Nice overreaction?
Obviously the community hasn't changed, and people who have said so are the same that cover their eyes and ears and pretend nothing is wrong. However that doesn't have much to say in your response to jmurrayhead or I.
He was a customer of Inferno Tech and when Decado moved over to DBT he had to re-purchase a mod. He dislikes your site (I can't blame him, nor will most people probably) and he didn't outright criticize anything
but your site.
My post was only in relation to Inferno Tech. Nothing to do with DBT because I could find replacements for all of your add-ons or do them in house
.
jmurrayhead even stood up for you at the top of this page, so honestly I don't see why your getting so defensive. And rather than getting emotional and argumentative just point out facts and address the worries of people, otherwise you'll just ruin most chances of you actually getting a start on XenForo.
The mod you're referring to (vBShout) was re-coded from scratch and shared only a name with the Inferno Tech version. Despite this all former ITech customers were given a discount equal to Decado's (my) cut of the vBShout Sale. No one involved in Inferno Tech got any money from Inferno Tech customers for the DBTech version of vBShout. The only person paid was the coder who had written vBShout from scratch and who had 0 involvement in Inferno Tech.
Regarding the site layout.. -shrugs- everyone has their own opinion of what does and doesn't look good. The layout tested well and got good feedback in surveys and polls. As long as our customers like it that's good enough for me.
Generally, from my observations, I feel the only time this happened is when you had individuals who has a particularly elevated status from the VB days, who then came here with an expectation that the "former glory" they had entitled them to some sort of special treatment. It's quite apparent when you look at people who made a lot of noise and demanded special treatment, got none, and have now left the community.
On the contrary, when you look at people starting to do development, or want help working with XF, you often see multiple people trying to help them out and point them in the right direction.
As for "lying and spreading rumors", to be honest, all I see is people posting incorrect information, which, if thats the case, rather than come out with accusations that they've done it in a malicious way, why not just just correct them instead?
You could be right, I just find it strange that no one ever posts incorrect information that swings in the opposite direction - that makes us sound better rather than worse. A little further down the thread we have more misinformation from a person who holds a grudge against us because we asked him to stop removing and then editing our copyright without paying for it from our free mods he was using. Do I think it's a coincidence that someone with a grudge is posting misinformation that makes us look bad? Especially misinformation that could have been verified in 5 seconds by visiting our site and looking at the footer? I have my doubts.
The truth is people posting negative comments are hardly going to have good intentions, so when those negative comments also happen to be factually inaccurate it raises suspicions.
DragonByte Tech does make some cool add-ons. I will give them that.
But they're not always coded nicely & they have the habit of blaming everything & everyone under the sun when something goes wrong.
Their "attitude" toward people is also what I would classify as "hostel" as demonstrated in this thread (the clear overreacting toward the smallest things).
But if this wasn't enough, their add-ons are normally associated with not 1 copyright, but rather 2 - 4 links on every page, per add-on. So if you install 2 of their add-ons you end up with 2 copyrights with 4 - 8 links.
Our copyright lines tend to have two links - one back to our homepage and one back to the distinct product page for the product in question. There is also a completely optional third link which can be turned off in the ACP and exists only in our Lite versions. We have a copyright condenser to prevent the every addon taking up its own line and having its own set of links. It makes the copyright link read as:
"Site powered by vBulletin Mods & Addons from DragonByte Technologies Ltd. (Details)"
Where the first link ( vBulletin Mods & Addons) leads to our homepage and the second (Details) to a page displaying details on all of the installed mods on the site. This is easily available information that anyone can see simply by visiting our website and looking at the copyright footer. I am happy to be able to clear up this information for you.
Forsaken pretty much took the words out of my mouth, so I don't need to touch base on that.
Regardless, instead of complaining about the community here, I would focus on capitalizing on an opportunity. Surely, getting all defensive and attacking the community can't be good for possible future business, right? Who knows how much longer vBulletin will stay afloat? Do you really want all of your eggs in one basket?
Honestly whether or not there is an opportunity remains to be seen. The truth is that a hostile community makes it much more difficult to convince our coders to code for xF and support their mods on xenforo.com. It also makes it difficult to build a market when misinformation is spread and there are large sections of the community who have major issues with things like copyright (an historical example of that can be found here:
http://xenforo.com/community/threads/powered-by-page.6301/). The market as it stands is many times smaller than the vBulletin market and it would be a risky investment to spend time and resources on a growing product in the hope it one day develops into the market leader. When that's the case you have to take everything into account, and the reception your work is likely to get from the community is vitally important when that community is also the primary source of "advertising" for modifications. Because xF is still small (relatively speaking) a vocal minority who are happy to spread untrue information or publicly attack developers rather than simply voting with their wallets have a disproportionately large voice.
To everyone who feels we may have overreacted please accept my apologies. The truth is it's difficult to go from hearing DBTech customers ask us to come over to XenForo and talking about the positive changes in the community to coming over here hoping it's true to find that even in our absence people are spreading incorrect information discrediting us, whatever the intention behind that may have been.
The truth is that unless my calculations are very wrong somewhere, it's highly unlikely to be financially beneficial coming over to XenForo at this point. The fact a few of our most loyal customers have switched to xF and that we really like Kier, Ashley and Mike and the work they do is what has me seriously considering us investing some more time to give it another shot. The hostility of vocal parts of the community is what gives me - and the half dozen coders at DBTech - pause.
Regards,
Iain
