclusive of both vBulletin 4 and 5. It cost me $250 yet I still choose to pay annually for xenForo as opposed to downloading the garbage excuse of a forum software vBulletin is. They have also had 2 major vulnerabilities discovered within the past 6 months on both vb4 and 5.

Also popularity should not be the deciding factor on forum software. Features, security, performance, and flexibility should be. When zero day exploits are being sold over the internet for vBulletin for $1k usd :p popularity won't make you feel better or your members
Click to expand...

Yeh, saw their two major vulnerability messages on our VB system.

The xF crowd seems much happier and more helpful.

I'm pleased beyond words that xF works reliably. Can't wait for the 1.3 upgrade to be released out of beta.
 
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Elementary control over the conversation system should also be integrated in xenForo. It is very disappointing to need an external add-on in-order to limit people's ability of having an infinite number of conversations that are never deleted unless all participants decide to unanimously leave the conversation.
wedgar said:
Yeh, saw their two major vulnerability messages on our VB system.
Click to expand...
Yupp, and if I recall correctly one of them allowed the creation of a root admin account through the install files. Customers were not even emailed about the issue.
 
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tyteen4a03 said:
1. XenForo has an inline moderation feature which allows you to selects lots of threads from the forum menu, just like vB3. xF also has a spam cleaner that lets you prune a user's spam posts very quickly.
Click to expand...
I am talking about moderation from search.
Can you search someones posts and delete only the bad things he said? No
Can you search some bad word or illegal stuff from search and remove them? No
If it appears in 100 places then you have to open 100 threads in your browser and tick them and delete them.

tyteen4a03 said:
2. What do you mean by "abuse"?
Click to expand...
xenforo count each member's Like totals and the whole ranking system is based on those totals. Someone can easily press like in mass on some other user's posts and totally spoil the whole likes system and trophy system in few hours which will lead to discourage real quality posters who gained points by posting quality content for years.
That's a really big disaster for a forum.

Even worst there is no way to delete those fake likes and find in which threads he did that abuse etc.. admin goes totally helpless.

Don't compare facebook like system with xenforo. facebook doesn't count total likes user has gained over the years. Its just for each post. xenforo system is totally different.


tyteen4a03 said:
3. XenForo does not need maintenance features because the system self-maintains. If you really need to clean up, the Rebuild Caches page will do what you need.
When will you ever need to use such "complex prune methods"?
What "maintenance features essentials for a large board" are you missing?
Click to expand...
Can you do rebuild post counts? No
Can you do rebuild user names? No
etc.. just check vB Maintenance section.
 
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Max said:
I am talking about moderation from search.
Can you search someones posts and delete only the bad things he said? No
Can you search some bad word or illegal stuff from search and remove them? No
If it appears in 100 places then you have to open 100 threads in your browser and tick them and delete them.
Click to expand...
Now that's a suggestion for the developers... or any add-on developers out there. Regardless... If you've got a user wreaking havoc, then what are they doing on your forum in the first place? If they're spamming, just spam clean them. If they're posting messages that break your community guidelines, then why aren't your moderators on the case? It's far better to let your moderators vet a suspect user's posts than to go deleting them indiscriminately. You can achieve this within the Database if you must, by setting the message state of the user's posts to "deleted".


Max said:
xenforo count each member's Like totals and the whole ranking system is based on those totals. Someone can easily press like in mass on some other user's posts and totally spoil the whole likes system and trophy system in few hours which will lead to discourage real quality posters who gained points by posting quality content for years.
That's a really big disaster for a forum.
Click to expand...
The likes system isn't all that useful if a minority of users want to farm likes from each other. It will become fairly obvious, fairly quickly (to your moderators and your members), if people are attempting to rack-up likes in a short space of time. If you really want to, you can limit likes per day with an add-on, or if you really want a Reputation System that mimics vBulletin's one, you can install one. I'd feel though, that implementing such a reputation system will only encourage the elitism and clique-mentality that you are trying to avoid.

Max said:
Even worst there is no way to delete those fake likes and find in which threads he did that abuse etc.. admin goes totally helpless.
Click to expand...
Set the user's likes count to "0" on their profile. It won't remove the likes from the posts, but they'll have completely wasted their time if the count is what they were after.

Max said:
Can you do rebuild post counts? No
Click to expand...
Rebuilding post counts shouldn't be needed on a day to day basis - post counts are re-calculated for a user as their messages are deleted. If for whatever reason you do need re-count user totals, there is a query that will do this. In the two years of operating my forum, I think I have only used it once. There is also an addon that allows you to re-count at will.

Max said:
Can you do rebuild user names? No
Click to expand...
Not sure why you'd want to do that. You can rebuild user caches if that makes any difference.
 
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digitalpoint said:
If you flip the charts into historical mode, you can see the month to month trends... Which is way more interesting than the pie charts which are as of "now".
Click to expand...

40% of VB installs still use 3.8 and another 50% on 4.x. That says a LOT.

VB has 70% market share but 90% of that isn't the latest version.

XF has considerably more installs on it's latest major version than VB has.
 
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