XenForo vs. IPB/IPS What's your honest opinion?

[Tigratrus]

I'll preface this by saying that Susan and I have been actively evaluating new platforms for about a year. We've been developing/extending our community solution (currently vB 3.8 + WP/Joomla! and PHPMyDirectory) for about 5-6 years. Our community is how we make a living. It pays our mortgage and all our bills, so it's both a business AND a labor of love.

I've tried very hard to give an honest comparison of the two systems based on our experience. Susan and I would very much appreciate hearing what others think from *their* experience and perspective.

Obviously vB 4 is not even vaguely in the running. This isn't an emotional decision it's based on hard cold facts about the platform, it's resource consumption, it's likely future, and how freaking impossible it is to work with if you want to modify/extend it.

Our take, based on working with both systems for about a month, popping for a "Hosted Community" with the full IPS Suite loaded on it (if you get the "Plus 40" for $29.99/month and pay $5/month more you can get the entire package including IP.Content and IP.Nexus) is:

IPS:

Benefits of IPS:

1. IPS is a very mature system with a LOT of capability. The development pace is rapid, and they have come a long way from a year or two ago. The have importers, and seem to provide excellent service on tickets, the forum based help is spotty, but as long as tickets work that's fine with me.
2. IP.Nexus is a real gem, seriously impressive what you can do with an integrated ecommerce solution, next version has ala cart ad sales, even the ability to use as the front end for hosting reselling. Awesome stuff.
3. The mobile skin and built in iphone app are definite benefits.
4. The IP.Content article system being able to promote from forum topic to an article and fully integrate the comments and topic replies is a major plus.
5. They have a great search system that is fully integrated across the whole system (except for only searching a single IP.Content database at a time) as well as excellent support for Sphinx.
6. Their gallery is getting a major upgrade, though it lacks meaningful integration with the rest of the system. It's very nice, and works well with the mobile skin/app.

Downsides to IPS:

1. The 3rd part dev community is very VERY thin. The core products change so frequently, and break skins/mods with incredible rapidity. The end of last year IPS was releasing a major upgrade to one of their apps EVERY WEEK! That has driven a tremendous # of the Mod and skin developers away from the IPS platform simply because they can't afford to be updating everything they do so often. There are currently a LOT more mods for XF already built, than there are 3rd party mods that work with the current version of IPS.
2. The IPS platform (while it makes vB 4 look like stone tablets and chisels) is somewhat dated, and despite all it's technical capability, feels clunky to me personally. There are a lot of inconsistencies between apps, and the CSS is really hard to work with.
3. The promise of IP.Content is largely unfulfilled as it's very awkward to deal with. The documentation is quite lacking, and it's flat out hard to work with.

In short: If you like the stock IPS system out of the box you will probably love IPS and it's what you should go with, it's a great product. But if you want to extend it in any significant ways to meet your communities specific needs, you are likely to be fighting an uphill battle and a rough time finding someone to help you with the development, and a rougher time maintaining your customizations. Same for styling, if you don't like the stock skin or a fairly simple variation based on the stock skin, you CAN find some custom skin devs, but they are expensive and maintenance will be a major problem with every app release requiring significant work to maintain the skin multiple times a year. IPS has some very technically capable solutions. IMO They need a better UI designer (little inconsistencies like things not being exactly aligned and the CSS being hard to work with).

XF:

Benefits of XF:

1. XF is FUN. Seems shallow, but using XenForo is a very engaging experience. The #1 goal for a forum (IMO) is to reward people for their efforts. They need to feel appreciated by their peers, they need a sense of affirmation. XF does that better than any system out there, hands down. In my opinion, this is a crucial thing, hard to achieve and absolutely priceless for a community builder.
2. The community. The XF 3rd party dev community is bursting with energy and people getting mods built. XF is built from the ground up to be modification and styling friendly, that that's a benefit that will draw the modification community in droves..
3. As XF has been built from the ground up with a fully modern design with a single, well architected CSS styling plan in place, it's very easy to customize the look/feel of the forum. The ability to put virtually ALL your styling changes in a single extra.css file means that XF upgrades have very VERY little impact on custom styles.
4. Once you get below the surface of the ACP and look at the templating system, you quickly find just HOW powerful the system is. It's designed so that you can take any part of the system and extend it (both templates AND code) without modifying (hacking) the original. Again, that will make it a lot easier for mod developers to maintain their mods ad XF upgrades.
5. XF is built as a platform like IPS. Kier and Mike have said from the beginning that they will will building a CMS, Gallery etc. Based on the best of breed nature of the Forum component, I have a high confidence level that those components will also be innovative and best of class. Looking at how fast their development cycle is, and how fast they built the whole platform AND the Forum component on top of that platform, I'm willing to bet that other parts of the platform will be available much faster than many people think.
6. The SEO is superb out of the box, the fully semantic markup is the best we've seen.

Downsides to XF:

1. It's new. As it's not *quite* gold release (though I feel sure that it will be very shortly), a lot of Devs are waiting until they have final code in their hands before putting out their mods.
2. There is a degree on uncertainty regarding the future of XF based on the legal disputes with IB. Personally, after reading the pertinent documents, I think IB is clearly gaming the legal system in an attempt to bleed XF dry before they really get rolling. I think they will fail, but it's a legitimate concern that must be considered as a person who has a BUSINESS building and running a community (as you and Susan and myself do).
3. XF as a platform is nowhere *near* as comprehensive in functionality as IPS, nor do they have the corporate resources that Invision Power Systems has.
4. Migrating a complex community to XF is currently going to be a somewhat complex, phased process. To start the process requires a level of faith in the platform and it's future development that many will be uncomfortable with.

Conclusion:

After working with our IPS installation for a couple weeks, getting a feel for what's involved in making it what we want for our community, we came back to take another good hard look at XF. Honestly, I wish it was an easier decision, IPS is a GOOD system, with a ton of capability (esp IP.Nexus if you are selling ads and or any memberships or tangible/digital goods).

In two days we made more progress in XF than we had in 1-2 weeks in IPS. If *we* can do things that much faster, a real developer will be able to give us *far* more bang for our buck, IMO.

At the end of the evaluation we asked ourselves 2 questions:

1. Would you regret going with the other platform later?
   1. If we went with IPS: Yes. We'd always wonder how much better the community would have grown on XF.
   2. If we went with XF: We'd miss the capability of IP.Nexus most. But we built more with XF pages in 1 day than we did with IP.Content in a week.
2. Which do you think will encourage community participation more?
   1. XF. Hands down. IPS relies too much on blocks to "integrate" things. Likes/Alerts system >> Rep.

As a final reality check we chatted with a developer that's a good friend of ours that both runs his own vB forum and is looking to move. He said that he's looking at XF, and is very excited by the platform. He's never looked at IPS though so that's not a comparison, just an opinion on the XF side.


What it comes down to is both are good systems. VERY good systems. Both make vB 4 look like stone tablets and chisels. But we've been doing this for 5-6 years now, and we've learned that a modern system, built right from the start is a better fit for us. We never... NEVER seem to be able to use an out of the box system, we always push the envelope. For us, that makes IPS less of a good fit than XF.

What about others looking at the same choice? What have you found?

 

[Forsaken]

Excuse me my friend, dont speak if you don´t know..

I don´t have any nulled forum (a moderator said that because I like to ask before purchase somethin )

However, being customer or not, XF should have a roadmap

These aren't official add-ons, so there is no roadmap.

 

[User]

Again, what dream world are you living in where you can't find a designer and then find someone to code that design for xF?

The lack of quality skins is imho a comment well taken and has nothing to do with xF as software and everything to do with other established solutions having been around a long time and thus have a large and solid customer base.

There are many skin sites out there for both vB and IPB where you go and you simply say WOW at the quality of the skins. For xF not only the variety but also the quality of skins is severely lacking. I don't want to point fingers and get feelings hurt, but in my opinion there's only one designer/coder out there who provides truly excellent designs and service (including the appropriate design and testing for tablets). Of course that designer charges more than a few bucks for a skin, but people are paying the price because of the quality of the work and because frankly there really isn't anyone else.

It will take quite a while for xF to catch up to the graphic and mod offerings other forum scripts provide and the thing is that the xF team really can't do anything above what they have already been doing to speed the adoption of xF up. I suppose they could give well known skin designers a free copy of xF, but even then there's only so much time in a day to do the work.

 

[mrGTB]

IPB, have been suffering from theme designers losing interesting making more for it. They update the software so often now with this new faster upgrade idea they introduced last year Matt Mecham mentioned in Twitter, that it's become a nightmare for skin creators to try and keep pace updating their themes sold to work right all the time, and they have to keep doing it across multiple products and not just the forum product.

 

[AzzidReign]

The lack of quality skins is imho a comment well taken and has nothing to do with xF as software and everything to do with other established solutions having been around a long time and thus have a large and solid customer base.

There are many skin sites out there for both vB and IPB where you go and you simply say WOW at the quality of the skins. For xF not only the variety but also the quality of skins is severely lacking. I don't want to point fingers and get feelings hurt, but in my opinion there's only one designer/coder out there who provides truly excellent designs and service (including the appropriate design and testing for tablets). Of course that designer charges more than a few bucks for a skin, but people are paying the price because of the quality of the work and because frankly there really isn't anyone else.

It will take quite a while for xF to catch up to the graphic and mod offerings other forum scripts provide and the thing is that the xF team really can't do anything above what they have already been doing to speed the adoption of xF up. I suppose they could give well known skin designers a free copy of xF, but even then there's only so much time in a day to do the work.

I have never been amazed by any of the "premium" skins for either software. I have and always will go with custom. That way I can tell the designer what it is I want and how to design it. With that being said, I've never said "WOW" to any "premade" skin. Not to mention, I don't want my site to have a design that other sites have an exact replica of. Again, that's just me...I think that in another year, you'll start seeing nicer and nicer skins.

Plus, there are various services out there that create and code custom skins that would probably even code them for xenForo. Off the top of my head, EdenWebs would be one of them.

 

[Taylor J]

IPB, have been suffering from theme designers losing interesting making more for it. They update the software so often now with this new faster upgrade idea they introduced last year Matt Mecham mentioned in Twitter, that it's become a nightmare for skin creators to try and keep pace updating their themes sold to work right all the time, and they have to keep doing it across multiple products and not just the forum product.

I haven't had a problem upgrading skins since 3.1.x, sure it used to go to fast but that settled down and it is going at a steady but not to fast pace and made it even easier to upgrade skins, including those who have more then 5, and plus most of the updates now down't even harm the skin.

 

[Shelley]

I haven't had a problem upgrading skins since 3.1.x, sure it used to go to fast but that settled down and it is going at a steady but not to fast pace and made it even easier to upgrade skins, including those who have more then 5, and plus most of the updates now down't even harm the skin.

You have to realize that your average customer hasn't got the knowledge to upgrade styles like the more experienced user. Most of any forums companies customer base relies on people being helped by the more experienced users and last time i checked you won't get many people helping the less experienced out of the goodness of their hearts without a fee.

With xenforo (and I do enjoy the styling/template system) is that these less experienced users are finding it easy to make their own modifications to their styles, more importantly, when they upgrade they are able to do this themselves with xenforo,within minutes. You just don't see that happening anywhere else <insert product here> which is why i personally think why xenforo is head & shoulders above the other commercial products in that department there's just no equal. The system entices people whom found styling/upgrading difficult and to the point holding off upgrading at other solutions are now making these changes and doing these tasks themselves with xenforo.

I could easily say yeah ipb is easy to style, it's easy to upgrade because i know how to and have styled many products for years but the majority of customers are not the technical type and i don't mean that as any disrespect to them. Xenforo just entices you to learn, to get involved and that is what we are seeing the less experienced doing, making some truly nice alterations and contributions to other people where at other solutions they couldn't even help themselves through no fault of their own.

 

[Taylor J]

You have to realize that your average customer hasn't got the knowledge to upgrade styles like the more experienced user. Most of any forums companies customer base relies on people being helped by the more experienced users and last time i checked you won't get many people helping the less experienced out of the goodness of their hearts without a fee.

With xenforo (and I do enjoy the styling/template system) is that these less experienced users are finding it easy to make their own modifications to their styles, more importantly, when they upgrade they are able to do this themselves with xenforo,within minutes. You just don't see that happening anywhere else <insert product here> which is why i personally think why xenforo is head & shoulders above the other commercial products in that department there's just no equal. The system entices people whom found styling/upgrading difficult and to the point holding off upgrading at other solutions are now making these changes and doing these tasks themselves with xenforo.

I could easily say yeah ipb is easy to style, it's easy to upgrade because i know how to and have styled many products for years but the majority of customers are not the technical type and i don't mean that as any disrespect to them. Xenforo just entices you to learn, to get involved and that is what we are seeing the less experienced doing, making some truly nice alterations and contributions to other people where at other solutions they couldn't even help themselves through no fault of their own.

True, but one thing that skinners use over at IPB is the skin key, which all in all makes it so much easier to upgrade skins for regular users because as long as a skin has a skin key then all that person has to do is reimport the xml and check a box that says this is a skin upgrade.

Also true XenForo is easier to customize for the average user but that's also due to the styling system that is implemented which all in all is pretty easy to get down, and IPB does take a bit to get used to but once that happens it's pretty much easy as it's just html/css (mainly css changes for some people).

 

[Digital Doctor]

It will take quite a while for xF to catch up to the graphic and mod offerings other forum scripts provide and the thing is that the xF team really can't do anything above what they have already been doing to speed the adoption of xF up.

Really ? Nothing can be done to improve the quality and quantity of mods for xF other than time ?
I think lots can be done.
Skins will improve as xenforo gets a larger customer base for skin makers to target. That one might be a "time only" solution.
I think if xenforo shows support for addon coders, they will come. People want good quality addons with support, at a reasonable cost. The question is how to deliver that.

 

[CTXMedia]

I paid for custom skins for my IP.Board because I just couldn't get my head around all the various templates and CSS files. Granted, I had limited time on my hands, but for someone who is usually interested in geeky stuff like that, I did find it a bit daunting and was quite happy to palm the job off onto someone who knew what they were doing.

The converse has been true for XF. I have been able to apply a general "theme" to the default style without any template edits, using the ACP styling system, which seems very user friendly (although having some background CSS knowledge does help in both cases).

Don't get me wrong - applying my current IPB style on near like-for-like basis is waaaayyyy out of my league given the free time I have available, but I do like the simpler interface that XF offers and think it fits with the overall simplicity of XF.

I'll confess to not installing IPB 3.2 so don't know if the skinning internals have been changed at all for the latest release of IP.Board - maybe someone can confirm?

I expect as XF grows there will be a need to extend the styling system, but then that may just be a simple matter of adding more categories/sections to the ACP styling management?

The IPB 3.2 style is more modern, but still needs a good bit of polishing and is still rather more complicated than XF - but then it possibly needs to be to accommodate all of the various switches/options.

Cheers,
Shaun

 

[3dsoft]

I don't want to point fingers and get feelings hurt, but in my opinion there's only one designer/coder out there who provides truly excellent designs and service (including the appropriate design and testing for tablets). Of course that designer charges more than a few bucks for a skin, but people are paying the price because of the quality of the work and because frankly there really isn't anyone else.

What's the website of this designer?

 

[Mr.Smith]

XF is the best software!

quite user friendly and performance tuned.

 

[hellreturn]

What is so bad about IPB View New content ?
This looks reasonable.
View attachment 20757

It's quite annoying in IPB to go through pagination or click on little icons to go to unread post in the view new content. God, I hate that. Every single thing they make it so complicated.

 

[Digital Doctor]

IPB to go through pagination or click on little icons to go to unread post in the new content.

I've heard that same comment more than a few times.
Can you "show me" ?
either on a live site or with screenshots.
... I am curious why people keep complaining about it.

Is there a public thread about it on the IPB forums ?

 

[hellreturn]

I've heard that same comment more than a few times.
Can you "show me" ?
either on a live site or with screenshots.
... I am curious why people keep complaining about it.

Is there a public thread about it on the IPB forums ?

To view 'new' unread post from 'View new Content' you need to click on blue icon (marked by red rectangle box in image) and if you click on topic link, it will show your first post in topic even though you have read that 50 times.

 

[Russell Haney]

I am currently using IP and I absolutely hate it. I am looking to switching over to xenforo!

 

[akia]

Well its been over 18 months since the first post

What are peoples views now?

 

[CTXMedia]

Well its been over 18 months since the first post

What are peoples views now?

I've never had it so good. XF has been a complete and total success for CycleChat and I've even had some of my previous members come back (who left when we moved to IPB).

More active members, more posts, more threads, and well, more of everything ... lol.

I've love the software, get more done in less time, my mods love it, my members love it (especially the "likes") and I can't think of another forum software I'd prefer to use.

For me, despite the obvious lack of development at the moment, I'm prepared to wait and see if the team can weather the storm, see the lawsuit off, and get back to actively moving things forward again sometime next year. I have no bugs or problems that require any fixes and my sites are running smooth and fast.

XF FTW - hopefully.

 

[redwolf6]

I have IPB expired licence, I am willing to trade it to a Xenforo licence.

I don't have $140 atm

 

[erich37]

I'll preface this by saying that Susan and I have been actively evaluating new platforms for about a year. We've been developing/extending our community solution (currently vB 3.8 + WP/Joomla! and PHPMyDirectory) for about 5-6 years. Our community is how we make a living. It pays our mortgage and all our bills, so it's both a business AND a labor of love.

I've tried very hard to give an honest comparison of the two systems based on our experience. Susan and I would very much appreciate hearing what others think from *their* experience and perspective.

Obviously vB 4 is not even vaguely in the running. This isn't an emotional decision it's based on hard cold facts about the platform, it's resource consumption, it's likely future, and how freaking impossible it is to work with if you want to modify/extend it.

Our take, based on working with both systems for about a month, popping for a "Hosted Community" with the full IPS Suite loaded on it (if you get the "Plus 40" for $29.99/month and pay $5/month more you can get the entire package including IP.Content and IP.Nexus) is:

IPS:

Benefits of IPS:

1. IPS is a very mature system with a LOT of capability. The development pace is rapid, and they have come a long way from a year or two ago. The have importers, and seem to provide excellent service on tickets, the forum based help is spotty, but as long as tickets work that's fine with me.
2. IP.Nexus is a real gem, seriously impressive what you can do with an integrated ecommerce solution, next version has ala cart ad sales, even the ability to use as the front end for hosting reselling. Awesome stuff.
3. The mobile skin and built in iphone app are definite benefits.
4. The IP.Content article system being able to promote from forum topic to an article and fully integrate the comments and topic replies is a major plus.
5. They have a great search system that is fully integrated across the whole system (except for only searching a single IP.Content database at a time) as well as excellent support for Sphinx.
6. Their gallery is getting a major upgrade, though it lacks meaningful integration with the rest of the system. It's very nice, and works well with the mobile skin/app.

Downsides to IPS:

1. The 3rd part dev community is very VERY thin. The core products change so frequently, and break skins/mods with incredible rapidity. The end of last year IPS was releasing a major upgrade to one of their apps EVERY WEEK! That has driven a tremendous # of the Mod and skin developers away from the IPS platform simply because they can't afford to be updating everything they do so often. There are currently a LOT more mods for XF already built, than there are 3rd party mods that work with the current version of IPS.
2. The IPS platform (while it makes vB 4 look like stone tablets and chisels) is somewhat dated, and despite all it's technical capability, feels clunky to me personally. There are a lot of inconsistencies between apps, and the CSS is really hard to work with.
3. The promise of IP.Content is largely unfulfilled as it's very awkward to deal with. The documentation is quite lacking, and it's flat out hard to work with.

In short: If you like the stock IPS system out of the box you will probably love IPS and it's what you should go with, it's a great product. But if you want to extend it in any significant ways to meet your communities specific needs, you are likely to be fighting an uphill battle and a rough time finding someone to help you with the development, and a rougher time maintaining your customizations. Same for styling, if you don't like the stock skin or a fairly simple variation based on the stock skin, you CAN find some custom skin devs, but they are expensive and maintenance will be a major problem with every app release requiring significant work to maintain the skin multiple times a year. IPS has some very technically capable solutions. IMO They need a better UI designer (little inconsistencies like things not being exactly aligned and the CSS being hard to work with).

XF:

Benefits of XF:

1. XF is FUN. Seems shallow, but using XenForo is a very engaging experience. The #1 goal for a forum (IMO) is to reward people for their efforts. They need to feel appreciated by their peers, they need a sense of affirmation. XF does that better than any system out there, hands down. In my opinion, this is a crucial thing, hard to achieve and absolutely priceless for a community builder.
2. The community. The XF 3rd party dev community is bursting with energy and people getting mods built. XF is built from the ground up to be modification and styling friendly, that that's a benefit that will draw the modification community in droves..
3. As XF has been built from the ground up with a fully modern design with a single, well architected CSS styling plan in place, it's very easy to customize the look/feel of the forum. The ability to put virtually ALL your styling changes in a single extra.css file means that XF upgrades have very VERY little impact on custom styles.
4. Once you get below the surface of the ACP and look at the templating system, you quickly find just HOW powerful the system is. It's designed so that you can take any part of the system and extend it (both templates AND code) without modifying (hacking) the original. Again, that will make it a lot easier for mod developers to maintain their mods ad XF upgrades.
5. XF is built as a platform like IPS. Kier and Mike have said from the beginning that they will will building a CMS, Gallery etc. Based on the best of breed nature of the Forum component, I have a high confidence level that those components will also be innovative and best of class. Looking at how fast their development cycle is, and how fast they built the whole platform AND the Forum component on top of that platform, I'm willing to bet that other parts of the platform will be available much faster than many people think.
6. The SEO is superb out of the box, the fully semantic markup is the best we've seen.

Downsides to XF:

1. It's new. As it's not *quite* gold release (though I feel sure that it will be very shortly), a lot of Devs are waiting until they have final code in their hands before putting out their mods.
2. There is a degree on uncertainty regarding the future of XF based on the legal disputes with IB. Personally, after reading the pertinent documents, I think IB is clearly gaming the legal system in an attempt to bleed XF dry before they really get rolling. I think they will fail, but it's a legitimate concern that must be considered as a person who has a BUSINESS building and running a community (as you and Susan and myself do).
3. XF as a platform is nowhere *near* as comprehensive in functionality as IPS, nor do they have the corporate resources that Invision Power Systems has.
4. Migrating a complex community to XF is currently going to be a somewhat complex, phased process. To start the process requires a level of faith in the platform and it's future development that many will be uncomfortable with.

Conclusion:

After working with our IPS installation for a couple weeks, getting a feel for what's involved in making it what we want for our community, we came back to take another good hard look at XF. Honestly, I wish it was an easier decision, IPS is a GOOD system, with a ton of capability (esp IP.Nexus if you are selling ads and or any memberships or tangible/digital goods).

In two days we made more progress in XF than we had in 1-2 weeks in IPS. If *we* can do things that much faster, a real developer will be able to give us *far* more bang for our buck, IMO.

At the end of the evaluation we asked ourselves 2 questions:

1. Would you regret going with the other platform later?
   1. If we went with IPS: Yes. We'd always wonder how much better the community would have grown on XF.
   2. If we went with XF: We'd miss the capability of IP.Nexus most. But we built more with XF pages in 1 day than we did with IP.Content in a week.
2. Which do you think will encourage community participation more?
   1. XF. Hands down. IPS relies too much on blocks to "integrate" things. Likes/Alerts system >> Rep.

As a final reality check we chatted with a developer that's a good friend of ours that both runs his own vB forum and is looking to move. He said that he's looking at XF, and is very excited by the platform. He's never looked at IPS though so that's not a comparison, just an opinion on the XF side.


What it comes down to is both are good systems. VERY good systems. Both make vB 4 look like stone tablets and chisels. But we've been doing this for 5-6 years now, and we've learned that a modern system, built right from the start is a better fit for us. We never... NEVER seem to be able to use an out of the box system, we always push the envelope. For us, that makes IPS less of a good fit than XF.

What about others looking at the same choice? What have you found?

Sorry for not answering your question, but I do have a question for you, please:

I have never heard of "PHPMyDirectory", but I am looking for a directory-solution. Is this "PHPMyDirectory" any good? What is your experience with this (bugs, etc.)?
Do you have this integrated with XenForo?

Many thanks!

 

[Carlos]

I'll preface this by saying that Susan and I have been actively evaluating new platforms for about a year. We've been developing/extending our community solution (currently vB 3.8 + WP/Joomla! and PHPMyDirectory) for about 5-6 years. Our community is how we make a living. It pays our mortgage and all our bills, so it's both a business AND a labor of love.

Okay - I think you are worried a bit too much here. Here are the reasons:

- Google changes their semantics 50% of the time, over the last 6 months, I have read nothing but "Google changes." Therefore, your rankings change. Your rankings is how your community is able to survive.

- From what you're saying, you've changed softwares over the years, so you've seen your community take a dip, take a dive, and sometimes fall. You're not alone. I am one of the customers that lost a lot of revenue because of vB4. They're lucky I didn't file a suit at the time.

- Even though that Google changes it's semantics a lot, you benefit from the changeover from whatever software you're using now, to xenForo. A lot of big board owners are saying that the changeover has benefited them more than the old software they were using. I also speak from first-hand experience, that xenForo can give you the SEO boost you need. Especially if your site is paying the mortgage. I can see a huge paycheck for you beyond your mortgage payments.

If you'd like to see what I experienced... Here ya go: http://xenforo.com/community/threads/codforums-experiencing-growth.19188/