I'm this >.< close to...

[Chimpie]

I swear I'm about to give up on forums all together. It use to be a love, a passion. I would spend hours upon hours setting up and tweaking. Heck, I even did some mod/hack installations for others at one point.

Now, I dread communities. Maybe it's my frustrations with vB. Maybe it's because XF doesn't have all the features I need to switch. Maybe it's because IPB just doesn't "feel right".

Ugh... I just don't know what to do.

 

[Peggy]

Do nothing. Seriously. Just wait, until XF has the majority of the features that you need, or until the add-ons are coded for it. It's still in beta, so no it wouldn't have all the features people need yet. Those usually come with future versions after the software is declared stable.

SO..... do nothing, and wait.

 

[Onimua]

I almost lost my love of running forums too, mainly because vB forced me into a corner (only using 3.x, which is quite old now), and IPB (don't quite like their design of things). I'm glad Kier and Mike came around and created XF, because it gave me hope for something awesome again.

While it doesn't have everything I may want, I'm happy to know it'll come in the future. In the meantime I can either program something myself or use an add-on, and with the huge amount of help from a number of people on here it's actually making me look forward to launch my site next month.

 

[Lee]

I agree. I am in the same boat. In fact, I disappeared for quite a long while. I used to be on the support team of a fairly big up and coming forum that is now no longer existing, and after that I took a hiatus. IPB has just never excited me in the way that used to, hence the death of my most recent community. I don't know what to do, weather to start again. The learning curve for xF feels very big to me, i'm struggling with the template manager for a start!!

 

[CroNiX]

vB v1 didn't have nearly the amount of functionality, either. Only through 10+ years (or whatever) of bloat and extensions can you have everything under the sun...and then look where that leads...and unmaintainable project where customers and developers alike are pissed.

I would much rather see XF stay lean and mean. In the early days of vB, I used to use just about every option available because to me because they were important and had to do with the core running of the site/forum. After many revisions and versions (read adding "features" into the core to give customers more and more and more options in order to keep selling them something year after year), I probably use about 25% of what is available as far as standard stock options. The rest, to ME, is bloat and unneeded, and hampers the efficiency of the code. But, its like any other piece of software. The earliest versions tend to be the best because they do whatever the function of the software is supposed to be. The subsequent versions are just adding crap so they can keep selling it as "new" year after year. I can still do *just* about as much in my photoshop v2 (dos, yes DOS v3) than I can in CS5 (Windows 7 or Mac). Not THAT much has changed. Sure, some useful new features. Same with MS Office or any other piece of software that has been around a long time. Utter bloat and crap...which we need more memory and faster processors to be able to handle....so they can keep selling it to us.

 

[Edrondol]

I am kind of in the same boat as well. I run a medium/small board that seems to be dying because we lost our niche and are trying to find one. Then I started a new site and had to back way off of it due to personal reasons. I hope to get back to that one because I think it'll have potential, but I've lost my drive to work on it right now.

 

[kilcher]

Me too. I have 3 forums. I can hardly stand to spend much time on my vB forum anymore (my biggest one) but love posting and spending time on my XF forums.

 

[Mikey]

as a forum owner, I have to say.. don't do anything. Save your money and join MY forum haha

In all seriousness, work with what you have, or try to make it yourself.

 

[Carlos]

I have this same attitude last year.

I was trying to figure out which software to go with... until August, when I found xenForo!

 

[CTXMedia]

Personally I was ready to throw in the towel with IPB at the end of last year, but I've got my head around some of the issues that were bothering me, and with the changes coming up in 3.2 (especially to the text editor) I'm finally settling into it.

I'm looking forward to getting Geeks up and running too ... thankfully it'll be a start-up so I'll have plenty of opportunity for cocking things up and experimenting, so that should be fun.

Why not take a week or two away. Ask your moderators to "keep shop" and do something else that you enjoy and switch off from your forums for a short while. Might help put things in perspective and renew your vigour.

You could also start your planning now for a move to another platform. Write down a few things you'll need to sort out - what you'd like to add/remove when you migrate - changes you'd like to make that would improve things for your membership - stuff like that. Keep your brain on the positives and then when the time does come, you've got some ideas to work from.

Cheers,
Shaun

 

[trilogy33]

Do what Peggy has suggested and hold fire.
I've been in the frustration zone before a few times, I guess quite a few of us have too.