Success or destruction stories with xenForo?

[AzzidReign]

Hmmm.. we are about to convert from VB4 to IPB3.2 in a couple of days. The forums have over 2M posts. Not shifting to XF as we feel it will take the platform a good 2 years to mature.

That...in my very honest opinion, will be STUPID. I wish I had stayed on vB. Seriously...if official addons are holding you back, why not just hire a coder to code you a system? That way it's personalized to you and not the general public.

I hate myself for downgrading my vb3.8+vbseo site to IPB. It's getting worse and worse. I'm currently making 25% ad revenue I was back then. Not a happy camper here. Only time and an upgrade to xF will tell whether it's their software or not.

 

[Marc]

Hmmm.. we are about to convert from VB4 to IPB3.2 in a couple of days. The forums have over 2M posts. Not shifting to XF as we feel it will take the platform a good 2 years to mature.

You have 3 people on here who have made exactly that move, 2 of which are big boards. All three are now on xenforo. Obviously your call m8, but I will be honest and say moving to IPB was a move I wish I had never made.

 

[Mike54]

Hmmm.. we are about to convert from VB4 to IPB3.2 in a couple of days. The forums have over 2M posts. Not shifting to XF as we feel it will take the platform a good 2 years to mature.

I never used vB4, so I have no clue what it is like. But I can tell you this much - knowing what I know now, I would never have converted from vB3.8 to IPB. I had a pretty fair run with IPB, until an update released just about a year ago. After fighting it ever since (with zero help from IPS, mind), I'm waving the white flag and surrendering. I've considered closing up shop, to be honest. That's not what I want for my sites, but I'm not going to endure this level of frustration any longer. Look at the IPB customers on just this topic. Over the last several months, I've wondered where some of the more active members of the IPS company forums have been hiding. They weren't hiding, they've already converted to this software, or to something else.

If you're already committed to the IPB conversion, I do wish you the very best with it. I hope your experiences will be much more positive than my own. If no money has changed hands, you might do well to take a couple steps back and give your decision a bit more consideration.

Azzid, I'm beginning to wonder how much longer your patience is going to last over there. They simply do not want to hear what you have to say. You've been making the same points, over and over, but it's all been met with stubborn denial. With the exception of Brandon, who just needs to drive by every topic on the site to tell everyone they are wrong. Just his attitude is enough to turn even Job away from doing business with them! I hope you will find some degree of satisfaction, but I fear it's a slim hope.

 

[Renegade]

I would love to carry this convo forward to understand the reason behind the following two issues which you all faced but this is XF and I don't think this would be appropriate.

1. User activity decrease. I don't understand why would that happen. The 3.2 seems like a good system to me in comparison to VB4.
2. SE listing. I see a few IPB forums much smaller than my VB forum but they have many more pages indexed than my current site.

Not that I don't want to listen to what you all faced, I am just trying to make sense of it. We need add-ons like blogs, nexus, classifieds, portal and other custom ones. If we had an option of managing it on XF, we might have chosen this instead.

 

[Marc]

I would love to carry this convo forward to understand the reason behind the following two issues which you all faced but this is XF and I don't think this would be appropriate.

1. User activity decrease. I don't understand why would that happen. The 3.2 seems like a good system to me in comparison to VB4.
2. SE listing. I see a few IPB forums much smaller than my VB forum but they have many more pages indexed than my current site.

Not that I don't want to listen to what you all faced, I am just trying to make sense of it. We need add-ons like blogs, nexus, classifieds, portal and other custom ones. If we had an option of managing it on XF, we might have chosen this instead.

The user activity decrease comes with the difficulty of use that IPB has. Now for me I dont find it too bad, but for whatever reason users that are a little less technical tend to find it confusing. Never did put my finger on it, but had people asking questions about "how to do xyz" all the time on IPB and yet now I havent.

SE listings, I dont think are much different if Im honest. Both rank them fairly well as I said in my previous post.

The main issue that I have with IPB which is what you will find when you move over there, is the speed of development versus speed of fixing issues. If you post a support ticket they are actually very good, however there are always niggling issues all over the software when it is release and these never get fixed before they are working on "the next big thing". So therefore you have a hole lot of what IMO are good products, that have their annoying little bugs here and there in them that never seem to get fixed. This is my primary reason for moving software above all else.

The other thing there seems to be is very much a "Well nobody else seems to be getting this" mentality on the support forums, and sometimes feels your treated a little bit like an idiot. Whereas I have had similar issues here and people are all over the post trying to figure it out. A real community spirit similar to that of the old VB3.0 and even 2.0 days. Something I honestly thought was dead when it comes to these kinds of forum.

 

[User]

Not that I don't want to listen to what you all faced, I am just trying to make sense of it.

Sense? Simple. No one on the official XF forum will advise you to go with a competing product, especially when all those people installed XF instead. At the end of the day you will need to buy a license for all products you are considering and just try them out for yourself.

 

[AzzidReign]

If only you could see all the angry threads they've moved to customer only sections or deleted. SE listings are terrible. Since upgrading to 3.2 we've dropped from the first page to not in the index for the same search terms.

But it's up to you. I'd rather my competition convert to IPB if you catch my drift. I'd be a very happy camper if that was the case look

 

[3dsoft]

If only you could see all the angry threads they've moved to customer only sections or deleted. SE listings are terrible. Since upgrading to 3.2 we've dropped from the first page to not in the index for the same search terms.

But it's up to you. I'd rather my competition convert to IPB if you catch my drift. I'd be a very happy camper if that was the case look

Have you upgraded from IPB 3.1.4 to 3.2 or did you mean that you upgraded from VB to IPB? I am currently using IPB 3.1.4 and also thought about upgrading to IPB 3.2 but I am not so sure, yet. Because I have also lost a lot of traffic ever since migrating from VB 3.8 to IPB 3.0. Loosing even more traffic would be devastating.
What I don't understand is that it seems that most IPB users see a decline in traffic after converting but the main IPB community site seems to have their traffic increased. That is somewhat a contradiction.

 

[hellreturn]

What I don't understand is that it seems that most IPB users see a decline in traffic after converting but the main IPB community site seems to have their traffic increased. That is somewhat a contradiction.

I upgrade from 3.1.x to 3.2.x and lost 20% traffic from SE right after conversion in 2 weeks. Nothing changed over night except the 'upgrade'. 3.2.3 had security exploit fix so there was not much option for not to upgrade and other 400 bug fixes.

Issue with IPB forum is wrong HTTP headers given to search engine and tons of 500 and 403 error. I don't think search engine likes 5000, 500 HTTP errors, do they? Why would Google refer some body to your forums, when Google feels your site has constant issues because of 500 HTTP error ? It doesn't stop here and their are other issues too which contribute to loosing your SERP.

The reason IPB community site keeps doing well is because they have tons of back link and admins are going to visit their forums anyways and they only have 2 competitors i.e. vB and Xenforo. How many competitors your forum got? Many.

 

[Mike54]

I am currently using IPB 3.1.4 and also thought about upgrading to IPB 3.2 but I am not so sure, yet. Because I have also lost a lot of traffic ever since migrating from VB 3.8 to IPB 3.0. Loosing even more traffic would be devastating.

I had amazing results after converting from vB 3.8/vBSEO to IPB 3.0.4. I was really impressed to see all of my recorded performance metrics improving as they were. Life was good, all the way through to the 3.1.3 update. When I was pressing panic buttons, the people at IPS assured me they had changed nothing that could affect my search engine numbers. Now, those same people are saying they may have changed some small things that may have had a large impact. Was that designed to make me feel more confident about their software?!?

When I updated one of my sites from 3.1.4 to 3.2.0, I saw an immediate slump in my data. This site was straight out of the tin, with no edits in any files or templates. And, as hellreturn mentioned, this was with no other changes. I had spent time during the 3.2 Beta period updating my skin, so after the forum update, my members were seeing a skin as close to the 3.1 skin as I could make it. That site runs on a VPS with more than adequate resources. All the excuses the IPB apologists have tried to offer are missing the mark.

What I don't understand is that it seems that most IPB users see a decline in traffic after converting but the main IPB community site seems to have their traffic increased. That is somewhat a contradiction.

I don't see it as a contradiction at all. A new release of IPB becomes available and people visit their forums to see how things are working. It's simple curiosity. As things begin to settle down, the spike in traffic will start falling back. Of course, when a company has the kind of release schedule we've seen with IPB over this past year, things never get a chance to settle down.

 

[AzzidReign]

Again, a lot of people are jumping the vB ship to go over to IPB. Why haven't they come here yet? I know the lawsuit has some people leery about what the outcome may be for the company. Others are worried that the development team is kind of small. And then there are those that think that the company and product are just not mature yet. So that's why IPB is seeing more and more people over there (though, I'd like to see the stats you've seen). Plus, as someone has said, they probably have thousands of backlinks for the word "forums". The logic of "the main site is doing well, why are the rest of IPB sites not?" just doesn't work. All are failing besides a couple, which, if you ask me, were extremely small sites when they started on vB so it's expected to see growth (and I highly doubt these people claiming growth on their sites even have Google Analytics installed...it surprises me how few webmasters use GA...they are probably looking at registration stats and not realizing over half the registrations are from spam bots lol).

Either way, you have multiple people here claiming to be doing TERRIBLE on IPB. I just upgraded my site to 3.2 on the 7th of this month. Each week, we are having a 8-10% decline in traffic. On top of that, as I mentioned earlier...MANY of our high ranking keywords have TOTALLY dropped off the face of Google. When I say top, I only look for keywords on the first page. I think anything after that is obsolete. So for me to notice all of these keywords just disappearing and not even be found in the first 20-30 pages is outrageous. How can I go from first page to non-existent? I mean, if that's how you want your site to be, more power to you. As I stated earlier, I'd like to see more sites in my niche be on IPB, it will just help me when I convert over here

I'm buying my license today and starting development. Kier is creating an importer for 3.2 (at least that's my understanding) using my database so I'm hoping it's smooth sailing for bigboards once he gets this importer working (8.5gb database). Then...just hoping that 1.1 comes with the release of his BB Search option. I'm itchin'...

 

[Deebs]

AzzidReign,

One thing I disagree with you is around XenForo's maturity, XenForo IS a mature product, it is if anything, not feature rich in comparison to other solutions available.

 

[AzzidReign]

You are not disagreeing with me, if I didn't think it was the right product, you wouldn't see me here. I'm just stating what I've heard from other people on other admins sites.

 

[Deebs]

Apologies

 

[3dsoft]

But how good is xenforo really doing in search engine results? Are any good stats around which shows that xenforo would do as good as VB 3.8?
For testing purposes I have created a test message here at xenforo with the exact same title (Test Search Breaking Image Links) which another user had created over at IPB. The problem is that Google does not pick up the xenforo topic at all and rather prefers the IPB topic instead. Check out the search results for yourself.

 

[AzzidReign]

lol then go with IPB. I think it's a stupid test for multiple reasons but you'll find more reasons to not go here. Again, idc what you do. I've tried vb3.8+vbseo, IPB 3.0, 3.1, and 3.2, and about to try out xf1.1. This is going to be our last move and we are going to make the best of it. After ever upgrade with ipb, we've lost more and more traffic and SERPs. But, you might want to try IPB and maybe you'll be the 1 in 100 that actually succeeds with it.

 

[Forsaken]

You are not disagreeing with me, if I didn't think it was the right product, you wouldn't see me here. I'm just stating what I've heard from other people on other admins sites.

I'd take what people say on admin sites with a truck of salt .

Maturity of a product shouldn't be measured by features, but by how well it performs, and the development pace. XenForo out performs every software I've used (Which is most of them), and the development pace is much faster than IPB and vB put together. Even if you use the ridiculous metric of features as a sign of platform maturity, just look at what has made it into 1.1... It took much longer for them to make it into vB and IPB, and XF is already doing everything better.

This wasn't just in response to you, but I see people saying XF isn't mature without anything to back the statement.

 

[Forsaken]

But how good is xenforo really doing in search engine results? Are any good stats around which shows that xenforo would do as good as VB 3.8?
For testing purposes I have created a test message here at xenforo with the exact same title (Test Search Breaking Image Links) which another user had created over at IPB. The problem is that Google does not pick up the xenforo topic at all and rather prefers the IPB topic instead. Check out the search results for yourself.

Nearly every community who has converted from vB or IPB have said their search results have picked up.

 

[AzzidReign]

lol If I listened to everything some of these kids say on admin sites like TAZ, I'd be lost. For one, the most outspoken ones, and even the ones that everyone holds up on pedestals, all run low traffic, low quality, low activity ****-holes (sorry for the bad word, I wonder if it will get filtered lol). I can't stand seeing some of these "big named" forum figures that walk around like the own every admin site and that their opinions are the only ones that matters. It's a lot of the vb fanboys too, from what I've noticed.

In either case, I don't listen to those clowns.

 

[3dsoft]

At the moment xenforo does not seem to be ready for our community, yet. An important add-on for us would be an equivalent gallery solution. The ones available do not offer the features, yet. Therefore I am not in a hurry to act, now.

But I would like to see your feedback after you converted. So please, keep us informed here.