Does anyone feel like this is the next-gen of forums?

I think that we will see the true nature of the platform at XF2.1
Agreed.
It was 9 months between 1.2 and 1.3, 6 months between 1.3 and 1.4, 11 months between 1.4 and 1.5.
If XF2 is released in early Oct, then averages would likely see XF2.1 in mid 2018. Some developers of large add-on's are signalling longer timeframes before their able to release XF2 compatible versions. Could be quite some time yet before end users see the benefits of the XF2 platform.
 
Haven’t seen it directly mentioned in those terms but I’d have to say by the comments of addon developers I’ve seen it looks quite promising! ;)
FYI
Please note that although XenForo 2 is essentially feature-locked, in order that we can progress as quickly as possible through beta testing and on to a stable, supported release, we are of course actively soliciting suggestions and feedback for XenForo 2.1 and beyond, for which we already have big plans - we are very excited to continue building new and exciting features on the new framework, and we are greatly looking forward to seeing what the add-on community comes up with.
 
Until someone creates something with the mobile fluidness of Facebook groups or Reddit and the ability to push photos on the fly like Snap Chat or Instagram, they will continue to be the 4 top dogs for online discussion and interaction. Is XenForo the best forum software currently on the market? Hands down by far. But, is it the new next generation thing that will make people move to it like Facebook did to My Space. Far from it.
 
Agreed ^

Disagree. Community discussion and online participation/engagement is increasing at an exponential rate. Just not in the methodology/presentation that you likely associate with the term Forums. Thus, why software developers have to decide if they are making a Forum, or a community engagement system/suite.

Also agree with this. I spoke to two people this week at a hobbyist meetup and we were talking about content on 'The Forums', we got confused because for a few minutes we were talking about two different websites. They were talking about Facebook groups, I was talking about one of the two other classic style 'forums' for that hobby.

One of them was only pushed to register and get onto Facebook so he could follow the (group) forums. Not for the traditional reason of connecting with friends/family.

One of the guys lives on a canal boat and so facebook groups is way more engaging and a compelling mobile experience, so he uses that platform as it's better on his phone.

For many people now, Facebook groups are their complete online forum and community experience. That is the current/next generation forum experience for many users in 2017.

They got the basics right cross platform, they have the core basic (live) connectivity down pat (yes live should be considered basic these days if the sites in a 1st world country with HQ internet access). They got the app working well, they got one click 'group/forum' joining spot on so lots of people are members of dozens or even hundreds of groups, they got push and desktop notifications sorted, they got live user direct messaging sorted on desktop and mobile (again with push, which is what makes it work and flow so well)

Now they're pushing more classic forum like features out. You can now connect groups to eachother to make a more node like structure. Got a popular hobby group? Create a new BST one and link them. Bam, you now have a new node and some kind of structure to your fbook community.

I saw new mod and admin badges appear a couple of week ago, postbit style. I'm sure that will get extended.

The next gen of classic forums needs to be super easy to use and get all the core parts of community seamless cross platform.

Easy registration
Easy posting in the right subforum without confusing new users and daunting them with a list of 100 categories browse through
Easy sharing of images and video (to any post, not just a gallery)
Much better private chat interfaces with live updates (I regularly start chats with users on my XF site and we switch to Facebook chat or What'sApp after a few messages as it's so frustrating not having live updates or have a small chat window follow you around the site as you browse, it's crap in comparison)
Push to phones and desktop alerts for thread and private message replies to keep conversation flowing
Better discoverability of all newly published content types and any content that has had recent comments.
Tightly integrated events or calendar system to help facilitate offline community and meetups in addition to the online forum.


The quality of the XF2 mods and 3rd party devs will dictate how quickly XF can compete and shine in it's own right in comparison. Especially those developing the phone apps. Sadly I'm not sure how successful any of the phone apps will be without being first party and very tightly integrated into the core or at least aligned with the XF2 vision and roadmap so that it can be designed and developed with the long term vision in mind and the flexibility to instantly enable new add-ons and have tweaks and features go live in the app after being configured in the forum ACP.

The backend must be able to accept any type of user generated content too, ie. video (even if it's offloaded to a 3rd party service like YouTube). A sure fire way to send a user off to another platform is telling them they can't submit a basic content type for technical or other reasons. Without that and many other features, and until we do have a great app, (classic) forums will never truly be next-gen and cross platform integrating the native features that matter and a mobile UI that's beautiful, user friendly and re-engages the user at the right moment.
 
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I've been getting a good look at Xenforo 2 and I personally like it a lot.

My question to the community is does anyone feel like the step being taken here by the creators of Xenforo is going torwards a new way of using forum software?

Sort of a next-gen approach.
If you define next-gen as a way to quick throw in any crap (funny images, videos etc.), with your smartphone, simultaneously eating a banana and driving your car, then no, I don't think XF2 can be titled as the next generation forum software.
I just see it as a (small?) evolution of the existing desktop based community software.
Sure, the future seems to be mobile only... but is this really the way we (or xenforo) should lay our main focus?
Maybe I am to old for this (50) but I hate it to read and participate on a community using my smartphone.
 
I've been following this software since the vB days. It's "ok" to me. As a simpleton end user I find the editor, in particular quotes, very clunky and not intuitive.
 
If you define next-gen as a way to quick throw in any crap (funny images, videos etc.), with your smartphone, simultaneously eating a banana and driving your car, then no, I don't think XF2 can be titled as the next generation forum software.
I just see it as a (small?) evolution of the existing desktop based community software.
Sure, the future seems to be mobile only... but is this really the way we (or xenforo) should lay our main focus?
Maybe I am to old for this (50) but I hate it to read and participate on a community using my smartphone.

It seems a lot of people are missing my point. I was saying I thought it seemed like a "next-gen approach". Wheras the easy access functionality and different features would make it seem like something new and fresh rather than the same old stuff were used to seeing.

There's a lot in my opinion that makes it appear this way. Maybe more new-gen than next-gen but you get what I'm trying to convey. Easy access and the approach taken seems to lead on to a new style of forum software. Kind of like a trademark to the product. Add-ons tip the scale with this as more developers are flocking to Xenforo to see what the fuss is about. As I'm sure they are (though I can't give examples). You can imagine as many developers as the product already has that it's going to increase even more. But the easy access features are really what lead me to make this thread.
 
Nobody on a mobile cares about a WYSIWYG editor any more. XF2 needs to just fly for the user. Big, easy to use, prompt and too the point for the content and interaction by any user. The "reply" function, for instance, should not quote the users content. It should be an ease of use link for a person to click and post, near instantly... without the intent to reply to x persons content. At most, it quotes the person, not the content. Quote should do that... nothing else.

70% plus of my audience is mobile. Everything should be mobile focused... quick, fast, simple, just the absolute essentials and nothing more. People may write lists and use smilies on mobiles... everything else... gone.

Oh... live posting, so people can see people are in the process of responding, would keep people around much longer.
 
I think that Xenforo evolves too slow.
Xenforo v2 was announced more than 3 years ago (https://xenforo.com/community/threads/xenforo-2-0-development-updates.113262/).
I'm a software developer myself, and I don't understand why it takes so long. I'm sure that the version released will be 100% bug free. Personally I would be fine with having a few non-critical bugs and a faster development cycle.

As I didn't think that it will take it so long to be released, we decided two years ago not to further customize our installation and wait for the next major version.
Also the decision to release a completely non-backwards compatible version is a risky decision. It can take years until a similar set of plug-ins will be available.
 
Also the decision to release a completely non-backwards compatible version is a risky decision. It can take years until a similar set of plug-ins will be available.
That will be the issue for me... I'm in no rush now to pay for conversion of custom add-ons when I have a solid working version.
 
70% plus of my audience is mobile. Everything should be mobile focused... quick, fast, simple, just the absolute essentials and nothing more. People may write lists and use smilies on mobiles... everything else... gone.
many still think of going 100% mobile as hit/miss,they put mobile approach as secondary in their thought process. They design for desktop and then try a few shots to make it mobile-friendly 😋 that's where "next-gen" character ceases.
Need of the moment is "made for mobile, compatible with desktop"
 
Also the decision to release a completely non-backwards compatible version is a risky decision. It can take years until a similar set of plug-ins will be available.

If it means the next gen of plugins are going to be more capable and higher quality then I say go for it. Screw catering for legacy if you can help it, forum software is already behind the times compared to other software coming out these days.

The rewrite is supposed to make it easier for devs to create plugins, so hopefully the release of XF2 mods will ramp up much faster than the first time around. Especially now that there's a much larger pool of installs to make it worth investing the time to make them.
 
Nobody on a mobile cares about a WYSIWYG editor any more.

I feel like the editor buttons should be hidden by default in responsive view, with a very discrete link to toggle it into view.

You could perhaps also have a user option to decide with the editor buttons are visible by default. I'd be happy for the buttons to be hidden 100% of the time at all viewports and click to show the editor buttons only when I want them.

Something like this perhaps:

Toggle editor buttons.webp
 
The editor preference is now handled differently in XF2. It's no longer a preference which is saved in the database. Instead, when you click on the "Toggle BB code" button...
1502890200832.webp

... the setting is saved on your device (using the browser's local storage). This means your normal mobile browser might have the toolbar disabled, whereas your desktop browser might have it enabled.

There's no way to set this as a default for users, but at least you can let them know that it is possible so they can set it up like that themselves.
 
Thanks Chris, I just tried it and it does save, but the entire toolbar is still visible and takes up screen real estate on smaller mobile devices, hence why I think being able to completely hide it would a nice touch for mobile.

It also get's around the issues with not being able to scroll if your finger begins the swipe on the toolbar. Although I assume that bug will be sorted at some point regardless.

If your mobile device has a smaller 4" screen, as seen on an iPhone 5 or SE, then the toolbar takes up a huge amount of space.

When the keyboard is visible and with the floating nabar, your working reply area is only about 300px tall.

The editor buttons are about 65px tall.

If you hid them and had a very discrete text link instead you could save approx 50px, that's about 17% extra space to view and edit the message your composing, plus it would look a lot cleaner.

I wonder how many individual posts require the toolbar when on a mobile device in the responsive view? I imagine it's a tiny percentage. It wouldn't be gone completely either, just hidden by default.


1502895689245.webp
 
The only reason I use my desktop as much as I do is because of XenForo and MMO gaming. As said, "if XenForo was made
for mobile, compatible with desktop", I'd be on my phone or tablet far more often. I have members flat out tell me they don't know how to use our forum on their phone and because of that I get the "why not just do this on FB" a lot!
 
a simple solution like "quick thread" in thread lists to "quick reply" in threads,sticked at bottom like upper navigation is much required.
 
I wonder how many individual posts require the toolbar when on a mobile device in the responsive view? I imagine it's a tiny percentage. It wouldn't be gone completely either, just hidden by default.
I can't imagine ANYONE posting from a mobile device is going to put much effort into text formatting a post. This is something that social media platforms are catering today's users to: simple, easy, posting.
 
Something like Sonnb's live thread should be in core and active for all threads. Refreshing or clicking a link to view new posts is so 5 years ago. People are adapted to new content appearing in front of them on the fly.
 
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