Max Fridman
Well-known member
Cool UI.X2 redesign is looking promising lol!
Has anyone noticed a decline in forums?
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Cool UI.X2 redesign is looking promising lol!
But expensive at $1000 year
Wesker
Well-known member
Not saying anything bad here because any improvement is a good but the core issue is that XF needs a major change and that means breaking away from traditional forums and doing something we haven't seen before. That's what they should be thinking with the development of XF3. As for XF2, I think you have just about perfected how good an actual traditional forum can be. Sure you can make some upgrades here and there but with XF3 you have to think big.
Such as?
Mr. Jinx
Well-known member
Might need some major performance improvements (hint: pagespeed mobile score is bad)
Only if he's allowed back to Earth.
Max Fridman
Well-known member
For sure. UI.X is pretty bad performance wise Xenforo doesn't help too tho. It blows my mind how a blog can literally put a single page on Google Search and rank higher than our 10 years old site with a better page.
For sure. 83$ monthly is a steep price for forum owners this days.
As you can see in the demo from @Mike Creuzer i see, better navigation for mobile and desktop, he already wrote a nice essay on this forum, the Xenforo design as it is, i can say "lackluster", the features are barebone and need a lot of third party addon to be flashed out need a list?
- Tags for example you need at least 60$ of addons to make them useful and usable (addon developed for a big forum with Xon help).
- Trophies needs third party addons to work better.
- User profiles are barebone too a single page we don't have a User Ranking System, User Activity System or something but a single page with follows and followers, you can't have Widgets in the profile page by default.
- User Badges? Even Facebook Groups has them.
Seems a little bit "flame" to me this continue "poking" around asking things when 1 entire business (Audentio / Themehouse) is looking forward to improve things and their founder wrote 1 giant post about it and literally 3 devs have a market monopoly on Xenforo (Xon, Siropu, OzzModz) for nice addons but, i repeat myself a lot of things should be built in the core experience, so they can focus on niche things and improve those not create them from scratch.
Then someone arrives and say "but we don't need this because my business forums that talks about insurances and is followed by 70 years old people is doing great!".
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Max Taxable
Well-known member
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Ultimately, there is just too much CSS from allowing just about anything to be customized. I wrote a bit about this recently, but we are waiting for 2.3. Im confident XenForo will improve the default theme and such so the era of needing a UI.X or any framework won't make sense except for people who want that very intricate detail and control. The goal is a perfect 100 in lighthouse, and it is possible with heavy caching and such. But its a number of factors, not just theme. Having a build process to reduce font awesome andsuch as what @Kirby built is absolutely a must. But even with UI.X you could turn off the Javascript features, the avatars, reduce your node list, stop loading fonts in, etc. etc. and with caching we can see a 95 score in lighthouse.
We have to do GOOFY things to get a dark mode to read in from the operating system for example such as loading the entire dark theme css as well. So not is there extra CSS as there is, there is also now double that IF you want to load in a dark theme for people with dark mode on. With CSS variables for example and a revamping of the themes section this wont be necessary. Browser support for this just wasnt there when the style property system and theming system were developed. In fact the style property system was built BECAUSE this was lacking from browsers. So its just the natural progression. You could do something a bit hacky sure to get dark mode to work but I imagine itd be a pain to maintain and fall outside the expected use of the theming system and template system as a whole.
The idea I had of giving administrators of forums full control over their theme was simply wrong. When I built UI.X that was my goal, and I succeeded in that I suppose. What forum administrators need now is just the most streamlined, mobile friendly, modern and industry standard UX. And to be clear, I cringe at theme frameworks a whole now (at least ones that dont have a build process). WordPress is notorious for offering bloaty themes. Why? Because the market asks for it. We developers and designers often build what is wanted not what is right.
ETA around the gaming.audent.io demo, going to see if we can just do 1 css.php (not sure), defer twitter card and whatever other JS, fontawesome build process, etc. Desktop is getting a 92 fwiw, will post scores after I do those few things
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This.
I'm not sure how many times it has to be said, or if I'm just saying this in the wrong way. Just take a look at all the dead forums here https://xenforo.com/community/forums/forum-showcase-and-critiques.53/?order=post_date&direction=desc
The only forums that are "alive" are the ones populated by >40 year olds like property rentals, hairloss, XYZ car model.
While you might be sitting comfortably in your competition free niche, I doubt Xenforo can keep paying their devs to do the same amount of work when only 1% of niches work out.
I'm not entirely convinced that optimization is the main problem that xenforo faces. Xenforo already beats reddit on every measure here.
Maybe it will help as 1 of many changes. But I think the problems are much deeper than performance.
If you can make that back then yes. Why no. What TH offers. That should be in core, or at least half of it. Every niche is different, and I agree that XF devs can't fulfil everyone's needs and wishes, however, they can improve the forum to be more user friendly and appealing not only to admins, but to users as well, as they are the main audience.
imno007
Well-known member
Dude, you're missing the point entirely, at least my point. Forget about however you want to define "fad," which you seem to be stuck on. The main thing is you CAN'T compete with them, not in any meaningful way. Why are we even discussing that as some kind of possibility? You can still find a way to be successful, with a little luck, but you are not going to "compete" with FB or Reddit, etc., certainly not with a ready-made cms or forum software that you spent less than $200 on.
I don't know about you, but I've spent over $500 on xenforo itself and related addons/themes/hosting costs, not to mention my own time spent coding which could have been billed at $100/hr somewhere else. I've spent a heroic amount of time and money on my own forums just for it to be beaten out by free alternatives.
Can't speak for Kier and the other people at Xenforo management for sure, but I don't think they ever intended Xenforo to be the cheap choice for people who can't code that are picking up the left-overs reddit left behind.
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Max Taxable
Well-known member
That would be, phpbb.
Well hold on, we get plenty of add-ons added to core over time. What I'm proposing likely will have poor reception for most forums and idk if XenForo wants to do that. Maybe. XenForo devs do a crazy amount of work as is. Every addon and feature ever SHOULD NOT be in core. XenForo is a framework as well, and every feature built into a framework will make it complex. XenForo is already one of the most feature rich platforms out there as it is.
Imo if I were xf I'd probably tire of hearing every time someone proposes one more feature after the other. We have all got to be reasonable.
Some features I'd agree likely should not have been in core. Like metrics show that next to no one uses bookmarks in the grand scheme of sites that I work with at least haha
All just my opinion ofc
imno007
Well-known member
You seem to keep getting hung up on trivial points. While what you've spent might seem like a lot to you, it's still not enough to put you in the same arena with the big players you keep referencing, like Reddit. Just as big chain-stores, and big businesses in general, monopolize most business in the brick-and-mortar world, so a relative handful of big businesses monopolize the internet. It was really a natural evolution, no surprise at all: many people were predicting exactly this kind of situation in the early days of the internet. And whatever replaces sites like Reddit and FB and the rest, whether that's five or twenty-five years from now, those sites/platforms are only likely to be even bigger and draw away even more traffic from smaller sites.
So... I'm not saying you should stop trying, or that Xenforo has no room for improvement, but just that you might have to temper your expectations, and try different things; and hopefully you'll eventually hit on something that, while it will likely never compete with Reddit, will provide you with a decent income.
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The end user decides what is better, not the developers or forum owners. They are the ones that have to use it, and they are the ones forum owners need in order to survive. Yet, there are many who think they don't matter at all. The end user is king and what they want is what we should all want. I'm not running a forum for me, I'm running it for those who will use it.
FTL
Well-known member
I'm an end user and have had this view for years, so it's not related to that. I'd noticed how primitive the Facebook system is since I started using it over a decade ago and it hasn't improved since then, so my view hasn't changed. I have only very recently become a forum owner.
This user is king idea I don't completely agree with and is a grey area, depending on circumstance. Creators certainly can and do dictate to users, all the time.
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