XF 2.4 XenForo 2.4 status and what's new under the hood?

Where are we?​

TL;DR: We're working hard to release XenForo 2.4 ASAP, but it's taking longer than expected due to scope changes and strategic decisions to wait for certain upstream developments that will benefit the long-term roadmap. Here's an analogy to explain why:

Software development is like planning a cross-country expedition with multiple destinations.

When you set out for version 2.4, you're not just driving to the next town over. You're charting a course through unknown territory with several strategic stops planned along the way - each representing a major milestone or feature release.

But the challenge is the landscape keeps changing along the journey.

• New roads open up (better technologies emerge)
• Bridges get washed out (dependencies break or become obsolete)
• You discover scenic routes that would benefit all future travellers (opportunities for architectural improvements)
• Weather conditions shift (market demands or user needs evolve)
• Your vehicle needs unexpected maintenance (technical debt must be addressed)

You can't just focus on reaching the immediate next stop. You must consider how each decision affects the entire journey ahead. Taking a shortcut to reach 2.4 faster might leave you stranded when trying to reach 3.0, 4.0 or even 5.0.

This is why scope changes occur: experienced developers are constantly recalibrating the route based on new information, ensuring the expedition can successfully reach not just the next destination, but all the strategic waypoints that follow.

The delays aren't detours, rather they're course corrections that keep the long-term journey viable.

To be slightly less cryptic, these are some of the specific challenges we have faced along the way:

A new Tiptap version is coming​

When we announced that Tiptap is coming to XenForo 2.4 it was 95% complete, and we then took a bit of a pause to work on other projects, which we have talked about since and will be discussing in this thread. Since then, Tiptap have announced Tiptap V3 which is currently in beta. Given how core the editor is to the forum experience, it makes a lot of sense to ship XenForo 2.4 with Tiptap V3 rather than Tiptap V2 as originally planned. While the changes involved are not too extensive, we also don't want to ship 2.4 with a dependency that is still in beta and subject to change. While we are not planning to wait for Tiptap V3 to be stable, necessarily, we do at least want to give it a little bit more time so we have a higher degree of confidence that we're shipping a stable editing experience.

We started talking about a rewrite (again)​

While this is not currently the direction we've decided to go in, it's responsible for us to at least consider all routes available to us to help us reach our destination.

After nearly 8 years since the release of XenForo 2.0, many of the technologies we use are showing their age, many of the decisions we made have started to slow us down more than we would like, and as a framework, XenForo becomes a less productive framework to work with. The solution to this problem can be to start from scratch, but we have ultimately decided that this is not something we need to do at this stage.

Instead, over the next few versions, including 2.4, we will be attempting to make iterative architectural changes to the framework so that we all have greater tools at our disposal to improve both the developer and user experience, particularly focusing on the implementation of developer tools and features that have become commonplace in other frameworks, such as Laravel.

Some of our best features are simply not finished​

There are one or two features that we see requested consistently from customers in our community forums and feedback channels, and we're excited to confirm they are coming in 2.4! However, it serves no one well if we release such highly-anticipated features before they are ready and before they have the usual level of quality, polish, and extensibility you would expect from a XenForo release. We'd rather take the extra time to get them right than rush them out and disappoint users with a subpar implementation that requires immediate patches or lacks the flexibility for customisation. We'll be sharing exciting details about what these features are and how they work in the coming weeks, so stay tuned!

We can't keep up!​

I just counted and there are about 15 features that have been merged or are pending to be merged into XF 2.4 that we haven't announced yet. Some of these are smaller and aren't worthy of a dedicated HYS of their own (so they'll probably be rolled into a "miscellaneous" HYS or two), and some of these are going to be mentioned below, but while we have been "cooking" (as the kids say these days) it has meant that things like code reviews, and writing HYS posts hasn't been easy to balance. There is also potentially more stuff coming from generous contributions from esteemed developers such as @Xon and @digitalpoint, assuming we have time to implement (otherwise they will wait for... a future version).


With all of that now being said, while 2.4 is taking longer than we wanted, we have been busy and we are very much nearing the end of development.

And, while disappointing (to all of us) it is important to maintain perspective. XenForo 2.2 was released in September 2020. XenForo 2.3 was released nearly four years later. XenForo 2.4 is not 3 more years away.

But, you clicked this to find out what's new, right? So let's go.

 

[cdub]

Doubtful tbh. At this rate, XF 3.0 is 5 years down the road…

Ha. You just listed the main reason they'll complain.

 

[tajhay]

At this rate, the scenic journey they are on, they will be on another continent.

How in the world did "upcoming weeks' turn into this farce, over a year later.

 

[DragonByte Tech]

I'm probably most upset that the manual install screen for 2.3.7 is still purple.

To be honest, I like it. Not just because I like purple but also because it’s a very clear visual indicator I’m not in the AdminCP

 

[duderuud]

The postponing is one thing, the complete lack of communication about why is another. Quite troubling in my opinion.

We'll be sharing exciting details about what these features are and how they work in the coming weeks, so stay tuned!

That was posted in June...

 

[Suzanne O]

The postponing is one thing, the complete lack of communication about why is another. Quite troubling in my opinion.

Stop moaning all the time in the HYS threads

 

[Gossipy]

The postponing is one thing, the complete lack of communication about why is another. Quite troubling in my opinion.

Agree. Delays and postponements happen, but extended silence like this is ominous.

 

[Lee]

Lots of bugs being squashed, which is good.

 

[USCSS_Nostromo]

XF in its primetime (XF1.0 - XF2.1)

XF 2.2 - XF 2.3

XF 2.4

XF 3.0

XF 4.0

 

[Arnox]

Lots of bugs being squashed, which is good.

What do you mean? No patch nor announcement has been made.

 

[Jake B.]

What do you mean? No patch nor announcement has been made.

Resolved bug reports

xenforo.com

 

[Arnox]

Resolved bug reports

xenforo.com

Ah. Sorry. Wasn't thinking.

 

[ekool]

Yes, i installed a plugin that allows you to chose between a google or xf search. We modified it so It defaults to google search whenever possible so the chance of high quality results is high.

Our info goes back to 2006. Some people have over 10000 posts, so we had to expand the search limit, otherwise we couldn't reliably pull up a list of user's posts. Even a search that should result in a direct hit in phpbb, would be some pages down in xenforo search. Not good.

We have elasticsearch. it doesn't do any better. It consumes 16gb of memory itself for making xenforo searches faster. Yes, we have elasticsearch well tuned. This minimum amount of memory keeps growing. Our hosting cost is up 4x. Phpbb didn't require elasticsearch, had better search, and was faster to return results.

We briefly considered rewriting the search engine from scratch but it was a lot less expensive to just use google!

Have you guys tried either of these? Elastic Search works fine for us but this project looks especially interesting:

XenForo Wonderful Search

Mar 3, 2023

An enhanced version of the XenForo search system which uses MeiliSearch as search engine

• Katsuro
• elasticsearch enhanced high-load lightning-fast meilisearch search search engine speed xfws
• Add-ons [2.x]

And then there's this one:

[DCom] Manticore Search Engine

Mar 5, 2023

Manticore search engine integration

• DimmmCom
• manticore search sphinx
• Add-ons [2.x]

 

[dvduval]

I guess for me Google traffic is clearly down for my sights and the trajectory is going to be continuing to be down and I know I'm not the only one. With the rise of AI, I don't see my form being quite as important as in the future but it's a nice artifact then I started in 2002. So it will be sort of the kind of thing where I'll occasionally do an update if it's available and pay the annual fee but maybe not every year, especially in light of the slow releases. I had a software product before that Was very successful for many years and then with some changes on Google it just wasn't as important anymore. And I kind of fear that that will be the case with this software too but it will still continue to have many customers going far into the future just the growth is probably not going to be there anymore unfortunately. There would have to be some reinvention of how these communities are done. That would involve more paywall type stuff since AI is going to have everything you can imagine.

 

[Swiftman]

If your forum can be replaced with a generic, faceless, souless, AI chatbot regurgitating widely-known information, I would argue that the actual problem is likely your site's apparent lack of community and its over-reliance on widely-available, existing knowledge rather than novel, original discussions.

If your forum generates a sense of social connection between its members—the "stickiness" that keeps people returning—and the membership base, in turn, generates new, original information and/or discussions for your forum, an AI chatbot harvesting what's already out there is always going to be multiple steps behind.

 

[Wildcat Media]

If your forum can be replaced with a generic, faceless, souless, AI chatbot regurgitating widely-known information, I would argue that the actual problem is likely your site's apparent lack of community and its over-reliance on widely-available, existing knowledge rather than novel, original discussions.

200% agree.

Content and community are what keep people coming back. Not forum styles, features, or toys. Not "discovery" BS that some here seem to think make or break forums. I've seen forums with absolutely awful forum software still thrive after decades. Members suffer through it, but they return because the discussions are what attract them.

The absolute worst forum kludge I've ever seen in my life:

Audio Asylum -- Audio Reviews, Audiophile Forums and Stereo Reviews

Audio recommendations from audiophiles and free forums. Ask questions and get advice on stereos, speakers, hi-end amplifiers, pre-amps, home theater, tube hi-fi, turntables, vinyl, tweaks, music, films, video, DVDs and more. A personal Audio Advisor with tons of stereo equipment reviews. A...

www.audioasylum.com

It's basically running on the remains of the old text/CGI-based wwwboard from the mid 1990s, with a lot of changes piled on top of it. You can still see remnants of the old threaded structure lurking in every discussion. It's such a freakin' UI nightmare that I personally cannot visit the place, but there are diehard members who have kept it going for decades...because of the content.

Blaming forum software, ai, social media, etc. for shrinking participation and visitorship only tells me the content is lacking. Any forum I still manage has been around for at least 20 years and all are still growing in membership and participation. Not all are 100% up to date either. Members just don't care. They're back for the community, and the discussion.

Yeah, updates are nice for the little quality of life improvements we can offer, but I cannot claim that any of the forums I manage or participate in are dying because they don't have 2.4. All of them are doing quite well and still growing. And would be, no matter what software we ran.

 

[smallwheels]

The absolute worst forum kludge I've ever seen in my life:

It's basically running on the remains of the old text/CGI-based wwwboard from the mid 1990s, with a lot of changes piled on top of it. You can still see remnants of the old threaded structure lurking in every discussion. It's such a freakin' UI nightmare that I personally cannot visit the place, but there are diehard members who have kept it going for decades...because of the content.

And - despite it's age - it has in opposite to XenForo a search function that finds two- and three letter words (but seems to be limited to 200 results per search).

 

[mjda]

And - despite it's age - it has in opposite to XenForo a search function that finds two- and three letter words (but seems to be limited to 200 results per search).

XenForo can do that with Enhanced Search. Works fine on my site, and on this one. Just search the word "do" here.

 

[FTL]

@Wildcat Media Sure, for a forum that's been going for decades it could well continue to thrive no matter how ropey the software, but for new forums set up in the last decade or so it's a different story. Yes, that is due to competition from the likes of Facebook etc and smartphones / tablets. Times have changed.