Here’s an example: I made a recommendation nearly two years ago suggesting that XenForo should consider implementing well-tested third-party code to help speed things up -
my post here. Now, we’re starting to see signs of this happening. That’s great - but it shows how long change takes when the pace is glacial.
Possibly you are overrating both: Your cleverness and your influence.
If XenForo is going to survive in this new era of the internet, it needs to evolve at a much more consistent and deliberate cadence. Otherwise, it risks becoming yet another product that “still works” - until it doesn’t.
XF is a small business, a very small one. It's main advantage is that it just works and is stable and robust. It is a classic forum software and promises nothing different. It is not famous for the most modern bleeding edge social features or alike. And still there is a market for it. There are people (include me here) that do not want to upgrade their forum continuously in a high frequence. In opposite: I want the thing to run with the least effort possible. Nothing against an upgrade from time to time, but making the whole platform a moving target would drive me away.
Still I agree that XF is lacking a lot of features that are really basic. Not even fancy ones. I don't know if you've ever heard of the Kano-model. Basically this clusters the elements of any given product (including software like XF) into three areas: basic features, satisfiers and delighters
Basic features are what you would reasonably expect from any product - i.e. a forum software should have an account management and the possiblity for registering and login. You would simpl expect that those features exist and possibly not even check their existence before buying. If too many of those are not met you would not even consider the product or exchange it for a different one.
Satisfiers are the things that make you buy a product from a reasonable perspective. Things like "simple to use", "nice ui", "good spam protection". They make you stick to the product. The more there are the better it is.
Delighters are features that you would not expect, those that blow you away. They make you a fan, someone who is exited about the product and recommends it.
As you can imagine the classification is not absolute but differs per user/customer: Things that excite you may be of no interest to me and things that satisfy me may not be fancy enough for you. And the classification changes over time: What may have been a delighter at some point in time has become a commodity and therefor a basic expectation - spell checking may be an example for that.
So the classification depends from the customers and their individual expectations as well as from the common state of technology and from what competing products offer. Teslas i.e. used to have loads of delighters, things no one else could offer, so they could afford to lack some basic expectations. Today the competition has caught up a fair bit, so in comparison they have fewer delighters today but have to care for basic expectations more due to the competition.
The problem XF has is that they seem to have been very good in the early years. However, time has moved on and so has the competition and the expectations. Today, XF is still a good and solid product for the purpose, still it is lacking more and more basic expectations - there is clearly a long backlog in that respect. There are satisfiers, i.e. robustness and security, however: Fancy delighters are somewhat missing - it is more a somewhat desperate looking race to keep up with the market (or even to ignore the market and the competition, hoping having created a big enough niche to be able to decouple from the rest of the product world).
The extendability via customizing and the add on system is kind of either a satisfier or a delighter - a clever one but at the same time a somewhat not so clever one: It leads to "outsourcing" more and more basic expectations and satisfiers to third parties, not to take responsibility for them and so to weaken the core product while at the same time the dependency from these third parties rises as does the complexity. High frequent updates - as many want it - include always to check compatibility with all the add ons and often enough an update of one or more add ons as well. Which then takes time until it is developed or - as constantly seen - an add on developer steps out or delivers very slowly, so making in the end customers unhappy and / or even hinders them this way to upgrade the core product.
Thus braking changes are somewhat a nightmare. 2.3 was a breaking change (a year ago, and many still did not upgrade for one reason or another). 2.3.8 will be a breaking change (due to the queries in templates policy). 2.4. will be a breaking change (due to the editor). 3.0 will be a breaking change (new style). That is a lot of breaking changes in - at least assumed - not too much of a time frame. It is no doubt necessary and more than that - it is overdue. Still from a customer perspective this is more work than I would prefer.
I'd assume the people posting on this forum are only a fraction of the customer base and they are overproportionally those who want "more features, faster". The problem is: We don't know what percentage of the customers this is but it does not matter anyway as they cannot come to a decision which realistic set of features it should be anyway. Capacity of XF is limited and so is their ability to deliver loads of features in a speedy manner.
However: ATM it seems the XF crew is far behind the wave. It would be unrealistic to expect even only a fraction of the fancy features people yell for in this thread as well as in others. Personally, I would like to see a speed in pace regarding keeping up with basic expectations (i.e. things like being able to sort pictures in albums in the gallery) rather than to spend loads of time in many fancy features. But what we currently see is a total lack of visible speed - to such an amount that I sometimes wondered if developing XF eventually may have become just a part time untertaking oder side project of the leading actors. However - I cannot judge on that due to lack of foundation, I just see the overall slowlyness and lack of result.
Personally, I do not need more frequent releases, let alone high frequent ones. I'd prefer a steady pace of bug- and risk-free releases and improving the basic expectations with a couple of satisfiers as a consequence and possibly a delighter from time to time.
As a forum user I've always been very happy with XF, more than with other forum software, and did not miss much. Running my own forum for three years now that was what made me choose XenForo in the first place and overall my users are happy with it and so am I for the most part as well.
Still, from an admin perspective as well as from the perspective to develop my forum further the opinion has changed a little bit - there are a lot of unpolished or lacking areas and aspects that I did not see in beforehand and some structural deficits as well. So overall still satisfied and not planning to switch horses, some delighters are still there, but a lot of basic expectations that have not been met. Which if this does not change will not necessarily make me switch horses but maybe at some point in time look around what other horses do exist - being fully aware that many of them do only have three legs, so would not be an option anyway.
I remember seeing it and it doesn't have any bearing on 2025 as that happened in 2019. You can google up Ashley's name and find the documents yourself.
