GrnEyedDvl
Active member
This is not a rant against XenForo. Actually its much the opposite. If you came here to see XenForo devs get bashed you will be a bit disappointed.
This will likely be a bit long. About a week ago I ran across this posted by @Chris D and he said something that really made me sit back and think. The point he made about people people being more motivated to leave a negative review than a positive one is a good point. I think anyone who thinks about it rationally sees this to be true, and I am willing to bet that anyone who reads this has made some form of complaint or another. But that is not the comment that caught my eye. That was this one.
For core functions and basic usability you guys nailed it. And I do mean nailed it. I dislike the 5 star system as I prefer to give a 1 through 10, so I will give you an 8.5 or a 4.25 on the 5 point scale. Forum structure, thread types, query optimization, styling options and ease of customizing, the plugin system, notifications, the way PMs work, profile options, bookmarks (better than a browser in my opinion), all that and more are excellent. Nice job and thank you!
If you check the creation date of the account I am posting with you will see its 2013. I actually bought XenForo 1.x back then, and refused to move my big site to it. It simply was not ready for a large site in my opinion. I did not post about it, or demand a refund or anything like that. I just did not use it. A little over a month ago I moved that same site to XenForo 2.3 and I am pretty happy with that decision.
So my question for @Chris D is this: Why do you not think XenForo is a 5-star product? And why the hell aren't you working on it and why isn't it done yet?!?!
I will give my 2 cents in a minute, but I am definitely interested in where you think XenForo falls short. Because I think where it falls short is simply related to what in other industries you might call fit and finish. It has great pieces, but they need a few slight tweaks. Or you might compare it to buying a car. You probably would not refuse to buy a new car because it does not have that extra USB port in the back seat. But when you need it, its really nice to have. My personal pickup has a 110 outlet and a bigger alternator that will actually run a decent small welder when the truck idles. I was not looking for that when I bought it, in fact I did not even know it also had an outlet in the bed of the truck until after I had owned it for a week or so. When we had a 3 day power outage because of weather in Denver I sure appreciated being able to plug in my big freezer for a couple of hours at a time and save a freezer full of beef.
Like cars, forums have evolved over time. Back in the day power brakes were optional, and power windows and AC were luxury items. Now you cannot buy a car without them. There are several things that are and have been standard items on other forum packages that for whatever reason XenForo has not embraced. And when I see them suggested it gets played down a bit, both by people who cannot or have not seen the utility of it and by the devs for "not enough interest". I guess I would say that people who do not get the utility of a certain item will never show interest in it because they simply do not get it, but once they use it then they get it. A few examples
Design flaw vs bugs
I think this distinction has to be made. For the purposes of this discussion, a design flaw is something that works as designed, but the design was maybe not fully thought out. A bug is something that does not work as intended.
The biggest example of a design flaw I can think of in XenForo is the File Health Check system. It seriously needs a built in way to update the hashes, especially when you release an official file that tells you to change the contents of it, such as the redirect files. So your user, who may or may not be technically inclined, follows your instructions and now has a warning in his admincp that he may or may not understand. Eventually he just learns to ignore that warning, which makes that warning meaningless.
For those of you who are going to jump in and say "He can do this and this and this in 5 minutes", I will simply respond "You can do the same the next time you have a problem with your car." The next time you get your oil changed or tires rotated (similar cost as XenForo) the manually check your oil drain plug and retorque the lugs yourself. It takes 5 minutes. Don't go run and complain if your tires fall off and your oil leaks out because you refuse to pay dealership prices for these services and take it to a place that pays minimum wage to work on your expensive vehicle.
For bugs and config problems, in my experience XenForo staff is really responsive on the forums. I think they do a pretty good job supporting the product but also coaching people through their own errors, or in my case an error caused by a bad piece of add-on code. And if you look at the Bug Report section there are numerous ones marked as fixed for the next release.
My only comment there is this: Why not release them when you fix it? Not as a patch you have to install, or an upgrade. Just release the code and say "This piece of code goes here" for those with the inclination and the ability to edit their own files. Put it out there as a Use at your own risk option. I would bet that someone out in the community would compile those into a plugin that would at least be semi official, so that no technical users could also benefit from it. I also understand that taking this approach might have to be run through legal channels and might not be possible depending on the piece of code that has to be fixed. Some pieces you might be able to release this way, others maybe not. Something to think about anyways.
And last but not least, its better to under promise and over deliver than it is to over promise and under deliver. There are numerous threads here about XeoForo 2.4 is coming and 3.0 is coming, and then it gets delayed. I know you are so excited when you feel like you produced something awesome that you want to get some info out there right now. But you are setting yourselves up for failure, or at least a ration of wtf? type posts, unless you really can hit that target. And I for one would rather see you spend the time helping someone or writing new code than responding to that kind of crap.
And I will say again, overall I love the package. Great work! Keep it up and I am definitely a long term customer.
This will likely be a bit long. About a week ago I ran across this posted by @Chris D and he said something that really made me sit back and think. The point he made about people people being more motivated to leave a negative review than a positive one is a good point. I think anyone who thinks about it rationally sees this to be true, and I am willing to bet that anyone who reads this has made some form of complaint or another. But that is not the comment that caught my eye. That was this one.
I found that to be a truly humble and honest comment, and I think he deserves some kudos for it. It's sometimes hard for all of us to admit when we come up a bit short. When I hold a meeting at work, I prefer to start with what is going right, rather than what is going wrong so that we can take what we did right and try to replicate that. So I will do the same thing here.Chris D said:
For core functions and basic usability you guys nailed it. And I do mean nailed it. I dislike the 5 star system as I prefer to give a 1 through 10, so I will give you an 8.5 or a 4.25 on the 5 point scale. Forum structure, thread types, query optimization, styling options and ease of customizing, the plugin system, notifications, the way PMs work, profile options, bookmarks (better than a browser in my opinion), all that and more are excellent. Nice job and thank you!
If you check the creation date of the account I am posting with you will see its 2013. I actually bought XenForo 1.x back then, and refused to move my big site to it. It simply was not ready for a large site in my opinion. I did not post about it, or demand a refund or anything like that. I just did not use it. A little over a month ago I moved that same site to XenForo 2.3 and I am pretty happy with that decision.
So my question for @Chris D is this: Why do you not think XenForo is a 5-star product? And why the hell aren't you working on it and why isn't it done yet?!?!
I will give my 2 cents in a minute, but I am definitely interested in where you think XenForo falls short. Because I think where it falls short is simply related to what in other industries you might call fit and finish. It has great pieces, but they need a few slight tweaks. Or you might compare it to buying a car. You probably would not refuse to buy a new car because it does not have that extra USB port in the back seat. But when you need it, its really nice to have. My personal pickup has a 110 outlet and a bigger alternator that will actually run a decent small welder when the truck idles. I was not looking for that when I bought it, in fact I did not even know it also had an outlet in the bed of the truck until after I had owned it for a week or so. When we had a 3 day power outage because of weather in Denver I sure appreciated being able to plug in my big freezer for a couple of hours at a time and save a freezer full of beef.
Like cars, forums have evolved over time. Back in the day power brakes were optional, and power windows and AC were luxury items. Now you cannot buy a car without them. There are several things that are and have been standard items on other forum packages that for whatever reason XenForo has not embraced. And when I see them suggested it gets played down a bit, both by people who cannot or have not seen the utility of it and by the devs for "not enough interest". I guess I would say that people who do not get the utility of a certain item will never show interest in it because they simply do not get it, but once they use it then they get it. A few examples
- Clone a forum - Not just to create a new forum, but you can set one up and label it DO NOT TOUCH in case someone screw up forum permissions. Then you can revert it using the Clone function.
- Same with user groups. On large sites admins sometimes come and go and there is a learning curve. Having a simple fallback plan in case of a screwup is just good policy. I had a script written to do this on vBulletin, and then vBulletin came out with the cloning function so I never used it again.
- Collapsible forums in the admincp. The user group permissions have it and it makes it much easier to navigate a large set.
Design flaw vs bugs
I think this distinction has to be made. For the purposes of this discussion, a design flaw is something that works as designed, but the design was maybe not fully thought out. A bug is something that does not work as intended.
The biggest example of a design flaw I can think of in XenForo is the File Health Check system. It seriously needs a built in way to update the hashes, especially when you release an official file that tells you to change the contents of it, such as the redirect files. So your user, who may or may not be technically inclined, follows your instructions and now has a warning in his admincp that he may or may not understand. Eventually he just learns to ignore that warning, which makes that warning meaningless.
For those of you who are going to jump in and say "He can do this and this and this in 5 minutes", I will simply respond "You can do the same the next time you have a problem with your car." The next time you get your oil changed or tires rotated (similar cost as XenForo) the manually check your oil drain plug and retorque the lugs yourself. It takes 5 minutes. Don't go run and complain if your tires fall off and your oil leaks out because you refuse to pay dealership prices for these services and take it to a place that pays minimum wage to work on your expensive vehicle.
For bugs and config problems, in my experience XenForo staff is really responsive on the forums. I think they do a pretty good job supporting the product but also coaching people through their own errors, or in my case an error caused by a bad piece of add-on code. And if you look at the Bug Report section there are numerous ones marked as fixed for the next release.
My only comment there is this: Why not release them when you fix it? Not as a patch you have to install, or an upgrade. Just release the code and say "This piece of code goes here" for those with the inclination and the ability to edit their own files. Put it out there as a Use at your own risk option. I would bet that someone out in the community would compile those into a plugin that would at least be semi official, so that no technical users could also benefit from it. I also understand that taking this approach might have to be run through legal channels and might not be possible depending on the piece of code that has to be fixed. Some pieces you might be able to release this way, others maybe not. Something to think about anyways.
And last but not least, its better to under promise and over deliver than it is to over promise and under deliver. There are numerous threads here about XeoForo 2.4 is coming and 3.0 is coming, and then it gets delayed. I know you are so excited when you feel like you produced something awesome that you want to get some info out there right now. But you are setting yourselves up for failure, or at least a ration of wtf? type posts, unless you really can hit that target. And I for one would rather see you spend the time helping someone or writing new code than responding to that kind of crap.
And I will say again, overall I love the package. Great work! Keep it up and I am definitely a long term customer.
