If XenForo's finished, what's next?

briansol said:
Discourse being on ruby is not an option for me. too much of a learning curve and ruby IMO is dead.


If it comes down to it, i'll stick with xf but start to convert my front end into a SPA and work on enhancing the API and make it a RESTful architecture php back end running react or nextjs front end.
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Just asking as a person that gets paid to build in Rails, what makes it too much of a learning curve? Also would argue that it isn't dead as some of the biggest sites and a ton of startups continue to use it and choose it.
 
Preference. Ruby was the next big thing 10 years ago and everyone jumped to it. Used to be half of job ads were ruby. I can't say i've seen one in a few years.

If i were to start fresh today, it would be python.

After .net/c#, php, python, and all the front end frameworks, learning ruby is just a non-starter when i have the other toolkit under the belt already. It's an un-necessary learning curve.
 
Slavik said:
More XenForo, as 2.4 is close (tm).
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Hugh Jackman Reaction GIF


Thanks, @Slavik, for the communication. A little goes a long way.
 
yeah, a fastAPI backend, full swagger API documentation always available, and a front end that allows interaction.

but anyway, that's not happening because I do have faith that XF will carry on, even if it's slow.
 
briansol said:
Discourse being on ruby is not an option for me. too much of a learning curve and ruby IMO is dead.
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Ruby is really bad. 4-5x slower than PHP, and because of that, you'll use a lot of caches and guzzle memory + disk to run a basic application.

I am the server administrator for two pieces of software in PHP and Ruby which are both identical in how they are used and how many people use them.
The PHP app runs on a 2 core with 4gb of memory
The Ruby app needs an 8 core and 32gb of memory

I've seen similar in other applications.

Flarum is also out because it is some of the moast bloated PHP code i've seen for a while. They refused to listen to my constant suggestions to keep it simple, so i just wrote them off and decided to not fund them.

If Xenforo fails as a business, i'm probably writing my own forum software in PHP.
 
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Taylor J said:
Just asking as a person that gets paid to build in Rails, what makes it too much of a learning curve? Also would argue that it isn't dead as some of the biggest sites and a ton of startups continue to use it and choose it.
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I built a whole site with paid membership system, galleries, paid downloads, shopping cart all with eRuby. It was awesome an supper fast. When day after ann Apache update it was all gone. Thats when I returned to forum software.
 
mjda said:
I agreed with everything you said, until this part. These threads, and comments like it, are a cause of the lack of communication. In my opinion, and I could be very wrong, if we had regular communication from the XF developers, a lot of this negativity would go away. The amount of negativity that's seen in these forums over the last year, or more, only started because of the lack of communication in the first place. Communication is one of the easiest things to fix, and something they promised to do better at, so the fact that still hasn't happened is why a lot of this negativity is happening.

Don't get me wrong, there has always been negativity within these forums (this isn't the update I wanted, you're taking too long, etc), but nothing like what we've seen in recent years. The main driver in all of this recent negativity is because of the lack of simple communication.

Again, this is all simply my opinion and I could be totally off-base. As easy as it is to communicate, something we all do every day already, why not just try that and see if it works? I'd never believe that they're so busy working that they don't have at least an hour per month to spend communicating with us here. Customer service is a huge part of any business and it's very easy to get right.
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Giving estimated dates, that's a fool's game for developers, as it inevitably will burn them. They either miss the date and get flack, or they release too soon and get flack for buggy software. After 4 decades of software development, I can tell you from first-hand experience that developers are the worst at estimating how much time it can take. I worked on a project management and estimating system for Fortune 500 companies, and even the developers on that team couldn't estimate well!

Talk about future features? I don't blame them one bit if they want to hold that close to their chest.

That leaves telling us development is active and underway. They've said that multiple times.

What else do you expect them to communicate?
 
MySiteGuy said:
Giving estimated dates, that's a fool's game for developers, as it inevitably will burn them. They either miss the date and get flack, or they release too soon and get flack for buggy software. After 4 decades of software development, I can tell you from first-hand experience that developers are the worst at estimating how much time it can take. I worked on a project management and estimating system for Fortune 500 companies, and even the developers on that team couldn't estimate well!

Talk about future features? I don't blame them one bit if they want to hold that close to their chest.

That leaves telling us development is active and underway. They've said that multiple times.

What else do you expect them to communicate?
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You must have missed my reply after this one because I answered some of this.

mjda

Post in thread 'If XenForo's finished, what's next?'

JoshA said:
But at the same time, I think it’s worth recognising that the tone of the community has also changed in a way that probably makes the XenForo team even less likely to want to post updates. It becomes a loop:
lack of communication → frustration → harsher threads → even less motivation to communicate.

I’m not defending the silence — just pointing out that both sides contribute to the atmosphere.
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The point is that the lack of communication started the loop. For many years we saw the developers both develop a great product, while simultaneously engaging with the...
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As for what could they communicate?

You've been here long enough to remember when the XF devs participated in these forums AND produced an amazing product, with less developers than they have now. What did they communicate then? They certainly weren't sharing new features before they were ready back then, yet nobody was begging them for communication. Why? Because they were active in these forums and showing that they actually cared about this product and their customers.

Personally, I'd like them to get back to their own established standard of communicating with the members of this forum, while also producing a great product, just like they did for the first 10 years of this company's existence. I understand that very well may never happen, but just saying something every so often would probably get rid of most, if not all, of this current gloom and doom surrounding the company.

Look at Chris's last HYS. Starts out with this:

Chris D said:
We're working hard to release XenForo 2.4 ASAP, but it's taking longer than expected due to scope changes and strategic decisions to wait for certain upstream developments that will benefit the long-term roadmap.
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For me, that's a great update and could've just stopped there and most folks would be content. There very well may not be anything to update since this, but why not just say that every so often? Something as simple as "Sorry there isn't anything new that I can share with y'all this month, but I assure you work is still continuing and we're closer today than we were yesterday to getting 2.4 out the door. Please be patient. We're working as quickly, and efficiently, as possible.". How hard is that to say?

But then he also includes this, which doesn't help at all:

Chris D said:
We'll be sharing exciting details about what these features are and how they work in the coming weeks, so stay tuned!
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That was in June. Why post that and then never follow up with anything? Yeah, sure, we're still technically only "weeks" since that post, but who is thinking 20 weeks when someone says they'll get back to you in the "coming weeks"? My guess is nobody. So is it wrong for us to have assumed we'd have some "exciting details about what these features are and how they work" by now?

Communication doesn't have to be long, or detailed, to be effective. Sometimes saying too much can be counter-productive, like this sample here.
 

If XenForo's finished, what's next?​

The scenario being that xenForo suddenly stops working, or else the forum users refuse to post as there aren’t enough updates?

My alternative to xenForo? Not Discourse I can tell you that.
 
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