XF 2.4 general discussion, feedback, complaints, random off topic posts, etc.

[bzcomputers]

You were not talking about other companies, you were specifically talking about XenForo

Keeping customers retained by scheduling updates at regular intervals, keeping lapses in software licensing to a minimum, is standard practice for many software companies.

???.

You even admit that XenForo is not currently doing what you implied, so what was the point of your first post?

You are quoting a separate post, that came after Chris's response to my first post. Chris said they currently do not implement any strategy for software renewal beyond what he stated in that link. I take him for his word, so in my most recent post XenForo's current stated policy was referenced.

Pushing unfounded conjecture or saying things without factual basis is conspiracy.

Anti-consumer or not, it is standard practice for many software companies and far from conjecture and conspiracy.

Please, don't take this general conversation, my observations and opinions, personally or out a context.

 

[Chris D]

They might have good intentions. Yet major releases take years. When the first betas of a new release show up you see a new style and some backend enhancements and nothing else. There hasn't been anything new except for the style in v2 and all its iterations. Then again they don't profess to be anything more then a forum software company.

If not for loyal customers this ship would have sunk years ago.

Frankly that’s unadulterated bull.

Major releases have sometimes taken a while, yes. We’re working on that though, evidently.

We haven’t added a new style since 2.0 nor changed it significantly in that time.

Every version since 2.0 (including 2.0) has knocked off a number of significant features. To say there hasn’t been “anything new” is just an outright lie or wilful ignorance.

As for surviving off of loyal customers, all the new licenses we’ve sold in 2024 along with the ongoing growth in our Cloud platform (which is majority new customers) would disagree.

Not sure what your personal problem is but there’s no need to spout off nonsense like this.

 

[smallwheels]

No, it’s total downloads across all versions.

Oh wow! In this case the situation for add on developers must be even way worse than I imagined. And the number of XF installs way lower.
I.e. does pretty frequent updates:

S9e Media Sites (2187 downloads)

10 updates since the beginning of August this year alone and 189 updates in total since the first release in Dec. 2017. As I keep my add ons pretty up to date, barely ever leaving out a release of this addon this would mean that probably a couple of dozen of these 2187 downloads in total is me alone. And this does not yet include my test and staging forums.

 

[Forsaken]

???.



You are quoting a separate post, that came after Chris's response to my first post. Chris said they currently do not implement any strategy for software renewal beyond what he stated in that link. I take him for his word, so in my most recent post XenForo's current stated policy was referenced.



Anti-consumer or not, it is standard practice for many software companies and far from conjecture and conspiracy.

Please, don't take this general conversation, my observations and opinions, personally or out a context.

If your first post is completely changed by Chris correcting you, that makes what you posted conjecture by definition.

The irony is... The conspiracy post had nothing to do with you, and more to do with other people who love to theory craft malicious reasons as to why XF does things, rather than the simple answser of them being bad at project management.

But I really don't care about this conversation, what you have to say, or really you in general so you can feel free to believe whatever you like and go about stroking your ego or whatever.

Oh wow! In this case the situation for add on developers must be even way worse than I imagined. And the number of XF installs way lower.
I.e. does pretty frequent updates:

10 updates since the beginning of August this year alone and 189 updates in total since the first release in Dec. 2017. As I keep my add ons pretty up to date, barely ever leaving out a release of this addon this would mean that probably a couple of dozen of these 2187 downloads in total is me alone. And this does not yet include my test and staging forums.

A large number of forums do not use many add-ons, and some of the add-ons you listed are usually grabbed from the developer's site (I get most of my add-ons from Xon's site for his free ones for example).

That said, the forum industry isn't that large compared to most other variety of websites.

 

[Chris D]

Oh wow! In this case the situation for add on developers must be even way worse than I imagined. And the number of XF installs way lower.
I.e. does pretty frequent updates:

10 updates since the beginning of August this year alone and 189 updates in total since the first release in Dec. 2017. As I keep my add ons pretty up to date, barely ever leaving out a release of this addon this would mean that probably a couple of dozen of these 2187 downloads in total is me alone. And this does not yet include my test and staging forums.

I’m sorry but you cannot estimate the installed customer base based on the number of resource downloads here. It doesn’t mean what you think it means.

It doesn’t mean that there aren’t customers. It just means that of the customers we do have, they probably don’t use that add-on, it’s that simple.

This is why people who are constantly banging on for us to implement X, Y, Z are going to be sorely disappointed in the long run. We’re not going to implement everything. We’re not going to implement the majority of things. Because the majority of things are not needed by the majority of customers.

One man’s essential feature is another man’s bloat.

Of course we will try our best to implement what we believe to be in the best interests of more customers than not but a lot of what people expect us to implement is by no means going to appeal to everyone.

 

[Forsaken]

I’m sorry but you cannot estimate the installed customer base based on the number of resource downloads here. It doesn’t mean what you think it means.

It doesn’t mean that there aren’t customers. It just means that of the customers we do have, they probably don’t use that add-on, it’s that simple.

This is why people who are constantly banging on for us to implement X, Y, Z are going to be sorely disappointed in the long run. We’re not going to implement everything. We’re not going to implement the majority of things. Because the majority of things are not needed by the majority of customers.

One man’s essential feature is another man’s bloat.

Of course we will try our best to implement what we believe to be in the best interests of more customers than not but a lot of what people expect us to implement is by no means going to appeal to everyone.

Expanded ignore system would definitely get use . And I can promise to use it enough to make up for everyone that doesn't use it.

 

[smallwheels]

There hasn't been anything new except for the style in v2 and all its iterations.

This is clearly untrue.

a new style and some backend enhancements and nothing else.

While most customers and users only see the surface and and shiny new functions it is a dirty and expensive secret that software is never ready but needs continuous work to simply keep working. Knowledge of the devs rises, new dependencies and new purposes arise, surrounding software (like PHP) may cause the need for changes, new functionalities need changes to be able to implement them, a dirty hack from the past fires back - the bigger and more complex the stack and the bigger and the older the codebase is the more continuous maintenance effort is needed that does not change anything visible for the user. Those refactorings may easily eat up half of your capacity and even more at times. It's a game that never ends, especially not in a dynamic environment. And trust me: You do not want to have a software where no refactoring is ever made because one day it will collapse with a big bang and long before that feature development will become slower and slower because every tiny change will cause bigger and bigger trouble that has to be dealt with.

While I agree that I would like to have more funcitonalities in the XF core and in some aspects a more flexible and more modern front end I clearly don't see that the XF guys would idle all day long.

 

[Suzanne O]

So when are we as in those of us on the cloud expected to see this happen?

 

[smallwheels]

It doesn’t mean that there aren’t customers. It just means that of the customers we do have, they probably don’t use that add-on, it’s that simple.

That's what I wrote earlier already:

Plus there are probably a lot of forums that don't use add ons at all. Still overall these numbers seem not very high to me - and furthermore give a perspective on that:

But still it counts for that point (which was the main point why I wrote it anyway):

Probably pretty hard to make a living from developing and selling add ons for XF, at least if you live in the western world.

It probably does not make economic sense for a developer to build a huge and complex add on. Way to much effort and time to invest for the potential sales revenue as the XF market is no doubt pretty small in comparison to alternatives like WordPress or Shopify. And it gets worse once you have a userbase as at some point you'll have saturated most of your potential market and have to live mainly from maintenance.

Therefor "biggie jobs" are potentially rather something for the XF crew itself. If I look at the feature list of thecompetition that has the things like "CMS/Page Builder", "Event System" and even eCommerce features integrated in their core (and a Gallery as well) I must admit while these competing companies are no alternative to XF for me that XF is falling behind here a bit.

 

[smallwheels]

A large number of forums do not use many add-ons,

That's what I already wrote in in the posting you quoted.

and some of the add-ons you listed are usually grabbed from the developer's site (I get most of my add-ons from Xon's site for his free ones for example).

and this I wrote also already in the post you quoted. Xon has started to move some of his free downloads completely to his site realtively recently, and if you have one or more of his paid addons it makes total sense to download the full range once you are on his site anyway. That's what I do, too.

My point was not to say that no one would use XenForo. It was a best effort approach to get an idea of the situation of an add on developer, extrapolated from the most popular add ons in the AUN statistics as there are no other, let alone official numbers available.

 

[smallwheels]

This is why people who are constantly banging on for us to implement X, Y, Z are going to be sorely disappointed in the long run. We’re not going to implement everything. We’re not going to implement the majority of things. Because the majority of things are not needed by the majority of customers.

Sure. But that's a very trivial truth, leaving out relevant parts. While there are no doubt features that would not justify the effort, others that would bloat the software, others that would only be used by a very tiny fraction of people (or not even by the people that demanded it in first place), others, that may conflict with the current code base and others that are simply too big or too far out from the basic concept of XF there are loads of things that could probably be implemented relatively easily, exist in other softwares, have been demanded - and are missing. Like @Forsaken said:

Expanded ignore system would definitely get use

I do not know what exactly he means here but i.e. a simple "ignore thread" function can't be that difficult - and has been demanded n times by my users already. I would have to buy a plugin (that is relatively expensive for this functionality) to get it. So it is obviously possible. There are currently 700 suggestions for the Media Gallery alone, 700 for the Ressource manager and more than 1000 suggestions (and over 9000 closed ones) for the XF core - I doubt that they are all useless ideas from freaked out users. Many of these have been sitting there for years and years and many have considerable numbers of votes on them, some of them hundreds of votes (and even more if you aggregate the duplicates).

There are 33 pages with 650 open bug reports in the bug-report forum for the core system, many of them unanswered, the oldest one ist from 2019.

So I can totally understand why some people get the impression of slow movement and being ignored.

Probably everyone will accept that you won't and can't implement everything. In fact nobody ever asked for that. Most would be happy if you - exaggerating here to illustrate the point - implemented something...

 

[Arantor]

a simple "ignore thread" function can't be that difficult

You’d be surprised.

Consider the list of nodes with all the forums on it. If the last topic in that board is in your ignore list, do you hide it from that view? (Same question applies to ignoring users, do you hide that most recent post). If you’re just excluding a topic from “what’s new” it’s less bad.

This matters because “finding the highest x” is significantly easier than what ends up being “finding the second or third highest x” and has very real performance implications once you get to even a modest size.

 

[smallwheels]

You’d be surprised.

I'm not a developer. That's why I buy software instead of writing it myself.

Consider the list of nodes with all the forums on it. If the last topic in that board is in your ignore list, do you hide it from that view? (Same question applies to ignoring users, do you hide that most recent post).

Probably true. Still not one but two add ons are availble that implement the funcionality. And I guess there are a lot of more complicated functions that have been built by someone. If we alway only implemented the easiest things out world would look vastly different.

If you’re just excluding a topic from “what’s new” it’s less bad.

Can't speak for others but that would be totally sufficient for my needs or rather the ones of my users - that's what they asked for.

 

[Arantor]

Probably true. Still not one but two add ons are availble that implement the funcionality. And I guess there are a lot of more complicated functions that have been built by someone. If we alway only implemented the easiest things out world would look vastly different

Not disputing that it’s doable - it clearly is - but the trade offs aren’t necessarily acceptable in the core.

 

[smallwheels]

Not disputing that it’s doable - it clearly is - but the trade offs aren’t necessarily acceptable in the core.

Well it was meant as an example, nothing more. As mentioned there are literally 100s of other suggestions and you can bet that a lot of them don't create much extra load if any at all and many will not be complex regarding implementation. So it does not make too much sense to dig to deep in this one. Either way the main issue is probably the lacking feedback for the suggestions and bug reports.

 

[AndrewSimm]

Not disputing that it’s doable - it clearly is - but the trade offs aren’t necessarily acceptable in the core.

I actually think ignoring threads would be much easier to implement. The ignore feature for users can be clunky for some of the challenges you mentioned. Hiding threads are common in Xenforo due to permissions so you just need to piggyback off of that.

 

[Suzanne O]

I actually think ignoring threads would be much easier to implement. The ignore feature for users can be clunky for some of the challenges you mentioned. Hiding threads are common in Xenforo due to permissions so you just need to piggyback off of that.

Ignore feature needs to be redone.
Needs to add a block check box

 

[JamesBrown]

Expanded ignore system would definitely get use

The double ignore plug in is still working on my 2.3 site. I rely on this a lot, and would not upgrade ever, if it meant going without it. So I would love to see it implemented in the core.

 

[AWS]

Not sure what your personal problem is but there’s no need to spout off nonsense like this.

Truth hurts don't it. Take off the rose colored glasses. I sure can't see anything new while I browse the site. I do confess I don't look very hard at the code so I might be missing these new features.

 

[Chris D]

My advice would be to not comment if you don't have an understanding of the things you're commenting about.

"There hasn't been anything new".

Here's all the new things we've added since 1.5:

Have you seen...?

This forum spotlights some of XenForo's interesting features. Spotlights on features in upcoming releases will be posted here.

xenforo.com

Have you seen...?

This forum spotlights some of XenForo's interesting features. Spotlights on features in upcoming releases will be posted here.

xenforo.com

Have you seen...?

This forum spotlights some of XenForo's interesting features. Spotlights on features in upcoming releases will be posted here.

xenforo.com

Have you seen...?

This forum spotlights some of XenForo's interesting features. Spotlights on features in upcoming releases will be posted here.

xenforo.com

I hope that helps.