If XenForo's finished, what's next?

I feel like Xenforo is the best forum I've ever had so any direction I choose would be a downgrade from Xenforo. I would probably look at MyBB or even back to phpBB3.
 
Wing said:
Keep in mind Discourse is free through self hosting since its open source, so naturally that is probably the best fallback someday IF Xenforo is no longer with us.
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Frankly I think Discourse is awful for a forum. Just my opinion. One of my forums moved to Discord when the Online Safety Act came along and - it's nothing like a forum. Not popular with members at all. It's quietly getting smaller and less active. I personally dislike Discord. Xenforo is zillions times better.

Edit - I meant Discord not Discourse - did you?
 
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I still think Xenforo is the best software (for the price), which can also help combat social media. I wouldn't want to "downgrade" to any of the free ones. And lose all the aspects that attract people who are used to social media - the ease of uploading images, the emoji likes etc. The embedded videos. The free ones are frankly clunky and archaic in terms of uploading media.

Don't know much about other paid versions but they are usually a lot more expensive. Xenforo has been reliable, easy to run and upgrade, and in my view, fairly unique as forum software for the 21st century. It may not be perfect in terms of communication but they can be helpful.

While I do have a slight gripe about 2.3.7 not being quite an "out of the box" upgrade, I'm prepared to wait for 2.3.8 :-)
 
Alvin63 said:
Frankly I think Discourse is awful for a forum. Just my opinion. One of my forums moved to Discord when the Online Safety Act came along and - it's nothing like a forum. Not popular with members at all. It's quietly getting smaller and less active. I personally dislike Discord. Xenforo is zillions times better.

Edit - I meant Discord not Discourse - did you?
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No, I think you everyone here is talking about Discourse https://www.discourse.org/ . Not Discord
 
Well, I'm self-hosted so even if Xenforo ceases, my site will be still be operational (big argument against cloud, by the way), buying me time to look into alternatives. If a dev was going to pick up doing maintenance and fixes, then I'd happily pay for that. In the end we are a small site that's probably not long for this world itself given average age of members (I'm one of the younger ones at 60) and lack of growth.

As for what those alternatives might be, I've been on some Discourse sites and was largely unimpressed so no to that option. I'd probably look at what's out there that might meet the need on our shoestring budget (we currently run on <US$300 per year, with the odd spike higher if an upgrade necessitates bringing Russ in to do some work) and do some trials using my dev site. I'm no dev, just an IT geek who knows enough coding basics to be dangerous, so rolling my own isn't really an option, even with help from something like Claude Code.

Our needs are pretty basic though, so I imagine there would be options. Customizable forums and styling, a basic set of moderation and administration tools, self-hosted. That's about it. We have add-ons but none are mission-critical for us. I'm running with two of them disabled due to repeated issues with them generating server errors and no one is the wiser.
 
Alvin63 said:
This all seems a bit mad - it's hypothetical. Like what would you do if you lost your job. Well you haven't lost your job so why worry about it?
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Do you stay with your first job for the rest of your life?

Do you have a forum where there is no hypothetical discussions and only facts and based on just current situation? Though so...

Though it could also be argued that people are considering their options based on the current situation here with the abysmal levels of communication and want to be better prepared.

Such a simple fix, and ignorance wasnt one of them.
 
Ok so maybe I misunderstood the title. So are you saying it means - what would you do if there was no Xenforo? Rather than - this is happening now we need to look somewhere else?

As for jobs - if you have a good job and life is good why leave it? Even if things aren't perfect - they could be worse somewhere else.
 
Alvin63 said:
Ok so maybe I misunderstood the title. So are you saying it means - what would you do if there was no Xenforo? Rather than - this is happening now we need to look somewhere else?

As for jobs - if you have a good job and life is good why leave it? Even if things aren't perfect - they could be worse somewhere else.
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Yes, the title is pretty self explanatory as is the OP.

There are very very few people in the developed world where people stick with the same job they started with till retirement. Most people look for better opportunities, growth etc. But i can understand others who are complacent and have this trauma that somewhere else will be worse and therefore never step out of their comfort zone as a result of the fear.
 
I think that's a bit strong to say people who choose to stay in the same job are "complacent" and have "trauma" :-) Anyway each to their own opinion.
 
tajhay said:
Yes, the title is pretty self explanatory as is the OP.

There are very very few people in the developed world where people stick with the same job they started with till retirement. Most people look for better opportunities, growth etc. But i can understand others who are complacent and have this trauma that somewhere else will be worse and therefore never step out of their comfort zone as a result of the fear.
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Mental outlook.

I am with the same company, on an amazing salary, that I have been on since apprentice.

I enjoy my work and the company is great to work for. Why would I leave?!
 
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