Why should we choose you instead of free forum boards?

Koiranpentu

Member
Hi!

We are going to change the forum software on the biggest Finnish Minecraft community from SMF to MyBB or XenForo. I need to convince others that XenForo is the most useful forum software. The community has money to invest to your forum software but the owner of the community wants to be sure its worth all the money.

So, why should we choose you instead of free boards? What are your best features you can offer for a gaming community? What is special just in your forum software?
 
I think there is something to be said for free and open source stuff. If I were not making money from my community, I'd probably consider SMF or something similar. I have used numerous free or open source stuff (heck, php and mysql were/are that way) and been very satisfied.

The term "appropriate technology" is one that all admins should follow - that is, use the right tool for the job. If the cost is going to be an issue, maybe XF (or any package) isn't the answer for a particular community.

As others said above, if particular features - the alerts, the ajax stuff, etc. float your boat, then XF is something to consider. I don't think, though, that the forum software is going to make or break most communities. That is more of a people and admin thing.
 
SMF to MyBB seems like change for the sake of change. I have forums running on both platforms and I don't really see how you'd benefit from that move. SMF to XenForo gets you onto a more modern platform with a faster development pace. The people you need to convince really need to try the demo and look at around at a few XenForo sites in order to judge whether or not it meets your needs.
 
It's running very fast indeed for me as well, hence why I edited my posts above saying "second thoughts, mine wasn't that fast".

Getting back on topic, I'll say this after running MyBB myself for 2 years. You'll need the StopForumSpam add-on used with it, otherwise expect plenty of spam registrations to happen and by default it didn't even offer Q/A for using before (not sure now). Something I added extra later, along with using SFS. Was getting hit hard with spam until adding both, used in conjunction with the default MyBB CAPTCHA also.

Being honest, out the box I found MyBB lacking greatly in dealing with stopping spam.
 
Hi!

We are going to change the forum software on the biggest Finnish Minecraft community from SMF to MyBB or XenForo. I need to convince others that XenForo is the most useful forum software. The community has money to invest to your forum software but the owner of the community wants to be sure its worth all the money.

So, why should we choose you instead of free boards? What are your best features you can offer for a gaming community? What is special just in your forum software?

2 reasons. First, the software itself. xenforo is much better and superior than mybb in any way, form and shape. Second, the Community&Support. Community here is very friendly and very helpful. Also the support provided by the staff is top notch from what I have seen.

At MyBB, the community is very unmature. And I mean very. Almost all users there are teens and behave like kids. If you would need help with anything you will be pretty much on your own.
 
Although this is probably fodder for another thread, I'm finding that the load times on XF are, according to Google Webmaster tools, slower than they were for my old (EE) 2003 vintage forum. This seems impossible, but the graph continues to show it....

BUT, the perceived speed - to me and my users - is much faster with XF. I took some polls which indicated this is true with most of my community.

I can think of a few potential reasons why this is so. For example, the submission of new posts on XF would not be counted by goog as a page load (from afar), yet that is one of the fastest parts of XF.

In any case, the differences are in the realm of .5 seconds per page.

So, while speed may not yet be the primary reason for a XF decision, the perceived speed of the actual users seems to be much higher than the measured speed using simple page loading.
 
O/T But a lot of the load time is attributed to the share page elements: Facebook, Twitter, Google+

Disable those and you will see a decrease.

That's very true, it does make things faster. Especially disabling Facebook and G+, Twitter is not that bad actually. You can also add Gravatar Avatars to that list from my experience using them with WordPress before slowing comments from loading lots of times.
 
We have a CDN, many server optimization and a few other things on our server and have modded Jaxel's portal to suit our needs. Xenforo is the best forum software I have ever used and out of all the years I have been running communities, starting and running xF based projects.

Here is myboard, you are welcomed to use it for speedtests or to showcase a nice xF board.

http://www.waywardinn.com
 
So, why should we choose you instead of free boards? What are your best features you can offer for a gaming community? What is special just in your forum software?

When comparing free vs paid there is always a difference in the level of support.

The big appeal for me is the platform aspect of XF. XenForo is very friendly to developers and that really underlies the success of software like this. If you are a developer then you will love XenForo. If you aren't a developer then you will benefit from the great addons that others have developed.
 
The big appeal for me is the platform aspect of XF. XenForo is very friendly to developers and that really underlies the success of software like this. If you are a developer then you will love XenForo. If you aren't a developer then you will benefit from the great addons that others have developed.

Did you work with MyBB at some point? It would surprise me if XenForo is more friendly to developers than MyBB as XenForo appears more complex to me. Even people who are not programmers like myself can write here and there modifications and simple add-ons for MyBB. Surely MyBB does not have a lack of add-ons also.

That said, I am still undecided whether it's a good choice to move to XenForo at this point in time.
 
In most cases here you will get a biased response(understandably so). I am waiting on 1.2 Xenforo Version to come out before
i make a purchase. But who knows when that will be or what it will bring.

Personally i would stay with SMF if i had to choose between SMF or Mybb. I used mybb for about 2 weeks before I converted to SMF. Mybb is just awful and they have a major spam problem.

I run an SMF forum now and I don't require members to do captchas or verify emails and I've never had any spam issues i the past 3 months since i've been using them.

As far as Xenforo goes

The alerts system is cool and lovely but it is a novelty and while convenient, it doesn't fully work for me on various Xenforo forums i work with.
The Pro that Xenforo has that it is one of the more newer software and it is a lovely software that integrates social networking aspects.

However,

1. With the ongoing lawsuit and the quietness from the developers, that should bring up some cause of concern and maybe take pause.
2. AS well as there are not a lot of modifications/add-ons and it actually lacks features that some free forum software have.
3. I have ot partially disagree with John. While the themes are nice, they are redundant. Most of them are literally variations of this default theme Xenforo.com uses.
I've literally not seen anything really differentiate itself. Sure the colors may be different and they add a cute background here or there but they are pretty much the same theme and some of them I believe should be free.

The only theme designer i've seen differentiate would be that Audentio guy with his drift series(also you can get this on mybb). Sexy and fun and unique looking.

Personally as I am looking at buying a license, I'd recommend that you take a peek at Invision Power board and see what they have to offer. I paid 10 dollars with them for their package to fully test out IPB(Demos are cool but they don't show you all you need to know) and i have to say that before I spend a 140 bucks on Xenforo, I am going to really give IPB a glance.

IPB is slightly more expensive than Xenforo but it is always good to check out alternatives. Xenforo has awesome potential but there are a lot of things against it right now.

Plus IPB Has some sexy skins and tons of Modifications.

My recommends

Xenforo: Mostly friendly community with awesome potential

OR
IPB: A bit stuck in their ways but at this point and time are quite established and have an awesome development behind them.
 
3. I have ot partially disagree with John. While the themes are nice, they are redundant. Most of them are literally variations of this default theme Xenforo.com uses.
I've literally not seen anything really differentiate itself. Sure the colors may be different and they add a cute background here or there but they are pretty much the same theme and some of them I believe should be free.
You haven't been to my site then. My latest release, Forge MB, is hardly what you describe above (nor are any of mine to be honest). ;)
 
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