Why did you leave Invision or WoltLab or vB5 or other commercial forum platform (if you migrated to XF)?

[sbj]

Hey,

I am interested to know more about why people left other commercial platforms and migrated to XenForo.

Specifically wanting to know about paid platforms only (IPS, WBB, vB5, etc.).

I mean leaving SMF or phpBB or vb3/4 doesn't need to be explained, it is pretty obvious. Not including them.

Coming from another commercial paid solution to here is not an easy decision however.

What made you do the switch?

Thanks.

 

[digitalpoint]

It was when I realized vBulletin devs couldn't code themselves out of a paper bag and the guy in charge of the devs (the CTO of Internet Brands) started spewing such utter crap from a technical standpoint that it was an "Oh ****..." moment.

People were asking why the vBulletin 4 CMS had hundreds of SQL queries per page and if that was going to be addressed and his response was, "No, because query count doesn't matter, only the rendering speed of the page does..." Even if you are going to make that argument, maybe the page being rendered shouldn't take 10 seconds to render. lol

This was the guy in charge of the devs.

It was also about the time Lawrence Cole of "Xtreme Marketing Systems" (lol) took over as their marketing director and he left a lot to be desired imo.

Distill it all down to a combo of poor management and underpaid (what I would consider) barely entry-level developers. Nothing good was coming down the pipe.

 

[kolakube]

Despite being a vBulletin junkie I somehow didn't know about XenForo until 2018. I ran my forums on vB3 for a long time and just by taking a look at vB4 I knew I didn't want to switch, so I migrated to Invision for a few years just for the forum aspect.

Once I put together that some of the nicer "vB but not really vB-looking sites" I found were actually built on this thing called XenForo and I looked into the history, I converted almost immediately.

I was never really satisfied with the look or controls of Invision and didn't feel welcome as an addon developer, so I never pursued much with the software. There is also something about the xF forum experience that makes me want to stay and browse around for sometimes too long where I feel like much of the layout of Invision is trying to get me to go away as soon as possible.

 

[VBX Co]

We moved from vB3 to IP.Board with a slew of add-ons in 2009 after seeing the slowmo vB4 train wreck. The thinking was to expand the offer beyond forums but unfortunately, members didn't like it; overall they found it clunky and too far removed from what they were used to.

We found out about Xenforo from one of the admin boards and came over in 2010 to offer words of support, with no interest in a license as we'd just renewed our IPS licenses for another year. However, a week later we bought a license to run a side-project and loved it. So much so, that we spent the next 11 months planning to move our 1.5M post site over from IPS. We moved it in Nov 2011 and have never looked back. Still think it's the best forum software on the market!

 

[Suzanne O]

Invision was too restrictive.
vbulletin was always getting database errors.
xenforo came along and i thought why not.
Never migrated my forums because at the time there weren't any importers.
I did have fun with xenforo when it was in it's early years. Lots of aggressive resets of my forum.
Less of them today