how is XF doing in term of customers compared to other platforms?

I highly doubt it. XF2.0 offers mostly feature parity. It's XF2.1 which will offer new features.

No one's going to convert a large forum to 1.5 now (and I'd say that statement has been true since XF2 was announced). It means addons (and particular styles) needing to be redone and will just confuse users. I imagine a lot of people have been waiting.
 
No one's going to convert a large forum to 1.5 now (and I'd say that statement has been true since XF2 was announced). It means addons (and particular styles) needing to be redone and will just confuse users. I imagine a lot of people have been waiting.

Respectfully I would disagree. If XenForo 1.5.x meets the needs of those forum admins, then they should invest time into investigating whether converting over a forum is viable and feasible.

If it doesn't, then they most certainly can choose to wait for XenForo 2.0.
 
No one's going to convert a large forum to 1.5 now (and I'd say that statement has been true since XF2 was announced). It means addons (and particular styles) needing to be redone and will just confuse users. I imagine a lot of people have been waiting.

Same here. I've been waiting to update my forum but I dont see the point of going through a big update and overhaul only for XF2 to come out weeks or months later and then have to go through all that expense again.

I know XF1.5 will be supported for a long time but it's not the same.
 
Respectfully I would disagree. If XenForo 1.5.x meets the needs of those forum admins, then they should invest time into investigating whether converting over a forum is viable and feasible.

If it doesn't, then they most certainly can choose to wait for XenForo 2.0.

"Investing time" and actually upgrading are two hugely different things.

Take Something Awful as an example, they've been publicly talking about moving their very customised (and HUGE) VB2 forum over to XF for something like 6 months. If I'm guessing right, their owner joined here over a year ago to start "investigating" their options but it'd be crazy to move something that big over to XF1.5 and spend masses of time/money on things like styling and addons when XF2 is on the horizon. XF2 got announced WAY too early and that's temporarily killed growth but I'm confident things will pick up massively once it's released and a lot of people who've been sitting on their hands for the past year will jump on it.
 
"Investing time" and actually upgrading are two hugely different things.

Take Something Awful as an example, they've been publicly talking about moving their very customised (and HUGE) VB2 forum over to XF for something like 6 months. If I'm guessing right, their owner joined here over a year ago to start "investigating" their options but it'd be crazy to move something that big over to XF1.5 and spend masses of time/money on things like styling and addons when XF2 is on the horizon. XF2 got announced WAY too early and that's temporarily killed growth but I'm confident things will pick up massively once it's released and a lot of people who've been sitting on their hands for the past year will jump on it.

Respectfully, that is incorrect. Upgrading is part of the investing time to understand the viability and feasibility.

Taking your example, a mature board like "Something Awful" would not convert their board on the first go around and then develop plugins/addons after the conversion.

They would need to take time to study how to implement their addons, styles, and estimate the cost of converting over their existing code into code useable in the XenForo environment. Moreover, they would need to run several actual upgrade runs to test whether the import process actually works - both vBulletin data and their custom data.

Prototyping, upgrading and migration testing is a huge part of this investigating process because it may very well be that when it goes live, it would break functionality that is a huge part of their communities success.

Whether XF2 killed the process for Something Awful or anyone else is debatable as each person is unique and again - as I stated earlier - it depends on each administrator's requirements.

Some may have a need for custom code. Others may not.

Case in point: We launched SimsWorkshop.net last year full well knowing XF 2.0 is on the horizon. The current requirements for SimsWorkshop were met. Delaying the site is not practical as there was no timeline for when XF 2.0 will hit and I decided to moved forward regardless.
 
More or less agree with @ManagerJosh I think most people I've talked to are fine going with 1.X since its completely stable, has a huge amount of add-ons and support and documentation, and is available now without any waiting periods. Others may be waiting on XF2, but Ive been telling people to wait a year if your forum is for-profit, wait til everything catches up.
 
No one's going to convert a large forum to 1.5 now (and I'd say that statement has been true since XF2 was announced). It means addons (and particular styles) needing to be redone and will just confuse users. I imagine a lot of people have been waiting.
I worked on the migration of my big board for 3 years, did the migration in February of this year and only now I am getting close to having the same functions I had on vb3. ( I had 110 addons on vb3) I should have everything fully imported in 1-2 months. (except for some obvious things like Events)
XF1 development is still going full steam ahead. I didn't even have time to install XF2 and play with it.
So coming from that point of view, I certainly do not expect XF2 to happen anytimes soon for us. I will upgrade my site to XF2 when all addons I use are ported and after XF2 offers enough new functionality to make the investment worthwhile. This will probably take years.
 
I worked on the migration of my big board for 3 years, did the migration in February of this year and only now I am getting close to having the same functions I had on vb3. ( I had 110 addons on vb3) I should have everything fully imported in 1-2 months. (except for some obvious things like Events)
XF1 development is still going full steam ahead. I didn't even have time to install XF2 and play with it.
So coming from that point of view, I certainly do not expect XF2 to happen anytimes soon for us. I will upgrade my site to XF2 when all addons I use are ported and after XF2 offers enough new functionality to make the investment worthwhile. This will probably take years.

If you had to start that 3 year process now would you or would you wait?
 
I waited for years on vb4 to reach the level I need which never happened. The same for ecommerce software. I will never wait again for something that may turn out to be very different than what I need. I will use what exists and work with that.
If I had to start over now I would explore IPS4.2 first.

The issue with waiting is the uncertainty of what's to come. XF2.1 will likely have many of the features that I need. So if I would create those for XF2.0 then when 2.1 comes out it may turn out to be for nothing. So if I would wait then I would wait for 2.1 not 2.0
 
Last edited:
After hovering around 1.25% lead for 2-3 weeks, the gap is now widening: 1.3% yesterday, 1.4% today. Let's hope that's a trend! :D
 
After hovering around 1.25% lead for 2-3 weeks, the gap is now widening: 1.3% yesterday, 1.4% today. Let's hope that's a trend! :D
Although, the historical charts would suggest XF has peaked - 37.66% marketshare on Dec 01, 2015 - and hovering around 36% since.
By comparison, IPS has grown by 7.8% and BB by 3% in the same time period.
 
After hovering around 1.25% lead for 2-3 weeks, the gap is now widening: 1.3% yesterday, 1.4% today. Let's hope that's a trend! :D

IMHO, this gap is going to leapfrog the day xF 2.0 Gold is released... the growth has been stagnant over last years becuase xF2 was announced a good 3 years ago and many vB/IPB forums may be holding the mammoth migration progress to xF 2.0 rather than moving to xF1.x and then doing it all over again... vB 3.x still holding 40%ish ground in vB marketshare almost 10 years after it demise, speaks volumes about its developers, in itself... :)
 
Last edited:
Unfortunately that chart excludes software like Discourse, Flarum, Vanilla. Probably because some of those have a free version.
 
Also I doubt that to many people are concerned about which one is leading the marketshare like they once were. It is about as interesting as watching water evaporate.
 
It is about as interesting as watching water evaporate.
That's half-way to my coffee being ready - most interesting! :)

I think XF2 being less than 1/5th of all XF installations is an interesting stat though - seems XF2.1 is the desirable (or required) end goal for many.
 
Unfortunately that chart excludes software like Discourse, Flarum, Vanilla. Probably because some of those have a free version.

This, I’ve seen loads of new forums go down the discourse route these days.

It’s not easy to differentiate between free self hosted installed and the paid commercial version through discourse directly, which throws a wrench in the accuracy of the commercial stats above.
 
Top Bottom