Daniel Hood’s addons – our involvement

Stuart Wright

Stuart Wright

Well-known member
Wanting to be transparent about our involvement with Daniel Hood’s addons, here is the situation.

Background.

My wife and I own AVForums.com which uses something like 90 Xenforo addons. AVForums is a large forum which provides a living for several full time employees and several freelancers.

We regularly need features and functions and commission coders to create them for us.

We commissioned several addons from Waindigo
https://xenforo.com/community/resources/temporary-user-changes-by-waindigo.3361/
https://xenforo.com/community/resources/conversations-access-by-waindigo.2357/
https://xenforo.com/community/resources/moderation-queue-information-by-waindigo.2360/
https://xenforo.com/community/resources/watched-forums-by-waindigo.3818/

and we paid towards enhancements to others

https://xenforo.com/community/resources/th-hotspots.4827/
https://xenforo.com/community/resources/moderation-queue-information-by-waindigo.2360/
https://xenforo.com/community/resources/warnings-by-waindigo.2300/
https://xenforo.com/community/resources/th-datatables-bb-code.4819/

When Waindigo retired from the Xenforo community we started a close working relationship with Daniel Hood, commissioning the following addons:

https://xenforo.com/community/resources/tag-essentials.4572/
https://xenforo.com/community/resources/prefix-essentials.4970/
https://xenforo.com/community/resources/conversation-monitor.4131/
https://xenforo.com/community/resources/trending-content.3986/

which Daniel sold and supported on his Xenmods website, splitting the license revenue with us 50/50.

May 2016.

When Daniel retired from the coding community earlier this month, he had all his addons transferred to me (for no payment). His intention was that I would curate the addons, ensuring that they survive (since we use several of them) and make sure the license holders would be looked after.

I had hoped that I could strike up a relationship with a coder (or coders) who would support the addons for the same 50% cut of the license fee and 100% of any new development costs. Any less than 50% would not be worth the risk to our business.

I was misguided in thinking that it would be possible for a coder (or coders) to undertake this task. I did not consider these facts:

  • Xenforo 2 is coming sometime in the not too distant future and the addons will need recoding. Some of their functionality will certainly be made redundant by new features in XF2. Others will need rewriting and this is a fair amount of work.
  • Since there will be no charge for the XF2 upgrade for existing (active) license holders, it’s unlikely that the Xenforo community will accept paying for addon upgrades. So all the work in creating the XF2 versions will be done for very little financial return. I speculate that this will be a problem for several addon coders.
  • Xenforo addons are way too cheap. When it costs $1000 to code an addon, how do you justify selling and supporting it for $15? For professional coders and businesses, it doesn’t make for a particularly attractive financial proposition.
  • Supporting these popular addons could be a lot of work and would most likely require more commitment than an amateur (by which I mean someone with a full time job who is coding the addons in their spare time) could give (which is often the reason why coders eventually retire from the Xenforo coding scene).
So we have made the decision to pass all the addons along (except the four we commissioned from Daniel). We have passed these addons along without any payment, although we have been given a lifetime license for all of them.

I chose @Xon to take over these addons who has committed to supporting them and advancing them to Xenforo 2 (feature redundancy not withstanding).
License holders will be able to claim their licenses using a small extension addon to Chris Deeming’s Products addon which Chris is in the process of producing.

So I want to apologise to everyone who has been waiting for support or sales of Daniel’s addons for the delay in organising this.

Trending Content, Prefix Essentials, Tag Essentials and Conversation Monitor are available to purchase now from https://www.m2n.co.uk/community/products/. I will support these on Xenforo.

Xon will make his own announcement about the remainder of Daniel’s addons.
Thank you.
 
Xon is a rising star in this community as far as I could see.
He also took other addons over and is now maintaining them.
I don't own any of Daniel Hood's addons but I'm happy for all of his customers, as they should feel lucky that Xon took over.
Of course I can't see the future but Stuart drafted a hall of famer and I hope everything goes well.
 
Stuart Wright said:
License holders will be able to claim their licenses using a small extension addon to Chris Deeming’s Products addon which Chris is in the process of producing.
Click to expand...
This is for both, some addons which stay under your ownership and for rest addons which goes to Xon ownership?
I have several addons bought from Daniel (modess, convess, tagess...)
 
A wonderful gesture to pass these over without remuneration to support the community Stuart, understanding the issues. A thanks to @Xon for agreeing to move these over to XF2 also. Excellent community spirit from both parties here.
 
James said:
A wonderful gesture to pass these over without remuneration to support the community Stuart, understanding the issues.
Click to expand...
Well the credit for community spirit should go to Daniel who passed them on to me first. His primary concern was ensuring that the addons continue and that license holders are not disappointed.
 
NetDoc said:
Is there a list of mods to be expected for X2???
Click to expand...
If the functionality of the addons is not built in to the core of XF2 then I would expect there to be XF2 versions of them.
Let's speculate for a moment that XF2 has the functionality of the trending content addon built into it. I wouldn't be very surprised if it was. Adoption of that kind of feature would make the trending topics addon redundant and so there would obviously not need to be a XF2 version of it.
But we're not going to know what addons are made partially or wholly redundant until we see XF2.
 
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Stuart Wright said:
Since there will be no charge for the XF2 upgrade for existing (active) license holders, it’s unlikely that the Xenforo community will accept paying for addon upgrades. So all the work in creating the XF2 versions will be done for very little financial return. I speculate that this will be a problem for several addon coders.
Click to expand...

I expect to have to pay to upgrade add-ons to XF2 because I will have no other choice. If I can't have the same functionality as now, then I can't upgrade, even if XF2 is free. I'm almost expecting prices to jump higher after XF2 because currently they are too low, and the only motivation developers have to update them is money.
 
There's nobody better than Xon to takeover any project, the man is a programming genius.
 
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empire said:
I expect to have to pay to upgrade add-ons to XF2 because I will have no other choice. If I can't have the same functionality as now, then I can't upgrade, even if XF2 is free. I'm almost expecting prices to jump higher after XF2 because currently they are too low, and the only motivation developers have to update them is money.
Click to expand...
I think you are in the minority. I think most people would kick up a stink if they had to pay for an addon again.
It's seeing how people treated Daniel Hood about XenReviews that the wife (co founder of AVForums) strongly argued not to release any addons at all. Double the license fees would not make it worth the business risk of upsetting people.
I agree we will have no choice but to either replicate the functionality or forego it, and I think the latter is not an option in most cases. But I disagree that money is the only motivation. Many developers release addons for free.
 
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