We need a "No features" release

Rigel Kentaurus

Well-known member
XenForo in it's current incarnation is really good, it has just the right combination of features vs. core functionality, and I am currently really happy with it.

I see, however, that there are key areas in which it can improve ..
  • The mail system is terrible. There is even a "todo" in the code about the subscriptions. They really need to be sent in a separate thread. I have had the page hanging just because sendmail was too slow
  • There is no post_parsed table, the fact is, using a table with the preparsed post can lead to a significant increase in the delivery of the page
I am sure there are small details that can be polished. It would be really nice if the devs could take some months doing a "no new features release, we are just going to make everything better". Lots of code would need to be written just for the two that I suggested.
 
XenForo in it's current incarnation is really good, it has just the right combination of features vs. core functionality, and I am currently really happy with it.

I see, however, that there are key areas in which it can improve ..
  • The mail system is terrible. There is even a "todo" in the code about the subscriptions. They really need to be sent in a separate thread. I have had the page hanging just because sendmail was too slow
  • There is no post_parsed table, the fact is, using a table with the preparsed post can lead to a significant increase in the delivery of the page
I am sure there are small details that can be polished. It would be really nice if the devs could take some months doing a "no new features release, we are just going to make everything better". Lots of code would need to be written just for the two that I suggested.


I am going to disagree with you and say we need at least Akismet/Typepad spam management integration before we say we have a balanced set of features.
 
I do agree with Rigel, a no features release would be good. Fix the future-fix bug reports, rewrite the code and the TODO's.
 
There is no post_parsed table, the fact is, using a table with the preparsed post can lead to a significant increase in the delivery of the page
You can use the one I made if you want... Although since I really just made it for in-house use it doesn't store different parsed posts per language/style (I only use one language on my site as well as only one style... and styles rarely change the HTML of the message itself anyway, so...)
 
I am going to disagree with you and say we need at least Akismet/Typepad spam management integration before we say we have a balanced set of features.

Seriously, have you ever used Akismet with a forum board? It detects more false positives that it does positives. It comes with MyBB by default and I ended-up removing the thing completely. Works well with Blogs like WordPress, I used it with one and that's what it's really designed for use with. But not with forums due to the nature of how some posts gets made and how Akismet works in detecting suspicious posts.

It's a nightmare used on forums. I really hope they don't add either in XenForo, they are useless for using.

If there's anyting they could do with sticking in there as default on registration. It's StopForumSpam. There is no form of "Human Spam" defence on registration page.
 
Also, regarding the lack of a mail queue... a full blown queue would be nice, but in the interm, it would be very easy to alter the existing XenForo_Mail class to do all the actual sending during __destruct(), which fires after everything is done (including sending the page to the user).
 
Seriously, have you ever used Akismet with a forum board? It detects more false positives that it does positives. It comes with MyBB by default and I ended-up removing the thing completely. Works well with Blogs like WordPress, I used it with one and that's what it's really designed for use with. But not with forums due to the nature of how some posts gets made and how Akismet works in detecting suspicious posts.

It's a nightmare used on forums. I really hope they don't add either in XenForo, they are useless for using.

If there's anyting they could do with sticking in there as default on registration. It's StopForumSpam. There is no form of "Human Spam" defence on registration page.

Honestly, it does take some training of Akismet, but my preference to use has been TypePad as there has been significantly less false positives for me.
 
I am going to disagree with you and say we need at least Akismet/Typepad spam management integration before we say we have a balanced set of features.
I am sure you need it, but, how is this different from the people around the forum saying that they absolutely need the albums to operate their forum? Or that they cannot live without the post edit notice, or that the forum is not complete without tags?
Someone's bloat is another user must-have feature
 
Are there any threads showing what is working / not working ? What "needs" to be added ?
Are you using mail in a standard way ? I don't recall many people complaining too much about mail.

Indeed.

It sort of works, until you actually want to scale, it is not as if it were a bug, it just can be vastly improved.

The problem is that the mails are being sent in the same web thread. Because of this, after you post something, the mail notifications are sent to the subscribers immediately. This can take some seconds, but those "seconds" mean that, for AJAX interactions, they hang, and they even timeout and you get the "Server didn't respond" error. If not, you keep accumulating web threads in your server unless you have a really low timeout, in which case the user does not get a response after all.

There is no weekly digest functionality (or daily digest) functionality. It is just some sort of mail() wrapper at this point, really.
 
Not enough to warrant a third party solution.

We get a few spammers here but one click and they're dealt with.

I've had 2 on my site in 3 years.
 
I agree with the OP, I think it's always a good deal to take a moment and look at what you've got and improve upon it. So many software vendors, not just forums, seems to be so preoccupied in "what can we add now" instead of building upon or improving what is already there.

I'd love to see Kier and team take this thread into consideration.
 
I've had 2 on my site in 3 years.

The other night Floris was saying just as much, that he on average gets 1 spammer a month. Now your saying you've only had 2 spammer join in 3 years. You all got your forums wrapped up in silver foil or what?

I mean seriously, this is unbelievable reading! I get more than that in 2-4 days for sure.
 
I have had only one day, where 5 spammers had registered to my board, but cant write something because of the missing email validation.
this could happen because of my easy questions at the registration (2+2 ).
So I changed the questions to something like: What is the different of Black? or ask for Citynames of Countries.
After this change, there was no spammer seen anymore :)
 
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