If XenForo's finished, what's next?
- Thread starter Mouth
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Taylor J
Well-known member
I'd full heartedly agree with you if this was a publicly traded company where the team was beholden to share holders, or was a life boat.
This is a private company though that relies on their customers base to keep them making money through new licenses or renewals. And if they wind up not getting enough money to pay their devs then that leaves the product in a state where it worries people, what if a CVE 10 should arise and the team doesn't handle it in a timely manor (not saying they won't)? It's been 6 months since the last HYS, and even with the change to not posting one until a feature is done.. it shouldn't take 6 months for a singular feature to be completed.
The squeaky wheel gets the grease and all.
I don't post / whine as the community I help manage doesn't need new features all too much, because I build them when I need to. Doesn't mean I wouldn't like TipTap to already be released so the editor works as it should across ALL browsers + the other dev centrist updates that were already shown off.
And when it comes down to it, the "naysayers" that like to harp on the people worried/whining/discussing their concerns spend way more time in their replies and reading something that "they've already read over and over and over". At this point they should already know what / assume what is going to be said and just go on about their day rather than waste personal time that can be probably spent else where arguing with the first mentioned group.
Using you as an example, you replied with a good amount of paragraphs to @Wing 's 5 sentence response. Let them keep complaining/whining/discussing, otherwise the company could go on about their day and assume that all is fine in the land of XenForo and no one is awaiting/wanting their bug fixes / new features.
mjda
Well-known member
Let's see...
In this case, I post my frustration and we all see it go ignored for months while XF just does whatever they feel like is best for the company.
In this case, other members post their frustration and we all see it go ignored for months while XF just does whatever they feel like is best for the company.
I guess I really don't see much difference. With either option, someone complains and only folks who don't have a say-so reply.
smallwheels
Well-known member
I do have my doubts that - if one has that fears - actively lowering the sales of new licenses through constant destructiveness and posting endless FUD is a good strategy. Also, one should not take the relative small number of people participating in this forum take as "the customer base" and even less the small number of loud whiners and the needs they claim to have (and that they try to take everyone as a hostage for). The customer base will be much bigger and there will be a silent majority that probably couldn't care less about updates.
Other than that: @Chris D said a year ago:
So it seams your fears lack foundation.
You know and I know that we are not talking about "a single feature" when we are talking about 2.4. We are talking about a lot more and regarding the editor we are talking about exchanging parts of an antique codebase. Whoever has ever dealt with legacy code refactoring knows that it is often unpredictible in terms of effort. Clearly, something has not worked out as planned/assumed. Is the current situation annoying? yes. Is it the end of the world? no.
I am quite sure they will release something one day. What and when? No idea and I don't care too much. My forums work, my users are happy - so everything is fine. What annoys me is the uncertain timeline for the future: In perspective of updating I've made a feature freeze on my forums a while ago. So basically do not develop them further through customizing and add ons for the moment for the most part to avoid bad investments or to have to redo stuff or change routes to be able to update. This IS annoying, but not the end of the world.
I come from the world of custom development (though I'm not a coder). This means I know, everything is possible - but also: It is effort and it is expensive. The things that I would like to have in XF won't happen anyway - with the current staffing completely unrealistic, even if XF wanted them, too. In my opinion this counts for a lot of the wishes the whiners have, too. Just that they claim it would be the end of the world if they won't get those features. Which means: No matter when 2.4 or 3.0 are released and what those releases contain: Their whining won't stop.
There is a difference between holding XF accountable including giving them feedback and endless posting of identical tirades again and again. My assumption is that the whiners and their negativity and destructiveness are at least partly responsible for the silence of XF and the lack of transparency - what ever they could post would only create a new wave of rage postings by the whiners. If they were my customers I would literally pay them to switch to a different forum software and annoy someone else then. Their hysterical destructiveness and negativity does more harm to XF, the morale of the team and the spirit of the community here than the delayed releases do.
No doubt the XF team has realized that many people are not happy - how could they have avoided it. So as a custoomer you can either trust them and hope for the best or you distrust them and then you should leave. Simple stupid. XT have destroyed a huge amount of trust within their customers on these forums (but again: which percentage of the overall customers is this?) and it would be pretty ignorant if they would not know that. So they must have a reason for that behavior, whatever it may be.
FTL
Well-known member
A year ago, exactly. A lot happens in a year and the traditional style forum world continues to shrink, so there could have been a significant downard trend in all that time for all we know. Hence @Taylor J's fears have a lot of foundation.
To allay those fears, we'd need an official statement and / or hard data of the company's financials.
FTL
Well-known member
+1 to that.
The Chip Spa
Member
As a private company XF doesn't need to provide any of us their financials. However, being a mere 3 year old XF host and on cloud any reassuring official statement would be nice. I don't follow the XF forums and reading this post comes as a bit surprising. I only worry as Im on cloud and never really considered what happens if XF dies tomorrow and what if any precautions should be in place, in our hobby (casino collecting) there are 2 basic forum sites both XF. One self hosted and us on cloud.
I have no idea if I should have a self hosted copy around with a mirror of my forum or what. Even then I'm not sure I would know what to do with it
. So here is an XF customer who dies with the company as who knows where my users go if the sites down for any period of time.I know a lot of folks have started Facebook areas and that affects our sites a bit but I guess I would hate to be under FaceBooks thumb and TOS.
If anyone would PM me with suggestions for doomsday prepping I'd be happy to listen but I'm hoping for the best and NOT messaging any XF folks with undo questions. Hoping if there's a plug pull in the future it happens next November right before renewal and not right after!
mjda
Well-known member
As a private company XF doesn't need to provide any of us their financials. However, being a mere 3 year old XF host and on cloud any reassuring official statement would be nice. I don't follow the XF forums and reading this post comes as a bit surprising. I only worry as Im on cloud and never really considered what happens if XF dies tomorrow and what if any precautions should be in place, in our hobby (casino collecting) there are 2 basic forum sites both XF. One self hosted and us on cloud.
I have no idea if I should have a self hosted copy around with a mirror of my forum or what. Even then I'm not sure I would know what to do with it
I know a lot of folks have started Facebook areas and that affects our sites a bit but I guess I would hate to be under FaceBooks thumb and TOS.
If anyone would PM me with suggestions for doomsday prepping I'd be happy to listen but I'm hoping for the best and NOT messaging any XF folks with undo questions. Hoping if there's a plug pull in the future it happens next November right before renewal and not right after!
While I certainly understand your concerns, I believe the only issue with XF at the moment is their blatant disregard for calls for communication from their customers. XF has stated, many times, that development is ongoing. They're still responding to support tickets and Chris replied to a cloud customer concern just today.
I don't want to say "don't worry about it", because you have every right to be concerned, by the lack of communication alone, but there is no other evidence that XF is headed downhill. In fact, everything else points to just the opposite.
Taylor J
Well-known member
I don't recall saying that the people that post here, or the customers that are worried, are the entire customer base. Just because they don't talk though doesn't mean they don't pay attention. One doesn't have to look at the many posts of people upset with the communication from XenForo to see that development is stagnant. They can look at the time frame between HYS's, the time frame from the first time 2.3.8 was mentioned by the bug bot, or the time frame since the last x.x.X release was put out. Which is why I haven't posted on this until now, I was being a silent observer which I can and will argue is most of the customer base. The only evidence customers have that something is being worked on at this point in time is the bug bot replying that a bug was fixed for 2.3.8. And just like you hypothetically said that the majority of customers don't care about updates, others can say hypothetically they do care about updates. Because no one knows what they actually care about as they are silent.
Also my point about the HYS for 2.4 weren't meant to be about a singular feature. It was to point out that a or ANY singular feature shouldn't take 6 months to be finished. And yes I say finished, as that is the current company stance on HYS's, not to post one until that said feature is ready. So that is exactly what I was talking about when I brought up 2.4. HYS threads are communication, which is not happening at all at this point.. again.
Any of those 15 features could have been posted about between then and now.
And the new editor is already completed, otherwise they wouldn't have posted a HYS on it due to their current company stance on HYS's.
You also keep bunching everyone up in one group. Yet you and @Wing have the same thing annoying you both, the UNCERTAINTY. There's only a handful of people that "whine" about new features. Most of the complaints are due to no communication and the uncertainty of the product. I've also put a feature freeze on my blogs addon as I don't want to have to complete a total re-write on it and then have to fix it to work with the new style / editor after that (which in terms of the editor shouldn't be that hard since I believe they'll keep the implementation the almost exact same).
As someone that also comes from custom development because I am a Software Engineer as a career/profession and get paid to work in many different tech stacks including ones that are actually antique codebases, which XenForo is not and is laughable to say it is, my first point isn't a fear. It's an observation that has happened and will continue to happen to many different code bases and projects. I can patch a vulnerability myself, 90%+ other customers can not. Those customers are lucky XenForo doesn't use NPM for its JavaScript dependencies but rather use the SDK's instead (because many of them have been affected by exploits and hacks) and that none of the composer dependencies have been impacted by a wide scale attack/cve as of yet.
The only reason the team has given on lack of communication is that they are bad at it and have promised to do better, which so far hasn't happened. Yes they have the right to be upset about being called out about the same thing over and over by a handful of vocal people here, shouldn't give them the pass to be silent to everyone else. Silent observer or not.
Basic communication would silence many of the current "complainers", not give them more stuff to complain about. Invision has the same people that say "oh hey why did you do it like this / where is this feature / we want this one not that one / blah blah blah" just like every single product on the planet, doesn't stop them from communicating.
mjda
Well-known member
FTL
Well-known member
@The Chip Spa yeah, with Cloud you have zero control, as you fear as there's no access to the server. If the company goes down, then so do you, but I think that's an extreme scenario that won't happen. I'm also on Cloud btw, so have the same vulnerability as you.
I suggest the following:
I suggest the following:
- The ACP allows automatic backups to be downloaded and also one to be manually triggered and then downloaded. This is a relatively new feature.
- Buy a self hosted license, keep it current and always have the latest version downloaded to your PC. Also keep any older versions for reference or troubleshooting.
- Have a copy of the installation files for the latest versions of any add-ons that you've used.
- Since you don't know how to self host and it's not trivial either, especially if you've never done it before, is to get the contact details / websites of some of the customers on here who provide paid hosting support and turn to them if you find yourself in such a situation.
We can get an idea from their filings at the Companies House website as they're a UK limited company. If the numbers were to look bad and / or the filings were late (the later the worse) then that would be an indicator.
Wing
Well-known member
Except it’s always better to express feedback and keep said feedback relevant on the forefront, so new customers can see the current state of affairs. Instead of just letting things get buried and we all sit around singing everything is fine.
With the lack of communication, I would rather the customers then keep a bumped situation update going for others to see. Nothing is stopping XF from carrying out their promises from over a year ago, let alone officially communicating. So instead of being frustrated at users bumping these topics - maybe be real with yourselves and get frustrated with the reasoning and root cause.
smallwheels
Well-known member
Wow. You basically say that you deliberately try to manipulate the sales of XF licenses to new customers to the negative via XF's own customer forums to pressure XF to give you what you want. That is a pretty bold statement.
JamesBrown
Well-known member
It would be much better for your health to expend that energy trying to find a girlfriend
Wing
Well-known member
No, and I really am tired of these games with you and James.Wow. You basically say that you deliberately try to manipulate the sales of XF licenses to new customers to the negative via XF's own customer forums to pressure XF to give you what you want. That is a pretty bold statement.
Communication and transparency is a big deal for someone looking to invest. Part of running a business is communicating with your clients.
Mr Lucky
Well-known member
I don't think xenForo are looking for investors. I'd be interested if they were.
mjda
Well-known member
What was the point in posing the question if you were just going to tell me my answer was wrong and correct me anyways?
This is what YOU feel like is better. That's not necessarily true. A majority of other customer probably disagree with you. It's pretty obvious that complaining will get us nowhere so what's the point? You're seriously saying that all your complaining on these forums every day is just to keep potential future customers informed? Yeah, I'm gonna go ahead and call BS on that.
Tamer
Member
I don’t think it’s fair to assume that XF is finished. We’re not blind, it’s clear the team is still active. The real issue is the communication gap and yes even in our own families we sometimes struggle with that. It’s something to reassess during stressful periods, not something to hold anyone accountable for. The system works, and we can’t blame anyone just because they don’t say hello every day.
We hadn’t planned to renew our support and updates this year since we weren’t expecting to upgrade until the new versions were fully stable. But reading this thread made me realize that staying current is simply the responsible thing to do when you rely on a platform long-term. Yes we will renew and to be honest XF remains the best forum software by a wide margin. Nothing else comes close in terms of stability or extensibility, and I’m not really interested in debating that.
In short, until there’s a real, confirmed problem, I’m not worried at all.
