Not sure how many people don’t renew the license they own, but I’m sure more outreach to customers will increase that as well.
Maybe. From reading in the forums here a huge percentage do not seem to renew as a standard and many claim they could not afford it anyway. Which leaves me a little bit baffled as the license cost seem not very high and the renewal cost even less, especially when you compare it to the other running cost such as hosting.
I generally do renew maintenance because, being in IT, I'm a stickler for keeping systems up to date. That said, I will often wait to renew until I actually need it rather than just automatically on the expiry date.
Historically coming from a"professional IT entvironment" background I did constant renewal until now as well (and did not even think about it as I consider it as standard and it is not expensive) I am starting to think about changing that with XF. I am still on 2.2, so no real value in renewing atm.
In fact, the only reason I might eventually upgrade XF at this point, is because of add-on developer continuing to release new and very useful functionality with compatibility of 2.3+ only.
Very true. While there are some things that I would like to have in 2.3 it is mainly the add ons that kind of drive me towards 2.3 - ironically it is also add ons that keep me back from upgrading as one or two of the add ons I want to keep are not compatible with 2.3 yet.
Regarding 2.4: Maybe I am ignorant but I don't care about a new editor. The current one does the job for me and while there are some limitations it is easy enough to deal with them as a user. So from a "does it add value" perpective not at all interesting to me (yet - I haven't seen the difference). Value would i.e. be delivered by things like improved possiblities of making use of custom fields etc. - could be a game changer for many situations and forums and has been requested for ages unsucessfully.
And here yet again they refuse to communicate, lol.
I can’t imagine as a body shop owner I’d go radio silent as much as they do.
I would not say they "refuse" to commicate. It is rather no win for them in it - people will complain anyway, no matter what and how often they communicate. Just the cohort that complains will be a different one depending from the communication (and there are no doubt some that will complain anyway, independent from the communication).
To me it looks a bit like a two-fold situation: On the one hand XF is a pretty mature and robust software (and classical forum software in general is a pretty much finally designed use case). So whatever changes will be made will probably not be groundbraking like inventing the wheel or discovering the fire. It is basically mostly fine granular maintenance and thus not really time critical.
On the other hand there are still endless options for features or improvements, small and big. Which would not change the general character but add bits here and there. But a lot of them are only relevant for a fraction of the users and others would break things or need potentially massive work to achieve relatively tiny gains. So probably not easy to decide which ones to choose.
And third, as classical forums have become a little bit old fashioned, there are the two main cohorts of customers: The one that wants to stick with a classical approach and the one that want a modern reinvention of the forum concept (targeting towards AI, Reddit, Instagram and alike) - and those two directions are hardly compatible, achievable at the same time if at all.
Personally I am in principle happy with a slow pace and the stable state XF has - I would not want to do an upgrade of the forum software every month with all the work and risk tied to it, especially given the huge risk of add on issues tied to updates of XF. Still, while keeping things stable, it should be possible to deliver improvements constantly - there is clearly enough room for that. The "quality of life" approach of 2.4 targets in that direction, so I am fine with that. Just the "constantly" (or "frequently") part is lacking a bit.
