I will never use any third-party mods or applications. I have never had a single third-party mod with any forum software that didn't eventually stop working, contained serious bugs I discover after a month of usage, get abandoned, etc.
Hello everyone. I would just like to say that, the more I think about it, the more I think that Josh has a point. Addressing this point is, in my humble opinion, more important than any "feature" suggestions I have made previously. Also, the past two months, I have focused on installing and learning about Wordpress. This experience has taught me a few things. I would now like to make the following suggestions.
1. Developers should not be lone wolves. I would like to suggest that any developers of major add-ons should always work in groups of 3. I.e., I would like to be assured that there are 3 programmers supporting any major add-on, and that if any of them quits, he is likely to be replaced.
2. Xenforo should purposely make add-on development more profitable and more sustainable. I would like to suggest that Xenforo itself also have a system of encouragement to any major add-on. Such as (a) give certain add-ons "priority" status that officially encourages their use and also signing up for annual auto-repeating Paypal donations however small. (b) Activating some sort of policy whereby if Xenforo ever uses the ideas developed by an add-on, the add-on developers will receive priority consideration to work for Xenforo on this development or somehow receive significant compensation. I.e., I would like to see Xenforo remove the concern by third party developers that if their add-on is "too successful," Xenforo might make it obsolete by developing an official version. I believe that Xenforo could and should instead create a situation wherein developers "want" this to happen because it will likely be lucrative for them.
3. Work with Wordpress, not against it.I hope that Xenforo will never make the mistake of Vbulletin in attempting to develop and maintain a blogging extension. Instead, Xenforo should focus on the much cheaper and more effective path of optimizing an integration with Wordpress. The difference is analogous to the Soviet Union attempting to keep up with the United States in military technology in the 1980's, with government funding pitted against a booming consumer PC industry. Apple Computers similarly lost ground to the PC in the 1980's by refusing to cooperate in shared development.
4. Focus instead on a native wiki and a native networking extension. I do however think that Xenforo should develop or encourage the development of (a) a native wiki and (b) the ability to generate Facebook-style personal home pages for each member. Creating such extensions, instead of a blog, would be relatively inexpensive, relatively without competition, and extremely popular.
Meanwhile, I currently am planning to use MediaWiki with Wordpress integration. All evidence suggests that this works quite smoothly. This is currently used by Wordpress.org. Wordpress and Buddypress (which is just a Wordpress plug-in) have several wiki add-ons but which are always plagued with the support problems as implied by Josh.
The creator of Mediawiki / Wikipedia: It aims to increase its users from 400m to 1bn by 2015.
But growth requires a new interface, said Mr Wales... He said a lot of
people were "afraid" to contribute to the site by the sometimes complicated code - known as Wiki mark-up - needed to format entries... "If you click edit and you see some Wiki syntax and some bizarre table structure - a lot of people are literally afraid... Jimmy Wales says
Wikipedia too complicated for many. It sure is Jimmy.
This is interesting news, which I was glad to learn, but can be interpreted in different ways. With Jimmy Wales keenly interested in improvement, it seems hopeful that MediaWiki will someday improve, presumably with either upgrade or migration capability. Meanwhile, I am quite certain of three things.
(a) MediaWiki is as certain as anything to remain supported long-term.
(b) Although it can be daunting to master MediaWiki, there is nothing at all to clicking "edit" and adding to the basic text.
(c) Jimmy Wales is something of a fanatic who wants everyone on the planet to become a MediaWiki contributor. His displeasure over the shortcomings of MediaWiki need to be seen in this light. Perhaps a lot of people can feel more welcome to edit simply by enabling a "text only" mode that does not display any Wiki mark-up.
