. If you agree that Forums are dying out, then XF needs to be more than just a forum system but a suite of community engagement and collaboration functionality so that it supports and provides for a wider breath of customers requirements and enticements.
I agree with this but I think XenForo 2 is forming the framework to provide more features and more promising additions to the software that don't bog it down with nonsense. In my opinion, vBulletin has gone down the crapper due to their stupid "cloud hosting" nonsense, which I never agreed with, and its sluggish interface. IPB and phpMyBB have been compromised a million times and have had very similar, mundane code, mostly forever.
XenForo, on the other hand, continues to update itself with the latest web standards. The ability to use elasticsearch, for instance, could allow you to have a forum with billions of posts, and potentially have no issues.
What HAS changed is that companies like Facebook, Google, and Microsoft have started to realize that they can profit in this area through horizontal monopolization. These companies want to corner the market on information procurement and retrieval. And they are spending BILLIONS of dollars on it, whereas "forum owners" do not have these resources.
When ChaCha.com, a service where you could ask for and get any answer by human or bot, got too big, Google pulled the plug on their AdSense and downranked them in the search results. I know someone who was a personal assistant to the founder of that company, who is, quite frankly, a genius, or at the very least, smart innovator.
These companies don't like forums unless it helps them profit, in my opinion. They can't control the content, otherwise. Why do you think you have Google Groups, Facebook Groups (or whatever the hell its called), etc etc. I mean arguably Facebook itself is just a next-gen forum/bbs.
So there you have it.
Now when you talk about introducing new features, I think XenForo can and will do this, but thats only if thats where the developers want it to go. There is something to be said about a platform that offers good features, provides information in a way in which it can be easily retrieved, and gives you a platform for communication.
A forum is not a blog. If you want to run a blog site, install WordPress. But if what a forum is begins to change, that will be real innovation. Thats how I see it.