New XenForo Experience ACE - Download Free

Status
Not open for further replies.
As Mike said just above, it's "still free and likely to stay that way, just no guarantee of one on one support under a free license."
Thing is, that tells me nothing about long-term plans. My concerns are all laid out above, and I would like them answered if I'm going to continue using Audentio's products. That "no guarantee of one-on-one support" only makes me think that if I open a ticket or contact them with everything I laid out in my prior post, I may not even get an answer. And that if I have a styling issue, I'm on my own to reinvent their CSS/LESS coding and templates to tweak what I need to. A five minute exchange of messages with the developer could save me hours of labor. It's not as big of a deal on my smaller forums, but when running a forum with tens of millions of posts and thousands online at a time, changing a style or removing add-ons mid-stream is upsetting in more ways than one.

I really liked everything I ever purchased from ThemeHouse, but the bulk of the add-ons I used were discontinued to open source, and I had specifically chosen ThemeHouse/Audentio since they were well-established and I was counting on them for the long haul. I'd been burned way too many times on XF 1.x from developers who wrote great add-ons but disappeared shortly thereafter.

They've made it clear that they're moving away from themes (styles) and add-ons for an app-based approach. And I agree, the remaining products are way too steeply priced at $1,000/year to make it a wise decision for us. (I only have use for one or two add-ons; all the rest do not interest me.)

Bottom line? I don't want to invest time modifying AC.UI only to have that be discontinued several months from now. That's my main concern. I do like most of the mobile touches added to AC.UI, so that is a huge plus. Despite our forum skewing older (and having been established 19 years ago), we've crossed the threshold to where more than half of visits are on mobile devices. So I do need something like AC.UI. But I also don't need to get several months out and have it be discontinued, leaving me scrambling again (like I am now) to find a replacement.

My members also skew older, so I kept the default forums page but am currently using Feeds as a substitute for What's New, mainly because I like the Hot feed and Card view.
I'd like to do the opposite. I'd keep Feeds as the main landing page, but might make the Recent Activity tab the default if that is possible. But, offer a single link so that our older members could return to the traditional forum view with a single click or tap. (Here's a nice added feature for AC.UI--letting members choose either the Feeds or Forums view as their default.)

But I also like your idea of getting rid of What's New in favor of Feeds--it is a much better way to present the information, and allows visitors to weed out new activity they would rather not see. I need to play around with Feeds a lot more, and try tweaking how and where it displays. That is...if that, too, is not suddenly discontinued, or added to the expensive bundle...
 
I'd like to do the opposite. I'd keep Feeds as the main landing page, but might make the Recent Activity tab the default if that is possible. But, offer a single link so that our older members could return to the traditional forum view with a single click or tap. (Here's a nice added feature for AC.UI--letting members choose either the Feeds or Forums view as their default.)

But I also like your idea of getting rid of What's New in favor of Feeds--it is a much better way to present the information, and allows visitors to weed out new activity they would rather not see. I need to play around with Feeds a lot more, and try tweaking how and where it displays. That is...if that, too, is not suddenly discontinued, or added to the expensive bundle...
I thought some of the feeds would be too confusing. There's filters for sorting by date, for example, and my guess was that most users would use something like that thinking that they would be sorting by thread or post creation date and I would have to keep explaining that whatever criteria was being used instead. But of course if it works for you, then great.

I like some of the features of the addon, so I just moved what I wanted to keep beneath the What's New navigation. A user preference setting would be nice, but not sure how feasible it is, since it depends on the index page route...?
 
When was this? I remember TALK about it.
I don't know if they've completed the move (to where they are available as open source), but most of the add-ons I use are no longer available from their site (or if they are, I can no longer find them).

A user preference setting would be nice, but not sure how feasible it is, since it depends on the index page route...?
That was my concern also.

I had also considered offering an alternate theme with the traditional view of Forums, but the index page route interferes with that also when the Feeds page is active.

Ideally I'd prefer to have a portal page as the forum's landing page, using a search forum to populate it, but there is no article-style card preview for search forums yet. Although I'm now wondering if I can find a combination of filters that would give me this--we do have the option to remove the filter sidebar, if I'm not mistaken.

Moving Feeds to What's New does make the most sense for now. I'll have to figure out how to do that once I get a free moment. (I am trying to merge two forums at the moment, and it is not going so well. 😁)
 
I don't know if they've completed the move (to where they are available as open source), but most of the add-ons I use are no longer available from their site (or if they are, I can no longer find them).


That was my concern also.

I had also considered offering an alternate theme with the traditional view of Forums, but the index page route interferes with that also when the Feeds page is active.

Moving Feeds to What's New does make the most sense for now. I'll have to figure out how to do that once I get a free moment. (I am trying to merge two forums at the moment, and it is not going so well. 😁)
It's not difficult. I just disabled some of the menu items I previously had under What's new and set the parent navigation to What's New for some of the child menu items that are under Feeds. Or of course you could keep using both.
 
There hasn't even been another word about it until you mentioned it. They're hoping we all just forget they said it, I think.
I think it's more a matter of them finding time to get the add-ons uploaded wherever they'll be hosted at. (GitHub, perhaps?) They may have to modify the add-ons and/or the licensing terms due to them being converted to open source.

I only found out they were discontinued since I had a cart with renewals/extensions of all the add-ons I had purchased previously, then saw the announcement just a few days later. (Had I completed the checkout, I would have renewed them all a day or two before they were discontinued, in other words.) When trying to follow links to locate the add-ons on the site, I could no longer locate them.

Not a huge deal, really--it's not like my sites are broken from the add-ons being discontinued. Once they are open source, other developers may end up taking them over, and that's fine. And I don't mind paying for these, as long as they are regularly supported and updated. Even so, some XF minor upgrades (like 2.1 to 2.2) often require no changes to current add-ons.
 
That's a nice thought.
duke williams recap GIF
 
There hasn't even been another word about it until you mentioned it. They're hoping we all just forget they said it, I think.
This is the sort of persistently negative and nothing's-ever-good-enough rhetoric that we've been looking to leave behind. Even when we say we're going to make addons available for free, there's still some way to find fault and complain about it. Why make a baseless claim that we've somehow mislead people in what we're going to do, based solely on the fact we haven't yet done something we gave no specific timeframe on?

"But you said you'd open source them! But I want it now!"

Rest assured, we're still open sourcing the addons we planned to open source. We're not "just hoping you all forget about it", we've just been discussing some finer points such as which licence to use and potentially designing icons for them, and we don't give minute-by-minute updates or live stream our days - I can do so if you like but you might not find it very entertaining.
 
But I want it now!
Lying about what people say ain't negative though, right? Nobody said anything about "now" or even thought it. Certainly there's no rush to ensure your former customers are covered.

Still curious what devs were asked to take over the add-ons and turned y'all down. I haven't been able to find any and I have asked many.
 
As Mike said just above, it's "still free and likely to stay that way, just no guarantee of one on one support under a free license."

My members also skew older, so I kept the default forums page but am currently using Feeds as a substitute for What's New, mainly because I like the Hot feed and Card view. I felt the existing filters were also too confusing, especially as I saw no way to disable just the filter by date options, so got rid of them. They might make more sense with Threads Types Plus, but I'm not paying that much a year for the privilege :)
Is there any way you can share your site? I’d love to see how you integrated things as this is a lot what I’m thinking of doing.
 
Frankly, I only installed the AC.UI add-on and no Feeds add-on which causes many errors in the ACP but the theme interface is really a killer! Congratulations on the job and the free sharing.
 
just tried that, it disabled whole whatsnew page.
What's New is disabled by the addon, so you'll have to re-enable it, if you haven't already. Then disable "Feeds" (the navigation item) if you no longer want that to appear.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Top Bottom