I think XenForo Cloud has become an important part of the business and must also be consuming a large portion of the available resources, leaving fewer for development.
Albeit what you say is true (Cloud is taking more time).
From a previous job where it dealt with cloud infra for customers and their services I can say this is most likely a high possibility. Especially when it's mainly the dev team + a few others here to handle all of the cloud related tickets/etc. It took up a huge chunk of dev time at my last job and slowed feature work to a grind.
No doubt XF Cloud will consume more time in comparison to having no Cloud, the question is to which amount. XF Cloud was
announced in June 2021 and
the Beta started in October 2021. That was five years ago. I'd assume that the setup has somewhat stabilized since then, the more, as it is basically a clearly defined and limited technical scope that has not massively changed over the last years. Things like provisioning, backup, monitoring etc. will be automated so the main topic apart from maintenance of the technical infrastructure (and to a degree developing it further) will be ongoing support and possibly imports for new customers. So the effort involved vastly depends from the number of customers and the growth rate - it will obviously make a massive difference if they have 100 cloud customers or 100.000 and if per month they grow by one customer or by one hundred. But overall cloud offerings are considered cash-cows for a reason: A lot of revenue for relatively limited efforts in terms of continuous manpower and loads of synergy effects and gains from automation that whoever offers a cloud solution can make (the latter making cloud attractive for both: the ones offering it and the ones buying it).
But clearly things like i.e. the
migration of dpreview forums to XF Cloud last year will probably have consumed a lot of staff time and this year, following
what ChrisD said, as with most of us, considerable amounts of time went into protecting against bots (which resulted in CF being beefed up massively here on the forums).
I have personally been working, or at least on call, 24/7/365 for over 12-18 months constantly having to deal with the repercussions from the type of issues
However, no idea if this affected Cloud as well - possibly at least in terms of support as
Cloud pricing is billed based on requests to the db
What page views count against allowances?
We only count page views that involve connecting to the database and rendering a complete page of HTML. Cached pages and simple file transfers are not counted.
and with bots rushing for /search and what's new requests possibly went through the roof with many clients which then generated support work.
So either way, staff size
seems not to have grown since 2021/2022:
Technically, @Jeremy P and @NixFifty were both hired around the 2.2 release, which is when Kier mentioned Mike started winding down his commitments.
As has always been the case, support from staff is only guaranteed via the ticket system where you may well be greeted by any one of the staff including Jon (@Slavik), Paul (@Brogan), Me, Kier, Gems (@Gemma Eastwood), Aakif (@NixFifty) and Jeremy (@Jeremy P) depending on what the specific query is.
vs.
2026:
You’re right. You got us. I’m the only one left. I even pay myself and all of the bills. I guess the contributions of Kier, Mike, Gems, Jon, Paul, Jeremy and Aakif don’t matter unless they work in full view or contribute to the forum to an arbitrary satisfactory amount?
The latter has btw. been the sarcastic answer in July this year to a
hint from my side that possibly some additional staff could be a good idea:
Kudos, that you finally do something against the bots. On the other hand: Seems that you act pretty much as a one-man-army, the last man standing at XenForo, trying to safe the world singlehandedly. You work on 2.4, you fix bugs, you do support, you build a bot-fighting-thing, you do the official communication, you answer to pings on the forum and possibly a couple of other things more - does neither sound healthy nor effective but rather overloaded and fragmented. I mean: XF is a small company, but honestly: Where is the other staff and what are they doing? Wouldn't it be responsible, given the improved financial situation through XF Cloud, to employ someone to get some relief for you and some progress in the roadmap?
So it does not seem that additional staff would be in the works or on the roadmap. For my personal taste, w/o having insights, the current staff size seems somewhat small, based on the output and the delays of 2.4 and running a sucessful new product like XF Cloud w/o any additional staff seems somewhat questionable from the outside. Would be interesting to know what size XF's competition is. I.e. Woltlab offers a somewhat comparable product (including cloud and self hosted versions) and does manage to push out
more or less monthly (possibly small) releases. But then I've not used their product and therefor no current experience with it. Still it would be interesting to know a ballpark of their team's size in comparison.
Building up XF Cloud with the existing staff has taken effort and caused delays. Kier
wrote back in September 2022:
I regret that 2.3 has taken longer than I anticipated to come to fruition. A combination of Mike stepping away from day-to-day operations, and the need to divert some development resources to building our Cloud platform has unfortunately resulted in 2.3 being later than we all would have liked.
To avoid a lot of unnecessary speculation with regard to Mike, he has been winding down his commitments to XenForo since before the release of 2.2 and hasn't been part of the active team for over a year. Like me, Mike has been building forum software for over twenty years, ten of them with XenForo and simply felt the time was right to move on.
XenForo 2.3 has been bubbling away for quite some time now and we are coming close to being able to show you the fruits of our labours. I'm confident you will all find something valuable in the new version when all is revealed.
2.3.0 then finally came out mid 2024, so almost 2 years after this statement (the f
irst beta in March). Notably, this statement comes from another locked thread with the title
"Current state of XF and the participation of the XF Team" from September 2022. I've no idea when 2.3 was first announced and what the initial proposed timeline may have been. But in the first HYS for 2.3 in September 2023 (so a year after Kier's above statement) it was menitoned that the initial scope of 2.3 covered what now has become part of 3.0 (and has no timeline yet).
This is not XenForo 3.0
This is not the big design overhaul that was originally targeted for 2.3, which included sweeping changes to the template system and introduced a range of new technologies to provide a significant improvement to many areas of XenForo.
When it became clear that the new design would introduce unresolvable backward-compatibility issues, the decision was made to back out the new design and reserve it for a version of XenForo we will call 3.0. Instead, we decided to ship the new functionality that we have built for 2.3 without the new design, so that existing users can gain access to all the new features without worrying about a major maintenance job to get it integrated.
Some of the new systems that we built to support the 3.0 design have been adapted to work with the 2.3 system, and support for dark mode is one of them.
So the situation in all it's aspects from delays over open bugs to staff communication/participation is not new, rather threads like that have been popping up for years and years (and most were locked sooner or later). Despite that the situation has not changed and so it is possibly fruitless to hope it may now. XF is rock solid but moving forward at snail pace and there are possibly more reasons for that than XF Cloud and maybe also more than staff size. We can't change it but just hope for the best.
