Pretty Cool Blog Post

Brandon_R

Guest
If anyone can remember the old bulletin board software wars from years ago, you would remember an old major player called ikonboard. This software was a phpBB, UBB and vBulletin rival back in the day. But after they got purchased by a bigger company they lost alot of their users when the old developers of ikonboard broke away and created invision power board. Shortly after ikonboard became pretty obsolete.

Now the same thing is happening with vBulletin. vBulletin was purchased by Internet Brands and became more commercial and money hungry. The main developers of vB left the company and just recently announced that they are making a new forum software called xenforo. Which can be found at http://xenforo.com/

Could this possibly be history repeating itself? Will xenforo replace vbulletin in the near future just like invision power board replaced ikonboard? Only time will tell.

http://forums.ancientclan.com/blog.php?b=322
 
Just goes to show... money isn't everything in life...

Or companies can become too complacent and forget that their customers are assets not something to take for granted. Have a couple of issues with this currently, ego is a dirty word when it comes to software ... please note I'm not talking Xen here.
 
Or companies can become too complacent and forget that their customers are assets not something to take for granted. Have a couple of issues with this currently, ego is a dirty word when it comes to software ... please note I'm not talking Xen here.
Yep, there just goes to show you Business Models don't apply to everything. You can't walk up to the CEO of dominoes and say you got a bad pizza but in the software industry you can :)
 
I wonder of XF will get big enough, then be bought out, then developers quit, and make another new forum software. If they do, I recommend the new forum name be chucknorrisforu.
 
It would take a pretty long time for XF to replace vB
I don't know about that, Peggy. As soon as XenForo goes final and is released, a lot of vB users are going to flock to it. There are a lot who are already migrating to Invision. XenForo may very well knock vB out of the game within two years after it's released. All of this has happened before, and it will happen again.

If there is one thing we all know, it's that history repeats itself. If there is one thing we all know, it's that history repeats itself.
 
::nods::

I know quite a few people who run multiple boards that have been looking for a solution to replace vB for the last year or so, or at least looking at alternatives. Many of them have been looking at IPB because they are really the only viable alternative in many cases, but XF changes all that, in fact it's fundamentally superior to IPB in quite a few respects, and that's before it's even at version 1.0.

Don't underestimate the speed with which internet technologies change... If XF is better, more engaging, has developers that LISTEN, and scales better to big board loads, well, vB should be very concerned about history repeating.

Susan and I have been pretty much resigned to the fact that we were going to be stuck on vB 3.8.x and have to fork off to custom development at this point. After playing with XF, I'm now trying to weight just how much the (extensive) customizations we've made matter. XF is THAT much better than vB. And the "features" in 4.x mean less than nothing to us, it would be a downgrade not an upgrade for us.
 
::nods::

I know quite a few people who run multiple boards that have been looking for a solution to replace vB for the last year or so, or at least looking at alternatives. Many of them have been looking at IPB because they are really the only viable alternative in many cases, but XF changes all that, in fact it's fundamentally superior to IPB in quite a few respects, and that's before it's even at version 1.0.

XenForo is definitely innovative in a few area's but to call it fundamentally superior to Invision based merely off cosmetics is a long shot. Invision is a polished product and dare I say the absolute best on the market at the moment. I can't say XenForo is superior to Invision without first taking a hard look at the final code and feature lists, neither of which are available to anybody yet.

All of us have nothing but high hopes for XenForo and confidence in the development team. However I'm not willing to flatter their ego's too much yet. :D
 
That is a pretty cool blog post, now if it was on a big or in any way known site, it would be even cooler!

But still, I guess it is nice to see people spreading the love for xF already.
 
At least six months ... but hey who's counting :cool:
Not realy. Most of the vB owner need to replace vB within blogs and/or gallery, maybe social groups. (3.6.X)
xpadvanced or a bridge to Joomla 1.5 would be helpfull to.

So I think a lot of new projects will start with XenForo, but replacing vB will need some years
 
XenForo is definitely innovative in a few area's but to call it fundamentally superior to Invision based merely off cosmetics is a long shot. Invision is a polished product and dare I say the absolute best on the market at the moment. I can't say XenForo is superior to Invision without first taking a hard look at the final code and feature lists, neither of which are available to anybody yet.

All of us have nothing but high hopes for XenForo and confidence in the development team. However I'm not willing to flatter their ego's too much yet. :D
:)

I'm not calling it superior based on cosmetics, I'm calling it superior based on the awesome semantic HTML and other excellent built in SEO, beautifully setup CSS diven layout (not cosmetically beautiful, but make-life-easier-for-styling-designing). The combination of a fully CSS controlled display with jQuery for animations and tweaking IS fundamentally superior :). As is the built in routing/url redirection functionality of XF. As is the alert system. And the entire thing is built on MVC principles, which will make mod development a lot easier/more maintainable. Again, fundamentally superior. Not to mention being specifically designed to scale to big board load (with Sphinx integration coming etc). These are NOT cosmetic issues, these are core platform functionality.

The point is, Mike and Kier have built a new platform from the ground up with superior infrastructure that address a lot of things that the current market leaders are trying to fix via retrofit. At the same time they have added a lot of capability for growth, and made the base system faster, more scalable and all around a much better user experience.

Yup, my money is on XF kicking some butt in the forum space starting almost as soon as it's released. It's just *better* in almost every metric I've looked at with the exception of bells and whistles/mods available, and those WILL come. Just watch how fast XF is adopted by 3rd party devs if Kier and Mike do a good job of actually cultivating 3rd party dev interaction and development.
 
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