XenForo 2.0 Discussion

[James]

Sorry if it's been asked already, but will the existing 1.x license owners be able to use 2.0 as well, or we will have to buy XF license again?

Current pricing is not expected to change so as long as your licence is active you're able to download the newer version.

 

[Teapot]

Sorry if it's been asked already, but will the existing 1.x license owners be able to use 2.0 as well, or we will have to buy XF license again?

Yes, if you have an active license when 2.0 is released, you'll be able to download and use it. It works exactly the same way as 1.x releases do – if you have an active license, you get access to everything.

 

[Snog]

Manual refresh is dead. Make everything live update.

Plenty of ways to achieve a level optimal for all systems with options

I could be wrong, but I don't think you realize how much power live update takes when there are 1000's of users online at once. It might be alright for slower sites, but any site with a huge online presence would be slinging data constantly and eating bandwidth in the process.

 

[ibnesayeed]

I could be wrong, but I don't think you realize how much power live update takes when there are 1000's of users online at once. It might be alright for slower sites, but any site with a huge online presence would be slinging data constantly and eating bandwidth in the process.

There are many ways to deal with it.

• WebSockets
• SSE
• Long polling
• Periodic polling with customizable interval
• Polling with incremental interval (linear, logarithmic, or some other increment function)

Each approach has it's own pros and cons. Some are less supported by servers and/or clients than others, some incur more bandwidth than others, some require more memory or processing than others. An implementation with customizable behavior including an option to disable it should be the way to go forward. The cost to run is one thing, but the engagement and user activity that it might cause could be worth the extra overhead.

 

[TPerry]

Plenty of ways to achieve a level optimal for all systems with options

One of the issues I find is that folks that don't have the "horsepower" want the features that require the "horsepower" then moan about how it's slow/doesn't work. I lost track of the number of times I've told that type of person "Just because you CAN check that option, doesn't mean you SHOULD check that option".

 

[dethfire]

I could be wrong, but I don't think you realize how much power live update takes when there are 1000's of users online at once. It might be alright for slower sites, but any site with a huge online presence would be slinging data constantly and eating bandwidth in the process.

For the .01% of those forums they can uncheck the box(es)

 

[Alpha1]

Manual refresh is dead. Make everything live update.

lol. I was actually waiting until 'What's New' would auto-refresh. But it doesn't so it feels broken. I guess I got too accustomed to xf live feed, Facebook, etc. I have had various live update functions on my vb3 big board for 10 years now.

 

[Alpha1]

I could be wrong, but I don't think you realize how much power live update takes when there are 1000's of users online at once. It might be alright for slower sites, but any site with a huge online presence would be slinging data constantly and eating bandwidth in the process.

We live in the age of Facebook and technology for live polling has matured. Many functions in XF already have live polling. It should not be an issue at all. In combination with usergroup permissions there should not be a problem.

Live polling is simply a user expectation nowadays because pretty much every person uses it every day on many sites.

 

[Fred.]

Manual refresh is dead. Make everything live update.

But not like Facebook please!

 

[Snog]

You really can't compare Facebook and forums. And you can't use Facebook as an example for live updates simply because the hardware used to run Facebook is much more advanced than your standard run of the mill server a forum runs on.

The considerations for a full blown live update system are much more complicated than they may seem when dealing with multiple users vs dealing with minor small live updates like the alert system in XF. Each system that has been mentioned has advantages and disadvantages, mostly revolving around memory, link connection time or bandwidth usage.

 

[surfsup]

1. No simplicity of creating new threads.

2. No auto-refresh on new posts

Seriously? Are either of these in the works at all or do we have to code these ourselves?

We have a large forum that still gets 1,000 posts per day, but it would still be great to have easier options like Facebook and other social media.

 

[mauzao9]

I agree with the auto-refresh, live update of threads, alerts and such is fundamental and expectable these days.

Otherwise, it really feels Xenforo is falling behind; locked to the ways of how the forums worked since the ancient times.
If the reasoning is a performance on the large-scale forums then give them the flexibility to enable / customize it or not.

No more F5, evolution is necessary!

 

[Fred.]

Ok, What I think about the XF2 demo.

First of all I'm really but I mean Really, did I say Really? happy to see utf8mb4 support
This had to be done in 2.o otherwise it would have been to complicated.

Retina support However I might try to use svg, I'll see how it goes
Navigation manager and widget system Nice and easy
Custom user / thread fields Great!
Extended external/connected accounts framework
New HTML5 uploader Finally!
New editor
Off canvas navigation
New share page system: new sites, less overhead I always like less overhead
NoCAPTCHA Must have
Drag and drop sorting of node lists and other content types Nice!
Responsive media embeds

There are other things I like too like the New generic payment framework for example, but I'm not using it a.t.m.

Further I like the look of XF2 on my mobile, but not so on desktop. The UI from XF 1.5 looks more clean / neat on desktop.
I understand this is the first preview so I hope there will be some fine tuning here and there.
I always used the default style in XF 1.x because I liked it.
Not sure what I like to change tho
Edit: now I know!

Without those the page looks nice and clean.
A few styling changes around the navigation will probably do the trick.
At least the system is very flexible and easy to customise , just have to upgrade my brain again to learn the new stuff.

Congrats XF team
Well done so far!

 

[mauzao9]

One other "evolution" let's call it that Xenforo 2.0 even its vibe asks for it...

Would be threads that load on scrolling instead of paging; optional of course but it would feel so more smooth reading threads if you manually didn't had to click next every time.

It's i'd say the main thing I love about some other forum software around that is doing it, improving the flow of reading without interruption or more complex interaction of the reader to further load content.

 

[JamesBrown]

You really can't compare Facebook and forums.

But our users do.

 

[CTXMedia]

https://xf2demo.xenforo.com/ - for anyone who hasn't seen the announcement.

So far, so good.

 

[imno007]

Please care to explain where is this optoin?

The option I was referring to is:

What's New/New posts/Only include unanswered threads

But I have to confess I didn't think that one through. It doesn't really qualify as a new threads option, since as soon as someone replies to the thread it will be bumped to the regular New posts. So I'll have to withdraw my praise for that one. Looks like we'll still be depending on addon's for that feature - unless of course there's another option there I'm not aware of.

 

[Mert]

I could be wrong, but I don't think you realize how much power live update takes when there are 1000's of users online at once. It might be alright for slower sites, but any site with a huge online presence would be slinging data constantly and eating bandwidth in the process.

Do you realise the age we are at ? Come on dudes this was a valid point 10 years ago. Not today...

 

[Divvens]

I agree with the general consensus, live update is required.

It can be implemented the way add-ons do it now, let admins control how often the server is polled for information rather than hard coding it. Boards with performance issues can always increase that time and not have it poll often.

It feels really really odd that you have to refresh for it to take effect, and users aren't going to be used to that. They keep tabs open and expect it to auto update there and then check the tab, not the other way around that they refresh to check. If a refresh was required its as good as viewing the alerts/convo tab yourself after refresh.

 

[Teapot]

Also agreed, I have @Chris D's wonderful Live Update add-on on both my XenForo sites, and it (along with a couple of other tweaks) makes the forum feel like much more of a "live" experience – both in community as well as technology. While the polling might overload really huge sites, so it definitely should be optional, my site has hundreds of active users a day – and a heavy, CPU-intensive application – and the live update barely tickles our server. I definitely believe it should be an optional core feature, or at worst an officially-supported add-on.