Dev community - vB vs. Xenforo

HenrikHansen said:
Yaeh, try and visit the different forums for some weeks. Is there a friendy community, etc. Also look at the offtopic/chit forums (I am not kidding) It teels something about the interest of people going to site and have some friendly time with the community, do people actually voluntarily go to the forum and spend some time?

I remember the old vbulletin days when there was often interesting things in chit chat, when the community was active.
Now look at this https://www.vbulletin.com/forum/forumdisplay.php/6-Chit-Chat
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True

XenForo is the most friendly community I know in forum software development :)

People here almost jump over one another to help others and we also have an active discussion forum.
 
rollthebones said:
False. IPB had alerts since 3.1, which was released before XenForo was even announced.
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Interesting. Thanks for the info.
As my friend tells me, ideas are cheap, implementation is everything.
I like Xenforo's implementation much better.
Keep in mind, I did say I liked the site gbatemp.net.
 
whyweprotest said:
I could say the same about XF, where is the industry standard mobile support? Oh, have to pay a third party for that to be developed since it's not in the core unlike with VB and IPB. Where is XF's merge post into thread moderation tool? StopForumSpam support? What about ipv6? These are all things that have been talked about up to two years ago. I rather go with a company that implements features a little later than hoped for than not at all. IPB's release cycle is solid, can't say the same about XF.
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If these are the features that XenForo doesn't have that you really need, then they have done pretty well in my book.

...but sure, if you really need these features then by all means go to IPB. Such features would never make me want to go back to the current IPB software tho.

HenrikHansen said:
Yaeh, try and visit the different forums for some weeks. Is there a friendy community, etc. Also look at the offtopic/chit forums (I am not kidding) It teels something about the interest of people going to site and have some friendly time with the community, do people actually voluntarily go to the forum and spend some time?

I remember the old vbulletin days when there was often interesting things in chit chat, when the community was active.
Now look at this https://www.vbulletin.com/forum/forumdisplay.php/6-Chit-Chat
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It's a bad sign when your bug report section is constantly more active than your general chat forum.
 
DBA said:
Actually I believe that you should pick the software that makes your members happy.
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But if it makes you Shelley happy, it can't be that bad.
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In response to the OP:

Mr.Rick said:
I have been thinking about dumping all these vb4 sites I have acquired mostly in part because I am starting to feel as though the dev community is dying on vB.

If there was a good revert script I would certainly dump vB4 for vB3, but since there isn't I am entertaining the idea of a move to Xenforo.

Thoughts on the availability of developers?

vb3 or Xenforo?
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The problem with development on vB4 is that IB adopted an incremental rewrite strategy for the software. That strategy has wreaked havoc on third party development because the platform is constantly under construction. According to Kier's deposition, when he pushed IB to do a full rewrite Bob Brisco responded that only programmers care about code stuffs, therefore no rewrite. vB4 was basically a conscious decision to abandon third party developers.

XF is very friendly to developers. We have a good dev community here, a stable platform to build on, and lots of existing addons.
 
Mr.Rick said:
If there was a good revert script I would certainly dump vB4 for vB3, but since there isn't I am entertaining the idea of a move to Xenforo.
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Oh... I think Floris might do vB4 -> vB3 downgrades. But he's not on this forum anymore. I will ask him and get back to you.
 
I poured money into my vBulletin 4 site before I converted over to Xenforo. The money I spent on xenforo addons has been far, far less because most of what I need is already built into Xenforo. The SEO is there and so is the friendly UI that even noobs can understand. Not only that, some of the free modifications that are available are worth their weight in gold. Spending less time to work on the site after a minor vB4 patch or updates that break everything has made my move to Xenforo totally worth it.

Don't get me wrong though. vB4 is still the most powerful forum software with a large developer community, far greater than xenforo's but hey... after digging in the guts of vB4 for months and then turning around to dig in the guts of XenForo is like dumping Kim Kardashian whose been ran through everybody... then dating the cute girl next store you grew up with who ended up being a hot chick too.
 
melbo said:
Converted from vB3 to XF around 1 month ago. Traffic tanked hard - for 1 day:)


All metrics are up: Member activity, engagement, likes, conversations all up. Guest traffic from search engines up. Revenue up ~5x from what it was a month ago.
All urls were 301 redirected, vBSEO links are 301 redirected and a big thing for me was that I also pulled all my old static html pages (pre forum) into the XF Pages system, Enhanced the Pages with the help of ragtek and now have one tidy package of everything under XF.

Lawsuit, slow development etc. whatever. Ain't skeered.

Moving to XF was the best thing that we ever did for our community.
Well, free stuff Friday's were pretty successful too ;)
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Could you recreate the URL structure to the new XF? I am worried all old URLs will be broken if I switch to XF from vB4/vBSeo. Happened to me once when I messed up and took some time to recover.
 
Nicke said:
Could you recreate the URL structure to the new XF? I am worried all old URLs will be broken if I switch to XF from vB4/vBSeo. Happened to me once when I messed up and took some time to recover.
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I don't think you can change the way XF creates 'Pretty URLs' but my redirects have all worked great.
I have to admit that this was one of my greatest fears and although I had a couple minor problems (Thanks Jake!), I was fixed quickly and redirects are seamless. Then again, within 48 hours, Google had nearly every url re-indexed with the new XF urls.

My SERPs in Google dropped for a few days and then came back and most of them moved up a few notches.

This was my experience
 
The developers I've run across doing XenForo stuff *seem* to me to be better developers. I think it has to do with vBulletin being *easier* to develop in, but I would argue XenForo is better to develop in, but there's also a learning curve that non-developers aren't going to take the time to mess with.

That being said, after building so much stuff for XenForo myself, now whenever I build stuff for vBulletin, it almost feels like I'm losing IQ points just looking at how vB's hook system works compared to XF's.
 
digitalpoint said:
That being said, after building so much stuff for XenForo myself, now whenever I build stuff for vBulletin, it almost feels like I'm losing IQ points just looking at how vB's hook system works compared to XF's.
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I could say the same about the styles system.
 
8thos said:
I could say the same about the styles system.
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Amen. (y)
whyweprotest said:
Is it now? Would like to hear first hand experience since that's where I'm likely going to.
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IPB is a resource hog; page loads sucks - Everything from the front end, to the ACP side - I couldn't bear staying in an IPB site. I was offered an admin role by a legacy reborn to take his xbox site to the next level. Once I was made admin, I took a gander and tinkered around with IPB. To my horror, I checked out the ACP to find out just how fast or how powerful it is... I sat there for minutes just to load a ACP page. Really? Here I was thinking vB4 was slow... Now IPB, too? It almost made me cry just seeing it load.

It just reminded me of vB4. :(:notworthy:
Mr.Rick said:
I can live with vb3, i cannot however deal with vb4. Perhaps I am stuck in my vb3 ways and can't adapt to vb4, I cant say for certain what my issue is.
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You don't have to say any more. I think half of the people that posted on this thread has seen how horrendous vB4 was. I was a vB3/vB4 customer until 4.1.4 broke my entire site into shambles. I wasted almost around $200 dollars on this, and the worst part is, when I upgraded vB3 into vB4 - It killed my most expensive, my most visited website. In a few months, I transferred to xenForo and am the happy with it. Google pushed my site up on top and above the others.

The best part is? No redirection required! Hah! :D
Do I care IB owns vBulletin, not at all. I have no interest in vB4 or vB5. I wish someone had a revert script, I would buy that.
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You should've cared that IB owns vBulletin. They will charge you again, and not in a good way. vB5 is just around the corner, and when you upgrade, it will come with a price.
 
Digital Doctor said:
Around the corner in 3 months ? 1 year ?
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7369979638_4782b5bebc.jpg
 

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