List of Cool things XF has that vb doesnt

Joeychgo

Joeychgo

Well-known member
I am putting together a list of cool things XF has that vB doesn't. As I am transitioning my sites I thought a list like this could help my users use the site better.

Things like:
  1. user tagging in a post
  2. drag and drop images to post them


Can anyone help and add to the list?
 
Here are a few:
  • Resized quotes
  • Selective quoting
  • Alerts
  • Mentions
  • Avatars show who posted
  • Post Cache: never loose your post again.
  • Post Status updates from forum home
  • Addon content is integrated in new posts / find-new and alerts. Never miss an addon update again.
  • Modern software: no reliance upon outdated insecure libraries. (except flash)
  • 2 factor authentication
  • Secure password storage. vbulletin passwords can be cracked.
  • Image & video content caching: no more off site content.
  • Completely up to date with modern standards.
 
Thanks alpha, I'm talking about little things that users can do themseleves --- like alerts, or drag and drop images. Frankly, many of them could care less about about half of what you posted :)
 
Joeychgo said:
Frankly, many of them could care less about about half of what you posted :)
Click to expand...
There is lies the problem. Many of us have no idea what your users care for or not so it is fruitless to spend time posting suggestions for you just to be rebuffed because you are the only one who cares enough what your users want or need explained.
 
Yep... several users on my site commented on the 2FA - something I would never have thought would be "popular" on it as it's a motorcycle based site.
 
Bionic Rooster said:
There is lies the problem. Many of us have no idea what your users care for or not so it is fruitless to spend time posting suggestions for you just to be rebuffed because you are the only one who cares enough what your users want or need explained.
Click to expand...

Yes, it appears to me somewhat ingenuous to dismiss somebody's helpful response in such a way.

We cannot know what users' think.

For example shortly after switching to xenforo I had people complaining that the tooltips you get when hovering over a thread title go up instead of down as they did with vbulletin.

To my mind that is an improvement because when I see a list I start at the top and work down, so it seems intuitive to me that the tooltip should be above the title so as not to obscure the titles below.

Nonetheless here a a couple of suggestions of improvements

  • Conversations thread messages together into one conversation.
  • Thread tooltips go upwards above the thread title.
  • Watch thread box iis a popup that dismisses after ticking instead of having to go back a couple of actual pages in your browser to get back to where you were.
  • Report manager allows automatic acknowledgement to user
  • Edit/delete post allows automatic acknowledgement to user
 
One thing I think really stands out is the whole quoting system as that is used constantly:

*Highlight specific text in a post and hit 'Quote' -- Including adding multiple snippets
*Manage full or partial quotes (as above) such as rearranging them
 
Mr Lucky said:
Yes, it appears to me somewhat ingenuous to dismiss somebody's helpful response in such a way.
Click to expand...

No no -- I didn't mean it that way whatsoever.

What I'm looking for though are the little things that make using XF special. Like the selective quoting or user tagging
 
Maybe reformulate what I mentioned: most of it means increased security and privacy. This is something that people generally care abut. No one wants their account hacked because you use insecure outdated software like vbulletin.
 
I am very surprised to see that vb does not have the most elementary of things like mentiones and alerts.
 
It's really a funny story, we swapped out VB3 to XF about 2 years ago, maybe a little more.
We had been sitting on the fence with everything that had been going on at the time... well anyway...

The first comment about the alerts system was that we should rename 'Alert' to something else since it seemed to make some people panic that something was wrong. We quickly explained that alerts weren't a bad thing and explained about how to manage settings.

Most popular items in XF that are used the most:
- Member Tagging
- Selective Quotes
- Multi-Quote (the design of XF's implementation)
- Drag/Drop Images (hot feature)
- Private message system is much more heavily used in XF than it ever was in VB.
- Comments from members that know vB vs. XF -- XF's mobile responsive design is much more user friendly and workable.
- Thread prefixes are heavily used (color, variety) - Easy to group a set of threads together and one click can show all threads with same prefix.
- 2FA is also quite popular, surprisingly.
- Users also comment about how the site feels 'modern' and 'snappy' - probably a combination of server config + XF's design and code base.
- Auto-Complete/Suggestions for places where member's name input is needed (i.e. making a new private message) (Is this in VB or not? I haven't even looked...)

That's the summary of most of the feedback I get from the users. Our indirect competitors are on VB4, which has been heavily modified and I suppose they are stuck there for awhile. We have members that use both, but most have said they prefer the functionality and feel of our site.
 
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