So, my official thoughts on xF

[DRE]

I heard the users viewing thread has a lot of queries and slows down sites.

Can you get a coder to make a better one? Then you could sell it in the resource manager or release it for free.

 

[Mr.Rick]

A fellow Ontarian eh.

hah. yup

i love XenForo's ignore feature the best

Yes, its an amazing feature Chris.

I heard the users viewing thread has a lot of queries and slows down sites.

Can you get a coder to make a better one? Then you could sell it in the resource manager or release it for free.

I don't have to worry about it as of yet since that site is slow


Just finished our 2nd XF port.
Bought a new BB, going to port to xF in the next week
1.1m posts

 

[oldzy]

Interesting about the RC thing, as I live near Hot Rod in Hamilton, and hear buzzing up and down the road quite a bit.

 

[Mr.Rick]

Interesting about the RC thing, as I live near Hot Rod in Hamilton, and hear buzzing up and down the road quite a bit.

Yup, i am familiar with their name on the forums though I have never dealt with them.
They are fairly active on my one site here:
http://forums.londonrc.com/forumdisplay.php?f=97

Its a great hobby. I decided to keep all my RC sites when i sold to VS & IB, was hoping for no politics... lol, i was wrong

Also picked up my 3rd license.

 

[Mr.Rick]

Ended up doing another migration for another small board, went smooth.
- Serving avatars and JS from CDN helps.
- memcached was easy to setup.
- Addons are installing really smooth and of course all the FB integration stuff is awesome.
- pageviews are officially down on both sites, this is to be expected though.
- regformtimer has really worked well in stopping spammers.
- I certainly see the need for certain addons to be expanded on (ie: conversation reader). Spammers run amuck on our sites spamming spin off sites, would be nice to be able to search
- Really loving the simplest of things, the word censor / rewrite. Got a conversation the other day calling me a 'bumhole' and to 'frack myself'. lol
- Would be nice to see if there is no possibility of migrating a subscription to atleast write a note to the xF account of when they signed up, expiry & trans id. My bb's have hundreds of subs, nightmare!

 

[Wildcat Media]

Side note.. Analytics is reporting traffic is up, could be peoples curiosity, could be the site just runs better.
Statistically way less registrations since the tools using to block spam are working perfect!

We gained about 200-250 additional visitors (members and non-members) since we converted from vB3.8 last November. We now hit 1,000+ users during peak hours; we were averaging 750-800 previously. (And this was even after some members hated it and threatened to leave. ) It also seems that post counts are increasing at a faster rate, although I have not really tracked those stats as closely.

I had heavily modified our vB 3.8 to make it more efficient. We had tried vB 4.0 as a test instance but even with a dozen members, it was SO much slower than vB 3.8 that I never wanted to subject our server to it. The blog and CMS parts of vB4 are a trainwreck.

We still need a handful of very important admin/moderator functions that we're lacking, but otherwise the overall XF package has worked out so much better than vB that I'm glad I spent a few sleepless nights getting it converted.

Side effect: we upgraded to a newer quad-core server with dual SSDs. XF barely breaks a sweat during peak hours. We're set for quite awhile now! Very anxious to see what the future XF versions bring us.

 

[Slavik]

Side note.. Analytics is reporting traffic is up, could be peoples curiosity, could be the site just runs better.
Statistically way less registrations since the tools using to block spam are working perfect!

Rememeber to add about 12% more pageviews that you lose due to XenForo's use of ajax over vb4

 

[Alteran Ancient]

You've rated XF against vB4 and XF quite rightly came out as king. How would you rate XF against what you've seen of vB5c?

Wait... that's an unfair question - one that we already know the answer to.

 

[craigiri]

Rememeber to add about 12% more pageviews that you lose due to XenForo's use of ajax over vb4

As reported before, I lost about 20% vs. EE (expression engine forums).
BUT, here's the good news......actually, the stats show the 15% you mention, BUT that is in light of a 32% increase in visitors - so the deficit is actually closer to 25%. Some of it is caused by better and faster search, which also equals fewer page views.
But as the chart shows, even the page view gap is almost made up by increased traffic.

No complaints here....
Oh, and my newest XF installation is R/C also - but concentrates on Quadcopters...now I just need some members there.....getting good page views, but not members (yet).

 

[Stallyon]

I love the smooth, slick feel and the fact everything actually works like it should. Was a vBulletin customer from March 2005, will slowly start moving my forums across to Xenforo; I have successfully moved one so far.

 

[Mr.Rick]

Rememeber to add about 12% more pageviews that you lose due to XenForo's use of ajax over vb4

Yea, pageviews did end up dropping across all the sites I ported to xF
- www.theburningprocess.com (new domain and xF. was vb3)
- www.kyoshoforum.com (was vb4)
- www.durhamrc.com (was vb4)

I have decided to hold off porting to xF but certainly not because of the drop in pageviews. With the speed increase more memebers are sure to join the site and be more engaged, I think in time that loss of 12% will be back

If you are depending on CPM revenue, this will drop your income slightly

I love the smooth, slick feel and the fact everything actually works like it should. Was a vBulletin customer from March 2005, will slowly start moving my forums across to Xenforo; I have successfully moved one so far.

For the lats few days I was dealing with my box being crippled (since migration to xF). The slow query setup on xF literally brought my dedicated server to its knees with minimal to no queries from the smaller sites. Much research and asking around at least got me disable "Enable Delayed Insert SQL Queries". That did help and dropped 1/3 of the load from my box.

Once that was resolved it was back to work and this is where I see a few short comings still with xF (unless I am overlooking the ability to / feature for) mass moving users, mass moving threads. I did buy a mass move thread addon from a coder here (from resources) and its just not nearly as good as the default vB3 mass move. So, lack of ability to mass move threads and users is a draw back for some of us.

Migration of subscriptions seems to be a mess but havent had to tackle that head on yet.

So, as of right now, most of my active vB3 boards will remain vB3 while other sites go xF.

EDIT: also wish the usergroups showed total member count per.

 

[Shelley]

Yea, pageviews did end up dropping across all the sites I ported to xF
- www.theburningprocess.com (new domain and xF. was vb3)
- www.kyoshoforum.com (was vb4)
- www.durhamrc.com (was vb4)

I have decided to hold off porting to xF but certainly not because of the drop in pageviews. With the speed increase more memebers are sure to join the site and be more engaged, I think in time that loss of 12% will be back

If you are depending on CPM revenue, this will drop your income slightly



For the lats few days I was dealing with my box being crippled (since migration to xF). The slow query setup on xF literally brought my dedicated server to its knees with minimal to no queries from the smaller sites. Much research and asking around at least got me disable "Enable Delayed Insert SQL Queries". That did help and dropped 1/3 of the load from my box.

Once that was resolved it was back to work and this is where I see a few short comings still with xF (unless I am overlooking the ability to / feature for) mass moving users, mass moving threads. I did buy a mass move thread addon from a coder here (from resources) and its just not nearly as good as the default vB3 mass move. So, lack of ability to mass move threads and users is a draw back for some of us.

Migration of subscriptions seems to be a mess but havent had to tackle that head on yet.

So, as of right now, most of my active vB3 boards will remain vB3 while other sites go xF.

EDIT: also wish the usergroups showed total member count per.

Aren't the drop in pageviews because members don't have to venture to other pages to get tasks done? I'm sure digitalpoint highlighted and touched upon this when he migrated and was one month into using xf and posting his results.

 

[Mr.Rick]

Aren't the drop in pageviews because members don't have to venture to other pages to get tasks done? I'm sure digitalpoint highlighted and touched upon this when he migrated and was one month into using xf and posting his results.

Yes, AJAX = drop in pageviews.
For people driven by CPM revenue this will affect income.
I have not seen a trend of new users as of yet but again, I also ported slower user activity sites.

 

[Andrej]

I heard the users viewing thread has a lot of queries and slows down sites.

Can you get a coder to make a better one? Then you could sell it in the resource manager or release it for free.

I believe a better version is already available here (russian/eng), which don't do any database queries.

However, the author don't want to release it at the official community at the moment.

PS: wanted to include a google translate link but the translation is way too horrible.

 

[Carlos]

You've rated XF against vB4 and XF quite rightly came out as king. How would you rate XF against what you've seen of vB5c?

Wait... that's an unfair question - one that we already know the answer to.

Ahhhh..... I love these sarcastic jabs at IB.

 

[Mr.Rick]

Personally I will not upgrade to vB4 or vb5, though moving to vB4 may be an ok solution I just don't see the value in it. Perhaps i'm not seeing or knowing the overall benefits of leaving vB3 to it.
My vb3 has a ton of custom work done to it but currently I am finding more devs for vB3 than xF still. I havent taken to Odesk as of yet but perhaps that is the best place to find coders who don't take 2 months to deliver a non working addon.

 

[Carlos]

Very good decision, Rick. It was a waste of time to upgrade to vB4 when I purchased CODForums.

Don't get me started on finding a good skin for vB4. *groans*

 

[Mr.Rick]

Very good decision, Rick. It was a waste of time to upgrade to vB4 when I purchased CODForums.

Don't get me started on finding a good skin for vB4. *groans*

I have found designers to be very receptive to xF. vB4 designers seem way more overpriced, atleast the ones I have dealt with. There are good guys out there for xF but expect to still spend money.

One positive that I really like about xF, the stats graphs, amazing work there.