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

[JoshA]

The problem is money. Big capital has settled into online community building and has chosen its champions. They did not choose Xenforo.

The average community builder has moved to Discord, and the flagship enterprise customers have moved to Discourse. Those two companies have more VC money than they can spend, and more developers and talent than every other forum software combined.

They both offer entirely free products.

Whoever is left at XF aside from Chris has gone silent, and the reason seems pretty clear to me. Their resources are drying up, and if someone who's absent is siphoning up what's left, they need to stop and focus it on whoever is still putting in the work, i.e., Chris.

Xenforo won't compete with free. But Forum only Xenforo didn't really try.

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They've also mismanaged things. LONG TIMES before major releases dries up the cash. They were also slow to the Cloud market. Cloud customers are paying customers and they want a whole package not just a forum.

2026 will be a great year for Xenforo. And since 2027 is more than 13 months away I feel confident in saying that.

I don’t really buy the idea that this is primarily a “money dried up / big VC didn’t choose them” problem.

Discord and Discourse absolutely sit in different market positions, but that doesn’t automatically make XenForo irrelevant or “finished”. Discord isn’t a replacement for structured, indexed, self-hosted communities, and Discourse is a very different philosophy and architecture. There’s still a real market for traditional forums that people completely control.

Where I think the criticism does land is execution and visibility.

The silence from most of the team isn’t a great look, and it’s fair to say they were slow to properly capitalise on cloud as a product, not just a deployment model. That’s a legitimate strategic miss.

But I don’t think that equals “resources are drying up” or that people are siphoning things off behind the scenes. What information is publicly available doesn’t really support the idea that the company is financially collapsing. It looks much more like a small, stable company dealing with the reality of a large, ageing codebase.

Maintaining and modernising a mature PHP product isn’t cheap, fast, or straightforward. It’s slow, cautious, and usually invisible. That doesn’t make it mismanagement by default.

Long gaps between releases don’t necessarily mean work stopped — they often mean the opposite in large, debt-heavy codebases: refactors, decoupling, compatibility work, forward-porting to newer PHP versions, security hardening.

Speculation about people “siphoning off what’s left” doesn’t help the community or the developers, and it doesn’t make communication more likely.

Criticise the communication, absolutely.
Criticise the pace, fair enough.
But assuming financial collapse or internal rot without evidence? That’s where I think the discussion stops being constructive.

XF doesn’t need to “compete” with Discord by becoming Discord. It needs to execute well on what it already is: a stable, self-hosted, community-owned platform. If they get the modernisation right, that still has real value.

 

[Digital Doctor]

community-owned platform

xenforo isn't really a community.

It's a unthreaded threads chit-chat forum lacking almost any reasonable data structures with a photopost-like antiquated tabbed off gallery.

there is a massive lack of innovation.

If Xenforo really wants to forum only, it should retool as a development platform with a xenforo forum bolted on top of that. And let people innovate from the development platform.

 

[Wing]

Xenforo won't compete with free. But Forum only Xenforo didn't really try.

View attachment 330594

They've also mismanaged things. LONG TIMES before major releases dries up the cash. They were also slow to the Cloud market. Cloud customers are paying customers and they want a whole package not just a forum.

2026 will be a great year for Xenforo. And since 2027 is more than 13 months away I feel confident in saying that.

So... what happened to this year?

 

[Digital Doctor]

So... what happened to this year?

I dont know anything about that.


other than this random post with no reference.

 

[Ricsca]

If updates (even small ones) aren't released, the admins consistently don't renew licenses, and XF earns less...
So I don't understand why they're stuck...

 

[zappaDPJ]

If updates (even small ones) aren't released, the admins consistently don't renew licenses, and XF earns less...
So I don't understand why they're stuck...

Perhaps they are dining out (so to speak) on a steady income from the Cloud and can afford financially to take their time working on the next release.

 

[Ricsca]

Releasing simple updates isn't complicated if vb can do it too...

 

[zappaDPJ]

Releasing simple updates isn't complicated if vb can do it too...

I certainly agree that it would have been better to have made a number of small releases rather than attempt to save everything up for one mega patch. Tiptap at the very least should have been a priority release.

 

[FTL]

Perhaps they are dining out (so to speak) on a steady income from the Cloud and can afford financially to take their time working on the next release.

This seems likely to me.

 

[duderuud]

Even when that were true...the lack of communication is still a sign something is not right.

 

[Alpha1]

Even when that were true...the lack of communication is still a sign something is not right.

That maybe so.
But much of the customer communication in this thread is not right either.
Communication goes two ways.

 

[Lee]

This is now "flogging a dead horse" so to speak.

The business has made its mind up how it wants to operate and there is nothing any of us can do to change that, so I guess the only thing left to do is get on with it, or move on.

 

[Digital Doctor]

Perhaps they are dining out (so to speak) on a steady income from the Cloud and can afford financially to take their time working on the next release.

in the past they've said the codebases are the same.

 

[zappaDPJ]

in the past they've said the codebases are the same.

Indeed. I was referring to the revenue stream. The Cloud brings in a regular flow of cash whereas the self-hosted version probably not so much right now.

 

[Digital Doctor]

The future is cloud only.
The cloud pays and too many xenforo installs are unlicenced.

 

[PhineasD]

If there were only Cloud, I wouldn't have Xenforo. And like me, many other current customers.

 

[Rusty Snippets]

At least Self Hosted is still advertised!

 

[koraldon]

This is now "flogging a dead horse" so to speak.

The business has made its mind up how it wants to operate and there is nothing any of us can do to change that, so I guess the only thing left to do is get on with it, or move on.

Yep,
The reason is less important, but it is apparent that Xenforo has decided to stop talking to its customers.
It is what it is.

 

[FTL]

in the past they've said the codebases are the same.

Indeed they are. There are only small differences in configuration because with Cloud, there's no access to the server at all. I've got both products, so I've been able to compare those differences in the ACP myself. Settings for some things are configured by XF and can't be changed by the customer.

Also, due to lack of server access, any advanced configuration via the control files like extra.less isn't possible. On the other hand, it's a secure and stable setup that's been very responsive and reliable for me. Just click on the NerdZone link in my siggy to see what its performance is like.

 

[ES Dev Team]

I would never use a cloud option. I would have built my own software if nothing like Xenforo self hosted was available.

I hope the team has not ghosted us or is about to announce they got bought out by investors. 5 months of ignoring customers is pretty spooky.