Shoryuken Moves From Xenforo to Vanilla Forums

[DRE]

Just goes to show that beauty is in the eye of the beholder; there are a few things about it I do like. I like the really small avatar (their users don't, but then if you're used to a massive avatar it would be a shock!) since this reduces postbit space even more to focus on content not stats. I like the simplified flags under each post (off topic, agree, disagree, like) plus the mini-avatars of each post rater. I like the general style, light and easy on the eye.

I don't know anything about the platform, but reading the user comments it looks to have been a big step backwards in terms of features. I think that is their mistake rather than the style - you take away features from your community at your peril.

Like many here I can't understand their reasons for moving. It is simply wrong to suggest that a large forum is unstable on Xenforo since there are so many that run fine. Surely they just needed to sort out better hosting and with Mike Edge amongst others seemingly offering blazingly fast hosting for peanuts why change to Vanilla? Seriously looking at their pricing, to get daily backups and just 300k page views a month (which is nothing in forum terms, as each single visitor can create hundreds a day!) it's $149 a month - you could get some amazing hosting for that with money left over. Sadly (for Xenforo) I think this is yet another casualty of people getting a bit concerned with the legal case and lack of updates, it seems to be the straw that is breaking the camel's back in some cases.

Yeah it's pretty sad. The old forums looked so much better but they ruined it with the kind of ads they were using and the ad placement. The ad placement was very annoying and broke the forum in so many ways. After switching to Vanilla Forum, the ad placement is now almost even worse. There's like a huge chunk of the top right section missing cause there's supposed to be an ad there. Don't even bother signing up cause once you logged in you'll be greeted by a horrible user interface and even more annoying ads.

 

[Teapot]

^ Not sure if I'm getting confused with this platform/pricing, there seems to also be an open source version?

The software is open source for you to host yourself, but the software as a hosted solution costs money.

 

[Ingenious]

Cheers for the info guys, found the open source version on http://vanillaforums.org/ rather than the link in the footer of the above site. It's free and comes with the promise "You break it, you fix it". Mmmm... Xenforo $140 which over a year is only $12 a month. Converting that to UK it's £8 a month. This is what makes largely unsupported open source and free platforms such lunacy in my mind - for the sake of $12/£8 a month why take the risk? If you do not care enough about your community, friends and customers enough to pay $12 a month to run your forum, even out of your own pocket, should you be running a forum at all?

 

[oman]

This just doesn't look good:

 

[Digital Jedi]

Shoryken Forums? Holy Crap, that was the first forum I ever joined using the name Digital Jedi. My old posts are probably in the ether now (thanks goodness).

 

[FabioCesar]

what matters is how users accept the system, in my case my users prefer vbulletin ... in other forums that I have the XF is going well ..

What makes this community is dismayed by the XF looks like the center of the universe, if there is any comment on any other system or deficiency XF, are massacred ...

How to kill the forum using vanilla, it is a sign that the XF is not good, had good admin would not have changed the system ... now is the time to analyze the admins, expect the XF one more time or leave for another solution ...

 

[Slavik]

As per http://xenforo.com/community/threads/the-obligatory-go-xenforo-thread.44777/page-7#post-480713 this thread is more derailed into bashing the forum. So it will be locked.