Been saying this for years here tbh… yet certain users have bashed others for simply expressing this opinion. There’s so much Xenforo could do to modernize and bring more excitement back into stock forum software again.
Except there are social feed add-ons from reputable developers so why not look at those? You are creating a false dichotomy that the choice is between first party and AI slop when there are actually lots of good add-ons, most of which predate AI slop.
XF could maintain legacy forum setup while just giving a social feed too - and then we can decide what to set as the homepage.
I really do think if XF did this, they'd start selling licenses faster than ever.
I have some of the social media platform scripts, but I haven't seen them handle heavy traffic yet and I'm not sure they can.
I've seen XF handle TONS of traffic on a daily basis, like probably 500k+ in a day and it doesn't flinch.
XF is legit good software, and I think it's one awesome social feed away from being 1000000x's better than any competitor.
Which ones are you thinking of? I've seen a few, but perhaps I missed one. Def share them, if you don't mind.
Always willing to take a look. Thx.
I think forums will make a return - if they can learn to deal with AI bots. Forums will become the space for humans to interact. Thing is, social media benefits from AI slop. Forums, not so much. I can see a need for humans to connect on a promised human interface.
Forums have never left.
What's happened is everyone's dabbled in social media and now think it's better to get their own forum up and running.
This is a reflection of forum engagement and forum administration in general. We've all grown up, the web has matured, forum excitement has tapered.
So, I want to take a moment because while I understand the well-meaning intent behind your statement (and by the way, in no way am I targeting you, this is a sentiment that I see all th etime from the XF community: "just use a third party add-on!"), it's not JUST a social feed.
Social personalization needs to be forged into the entire DNA of the community ... notifications need to be personalized, recommendations of new users to follow, recommendations of new content. It's not just content, its the entire perspective of elevating and individualizing content to maximize engagement. This is something where legacy forums - all of them, not just XF - have fallen so far behind with web 1.0 database linear perspective. Just because things are posted chronologically does NOT mean users care about those items chronologically. Users care if they've posted before in that topic, if they started the topic, if they have friends who posted in that topic, if it's a popular and trending topic, etc - none of that design thinking has seeped into XF (or any of the other legacy software).
What is worrisome is that, ten or fifteen years ago, making my argument would have given collective hope as in, "hey, we see the future, and we need to make those changes." Now, social engagement and personalization is not just the gold standard, it's the base standard of expectation. We're literally using dated design thinking to compete with the biggest social engagement platforms in the world.
True, the format needs work and the art of the longform communication needs to be, and can be, advanced.
I completely agree with pretty much every point you've made but just to home in on that particular area; Why do I have to trawl through pages of posts in a thread to find my post(s)? Why can't I single click/press to list everything I've posted in a long thread? Why can't I do the same for another member?
All rhetorical questions of course, I can't do that simple thing because forum software fails to understand the value of enduring content. It's the one area forums trounce every other type of social platform and yet it never seems to capitalise on it.
^-- we added that kind of thing to our forum because the default navigation is not good.
Reddit style navigation of the whole forum:
Added thread search:
Per category searches
All this functionality exists in xenforo, but there is no UI to expose it, so you need to do template hacks etc.
Hope they see this and steal my idea
Reddit style navigation of the whole forum:
Added thread search:
Per category searches
All this functionality exists in xenforo, but there is no UI to expose it, so you need to do template hacks etc.
Hope they see this and steal my idea
I shared my thoughts the other day on this: https://xenforo.com/community/threads/xenforo-backend-astro-frontend-my-brain-hurts.238563/
If XF3 can do similar to that, then forums are going to be modern. Its like business sites and blogs now, you don't need this heavy wordpress, php, mysql backend nowadays, limited to a template system, when you have much better technologies and you can toss the whole thing into a cloudflare worker. Not saying a forum is suitable for that, but the technologies today are superior in frontend design to make anything modern and fast, easily.
If XF3 can do similar to that, then forums are going to be modern. Its like business sites and blogs now, you don't need this heavy wordpress, php, mysql backend nowadays, limited to a template system, when you have much better technologies and you can toss the whole thing into a cloudflare worker. Not saying a forum is suitable for that, but the technologies today are superior in frontend design to make anything modern and fast, easily.
I have pretty much the same stats on my forum.
They’re actually higher than they were during the good old days 10–15 years ago. At first glance, it looks like everything is going great.
But once you dig deeper and analyze the traffic properly—looking at user agents and other indicators—you realize that more than half of all unique requests come from AI bots. They vacuum up content like giant vacuum cleaners.
Of the remaining 50%, a huge percentage are bots disguising themselves with legitimate user agents, but their real purpose is to scan the site for vulnerabilities.
Every month I get around 100,000 requests just for /wp-admin.php, even though my domain has never run WordPress.
On top of that, hackers constantly probe for files like .env, phpinfo.php, and thousands—actually tens of thousands—of similar paths. By the time you get down to the thousandth most requested URL, you’re seeing things like 150.php, zz.php, and countless other random filenames.
So in the end, out of those millions of requests, about 90–95% are search engine crawlers, AI bots, or bots trying to hack the site.
On a sidenote:
There are ways to clean this out.
It is pretty easy to block these early via .htaccess, using either the target URLs or regular expressions. Also, the majority of those requests does come from a limited set of sources, i.e. a lot does come from Microsoft's Azure Cloud. Blocking the source ASNs keeps your 404-logs clean.
Basically the same anymore. But back in the old days, it was active, with tons of members and lots of interaction between the devs and members.
I don't know; I think it's up to the leaders to engage their forums. What you put in is what you get out of it. I promise if the Admins/Mods were active on this forum like they once were, you would see more and more members on. I see it when @Chris D posts about upcoming changes; existing members get excited, and the forums feel alive again. When there is a lack of communication, the forums die down and no one visits anymore.
Given the latest posts of @Chris D in this thread interaction between devs/staff and customers seems to be deliberately avoided and customers seem to be more seen as annoying or a threat. And the times when @Chris D communicated constructively seem over as well. Let's hope it was just a bad day. But as with other communication by staff towards customers over the last months this is again a style and behavior that in a normal company would considered to be inacceptable - with XenForo it seems to become the standard more and more (if communication happens at all).
I've not been here during those "old days" but they are gone for sure. XF as a product is still good, despite being years behind, XF as a company turns more and more out to be horrible and as unable as unwilling to learn in regards of communication. I've always defended the XF crew over the last months despite understanding the frustration many have. So often and so far that I even got falsely accused to be paid for that or my account to be a socket puppet account of an XF employee. But enough is enough. I don't expect much from 2.4 that would be relevant to me - so I don't care too much when it will be released. It is clearly not a major breakthrough or a massive step into the right direction, at least not for me. And clearly not after 1,5 years of delay. Still I don't care too much. But when a company starts to see and treat its customers as enemies something has gone badly wrong in terms of attitude.
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When I check who is online, basically there are only few members online and fewer familiar to me.
Is Mike still involved? I thought he had moved on.
