More waiting is required
Patience is a virtue, as the old saying goes.
I'm thinking about the other forum systems I have used in the past, especially the old freeware boards like phpBB and SMF which gave me unrelenting grief over the years. I listened to tons of empty promises from the phpBB developers about the upcoming 3.0 version that I hung onto my ancient but heavily modified 2.x version even well after 3.0 limped its way into the marketplace. 3.0 arrived I think in 2007, give or take a year. Yet seven years later, it's still essentially the same thing with only incremental improvements. SMF has been dead for years--they are still on the same version of software I installed several years ago, with again only the most incremental of changes (with the usual empty promises about greater things ahead shortly). MyBB I tried on one site and pretty much instantly disliked it, but I won't go there.
Nor will I go into the notoriously uneven support I've ever gotten from any of them.
So it's no mystery as to why I only create forums with professional software now, and not freebies. You get what you pay for. (Or I could say, I've paid
dearly for having used phpBB and SMF over the years!
)
But look at how much XF has changed since 2011, in comparison to those. They are not even four full years into the releases yet, and there's already a 2.0 version in the works. We've had five point releases along the way, each adding new features. And that even includes the "dark months" with the legal hiccup. Considering the development team is only two persons, that is impressive.
I have seen posts on other forums out there, declaring what XF "should" or "should not" do, and it is ridiculous. Some think it will take years. Others say no, they should stick to point releases. Some are already hating on 2.0 without even having seen it yet, and will never upgrade because it will "break everything."
Know what? That's called
progress. XenForo as a company and as a product needs to move forward. And they need to move forward
now. That is what 2.0 is all about. It's true there are competing forum systems out there, but in my opinion, XF is also competing with social media, having to compete with the Twitters and facebooks and Google+s which are hosting conversations and creating communities. The competition is a rapidly moving target.
It's that "newness" that will keep XF in the running as serious competition to the others. Without the baggage of management, a board of directors, marketing and other outside influences, I feel XF is more agile, more flexible to adapt to what is currently happening in both competing forum software along with social media. XF always needs to be easy and welcoming to use, but it needs those advanced features and continuous development to remain on the leading edge of forum software.
We won't know when 2.0 will be here, but I know it'll be along in a timely and competitive way, and that is good enough for me. When it is released, it can't be a half-baked flop (like a certain competitor's 5.0 release
) but having used several beta releases which were surprisingly stable, I know that will not be the case. 1.x seems more like a "starter" version for our developers--they've learned quite a bit from it, and 2.0 is how they can realize that large backlog of suggestions and introduce other new features, only by creating their own new framework which can adapt to all of these (and future) changes.
A major rewrite that breaks the add-ons I personally use will be inconvenient, true, but as a forum admin and owner of several sites, any software I introduce needs to be current, fresh and not a few years behind the times. It's the only way I can keep
my sites competitive. That is what counts. The price of a XenForo renewal is only a small part of the expense of running communities, but it is an investment that so far has paid us back well and has grown our traffic. That is what counts the most.