Suzanne O
Well-known member
Same here!
Makes it easy for us to continue our chats on our sites.
If XenForo's finished, what's next?
- Thread starter Mouth
- Start date
Makes it easy for us to continue our chats on our sites.
Wing
Well-known member
Then why are you not self hosted?
smallwheels
Well-known member
Strong statement. Given the threads where people complain (in my eyes wrongly) in a row about the "insane price" for XF self hosted licenses I am not so sure if a drastic rise in price would be a good idea. And how do you know that the goal of XF would be having a huge team? Regarding efficiency: One women gives birth to a child in nine month, nine women are not able to do in in one month. Not saying it would not be a valid (or even godd) decision to grow the team somewhat but on the other hand: Do you know what exactrly is XF's business model? Do you know if it is not part of their business idea to run with a small team? Do you know if it is not a deliberate choice to limit the featureset as well as the speed/amount of updates? As @MapleOne says: For many that have a heavily customized and well working forum each update is a bit of a horror, the more, the more add ons are involved. So having not too frequent updates is a good thing for many customers.
The business model now includes XF cloud which, according to Chris, already brings in half of the turnover/revenue - cloud did not exist a couple of years ago. Clearly, cloud generates way more revenue per customer than single licenses with an occasional update license every couple of years. Plus it is probably way less troublesome regarding customer support due to a homogenous installation base and way less troublesome to roll out updates, especially high frequent ones. So if it was for an efficient and most profitable business model they would ditch standalone licenses sooner or later, streamline the number of possible add ons for cloud and have more money with less effort. It would in fact make a lot of things easier for them which would no doubt also speed up the development. Thankfully XF said they like it as it is and have no plans and no reason to stop selling self hosted licenses.So be careful what you wish for.
I disagree with this. Bigger the better is a wrong notion when it comes to teamwork imo. As someone who has been part of a big team at my work I've seen it first hand how a lot of time and energy gets lost in miscommunications, duplicated efforts to name a few things. And while a big team might look good on paper, it can actually slow you down.
FTL
Well-known member
Indeed, quite.
Moshe1010
Well-known member
I didn't write drastically. In addition:
I didn't write a huge team either.
Using the "nine women" analogy for a mature software platform is a classic logical fallacy. That analogy refers to sequential tasks that cannot be partitioned, implying that software development is a single, indivisible linear process like pregnancy. It is not.
Software development consists of hundreds of distinct features, bug fixes, and infrastructure improvements that can be parallelized. While 9 women can't produce a baby in a month, 9 developers can certainly build 9 different features in the time it takes 1 developer to build them.
We aren't trying to birth a single baby here; we're trying to run a nursery, a school, and a hospital simultaneously. Trying to do that with a skeleton crew isn't "efficiency" — it's negligence. XF isn't suffering from "too many cooks," it is suffering from a complete lack of capacity to work on parallel streams.
No, and I don't care. If they present features from a new version but only release it a year (or more) later, it means something is lacking in the process. They might call it 'upstream development delay'; I call it a lack of progress.
Yes, but if you want to slow down updates, you don't publish "Have You Seen" features a year in advance and say 2.4 will be released ASAP (six months ago). You are misreading the map again. Their business model is to make money. Not updating your software in a timely manner, or worse, saying you will update it but failing to do so, is not good business practice. It does two main things:
- It basically destroys customer trust in the product and the brand overall.
- It greatly delays license renewals, which I guess is a very big chunk of XF's business model.
Actually, it's the other way around. The more features included in the core, the fewer headaches large forum owners have in general.
Good. If cloud services are the main focus, they should just shut down the self-hosted licensing entirely. Currently, in my opinion, it does more harm than good.
MySiteGuy
Well-known member
You talk about a logical fallacy, yet this is pure conjecture:
"I would argue that XF’s entire business model is lacking.
Instead of increasing the license price and hiring more developers, for some reason @Kier keeps the team small; and it’s not particularly efficient, either."
... much like your post above has conjecture.
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smallwheels
Well-known member
That speaks for itself. You jugdge drastically about something where you admit not having the sligthest clue about. This seems to be also true for wider parts of the rest of your posting.
Cloud services are not the main focus. It is a welcome source of additional revenue. You completely ignore what vision and mission the company has and also what history. I'd bet, currently only a small fraction of the customers use XF cloud. Given the history of XF of 14 years the vast majority will be self hosted. Killing self hosted would bring a number of additional customers for cloud but also lead to a huge number of forums to switch software or to shut down entirely. For many forum owners XF cloud is not affordable and for others it is simply not the right solution. XF know that, tell that and act accordingly - you ignore the fact as well as the statements of XF themselves.
Suzanne O
Well-known member
@Moshe1010
You need to stop putting blame on the XF staff mate.
That's why you're copping it here.
@Kier's a busy man. He's not some narcissistic grinch you think he might be.
He's just terribly busy getting this stuff sorted out.
You need to stop putting blame on the XF staff mate.
That's why you're copping it here.
@Kier's a busy man. He's not some narcissistic grinch you think he might be.
He's just terribly busy getting this stuff sorted out.
The lowest‑cost option for the cloud hosting plan is $648 per year, and customers are required to pay annually.
In contrast, a self‑hosted XenForo setup with all included plugins only costs about $100 for each renewal year—many users likely did not renew their license this year.
These figures underscore that the company’s primary focus is mostly on cloud hosting.
In contrast, a self‑hosted XenForo setup with all included plugins only costs about $100 for each renewal year—many users likely did not renew their license this year.
These figures underscore that the company’s primary focus is mostly on cloud hosting.
cloud hosting wouldn't exist without the software. I hope they remember that. I think they do.
XF will continue to grow, i have faith in the platform.
xf2.3 is good. there's stuff i'd like, but no one's making it and i'm not turning enough profit these days to fund it or put the effort in to build it myself.
my sole focus is on improving SERP ranks to get more traffic and convert new users to regulars. 90% of that is content. 10% is the platform we're on and i have no complaints about rankings.
XF will continue to grow, i have faith in the platform.
xf2.3 is good. there's stuff i'd like, but no one's making it and i'm not turning enough profit these days to fund it or put the effort in to build it myself.
my sole focus is on improving SERP ranks to get more traffic and convert new users to regulars. 90% of that is content. 10% is the platform we're on and i have no complaints about rankings.
Moshe1010
Well-known member
I think you should Google the difference between a logical fallacy and a conjecture.
It's not conjecture when the output speaks for itself.
If a restaurant takes 3 hours to serve a meal, I don't need to be in the kitchen to know the process is inefficient. I just look at the empty table. XF's 'empty table' is the lack of timely updates. You can debate why it's happening, but arguing that the inefficiency itself is just a 'guess' ignores the reality we are all waiting on.
Why should I care about the company’s business model? I only care about updates to the software I purchased.
I argue that the lack of updates is primarily due to a lack of staff. I’m not XF’s business consultant, nor am I donating money or buying their stock, so I have no reason to care about their internal business model, only the results.
If you’re so knowledgeable, please explain why major XF updates happen only once every few years:
- XF 2.2 released in September 2020
- XF 2.3 released in July 2024
- XF 2.4 (hopefully) somewhere in 2026?
Now you might ask: 'If you aren't happy, why are you still using XF?' Because moving would be very expensive and time-consuming. So, I am stuck with software that is lacking, forcing me to develop many custom add-ons just to keep up with user demands and 2025 social media standards.
It doesn’t feel like the company has a distinct vision. Please, share your vast knowledge about the company’s vision with us again.
Your bet doesn’t align with Chris’s statement (assuming he actually wrote it). I guess you’re not that good at betting…
The vast majority of customers don’t get updates in a timely manner compared to the competition. Back to business models: if the majority of customers are self-hosted and XF doesn't provide updates, those customers have no motivation to renew their licenses. Please tell me again: what is XF's vision or business model? Since you seem to claim to know more than most users here.
Let's just conclude that you have no idea what you are talking about. You use irrelevant examples regarding pregnant women to compare to software development, and then claim I have no clue? You are completely contradicting yourself.
smallwheels
Well-known member
Well, if you say (like you did) that the companies business model would be "lacking" it would no doubt be helpful to know what the business model actually is to make such a statement... So you seem - in opposite to what you say - to care about the business model - insofar that you give advice that nobody asked for and the foundations of which are based on plain phantasy b/c you are too lazy to think about what they really are.
I've never claimed I would be "so knowledgable". But what I know is that that is is a colmpletely ill-led idea to base "efficiency" of a company solely on version numbers and furthermore to assume a fast pace through version numbers would be efficient or desirable. Let alone that the quality and value of a software depends from counting up version numbers fast. People want or don't want certain new features - where XF does indeed not deliver in a fast pace. Barely anyone wants higher version numbers - if it was about that it would be easy to count them up faster, even w/o delivering anything of relevance.
In opposite: For many it is a quality of life feature to only rarely have major updates with braking changes - forum software is server software and many forums are heavily customized. So each update comes along with a risk and with a lot of work. Therefor for server software high frequent major updates are not really desirable for most people. If your forum works and is well used updates won't in most cases change something to the dramatically better. If your forum lacks visitors and content an update of the forum software typically won't change that.
Other than that you are very late to the party: The topic of update frequency, the delays and what could be desirable has been discussed in various threads to the excess over the last year. Nothing of what you write is in any way new. Basically every aspect about the topic has already been written and excessively discussed in the threads about the 2.4 update from basically every single possible point of view. If you are interested in that you can simply read it - no need to start the whole discussion from scratch again. The topic of this thread is "If XenForo finished - what's next?", caused by the six-months silence of XF-staff which has ended in the meantime. Your postings do not have anything to do with the thread topic - other than maybe that if XF would go cloud only it would be finished for me and I would have to search for an alternative.
If you dislike XenForo for it's lack of version numbering and - as you say - other forum software is dramatically better: Why are you using XenForo then and not one of the dramatically faster version-counting alternatives?
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Tamer
Active member
Much of this debate seems to come from applying the logic of fast-moving consumer software to a platform whose job is fundamentally different. Forum infrastructure isn’t judged by how quickly version numbers climb but by how reliably it supports years of accumulated content, countless customization paths, and communities that cannot afford instability. In that context, slower major releases aren’t a flaw, they’re a deliberate strategy to avoid forcing unnecessary disruption on the people who actually depend on the software.
Update frequency has never been a meaningful measure of product quality. Anyone who has operated a mature, customized forum knows that rapid iteration creates far more operational cost than value. What experienced administrators want is not a constant stream of breaking changes, but a platform that remains predictable, maintainable, and stable enough to trust when an upgrade is truly needed.
Speculating about internal business decisions from the outside rarely leads to accurate conclusions. None of us have insight into staffing, long-term planning, or the specific trade-offs the team has chosen. What we do have is a software platform that continues to run reliably in environments where consistency matters far more than release cadence. That, more than anything, is evidence of competence.
Now that Chris has explained the circumstances, the narrative becomes considerably less dramatic. Life intervened, communication lagged, and the development continues. For those of us focused on stability and real-world use rather than version number theatrics, that is more than enough.
Update frequency has never been a meaningful measure of product quality. Anyone who has operated a mature, customized forum knows that rapid iteration creates far more operational cost than value. What experienced administrators want is not a constant stream of breaking changes, but a platform that remains predictable, maintainable, and stable enough to trust when an upgrade is truly needed.
Speculating about internal business decisions from the outside rarely leads to accurate conclusions. None of us have insight into staffing, long-term planning, or the specific trade-offs the team has chosen. What we do have is a software platform that continues to run reliably in environments where consistency matters far more than release cadence. That, more than anything, is evidence of competence.
Now that Chris has explained the circumstances, the narrative becomes considerably less dramatic. Life intervened, communication lagged, and the development continues. For those of us focused on stability and real-world use rather than version number theatrics, that is more than enough.
JamesBrown
Well-known member
But we've already had the meal, we're not waiting on it at all. Those who are waiting, are waiting for some sprinkles on their 3rd pudding, while the rest of us are gorged already.
