Third Party Service Reviews

Post in here your experience with paying coders to develop custom styles, addons and even installation and server help. As a noob webmaster and now, a seasoned Xenforo admin and I have not only offered my services, I've also paid for help as well. There have been many times where I either had issues trying to code something myself or realized I couldn't code it and asked for help. I have either caused the development of or contributed to the development of several addons in the resource manager of Xenforo. I will be using this thread to document my experience with some of these coders and developers for the help they offered.

 

Yeah I've used all named except for Audentio's services and will some of them here.

 

Conversion

Jake Bunce helped me out with the .htaccess redirects during my vB4 to XF conversion. When I first created my Xenforo forum, it was in a folder called forum. To keep links from being broken after moving the xenforo forum to the root, I had to empty the forum folder and leave an .htaccess redirect file. Unfortunately, the directory name 'forum' clashed with Jaxel’s Xenporta modification since at the time, Xenporta redirected visitors to 'forum' whenever you make the portal your home page. XFacil.com helped me change the name in xenporta from 'forum' to 'board’. Unfortunately at the time, I lost my attachments during import and had to download the attachments and manually re-upload them into some threads. That sucked. Other than that issue, Jake Bunce helped me out alot back then and had a ton of patience which was much appreciated. If you ever need any conversion help though, Jake Bunce is your man.

 

Brogan's also awesome! I hope he adds attachment thumbnails to his Featured Threads addon.

 

Paid Custom Addons

Waindigo has gotten several addons made for me such as Add Avatar to Last Post and Thread Thumbnails and if it’s broke he’ll usually try to fix it in a time period that is usually faster than most developers. I’ve probably spent around $200 for the development of some of his addons but the ironic thing is I’m no longer using the ones I paid for. If you want to contact Waindigo for custom addons, you should sign up to his website because if you pm him on Xenforo you’ll get an automatic pm back from him saying that your pm was transferred over to his website. I don’t know how he does that, pretty cool. Waindigo is usually the most consistent developer in taking up small projects so you can definitely rely on him for that. However, I’ve had several of his addons break my site. I’ve learned the hard way to test out his addons on a test site first. Sometimes you should probably wait for a couple updates before using his latest addons. Let other people’s sites break first before you download it. As bad as that it all may sound there is still no developer as consistent as Waindigo. He won't turn you away. You may or may not like the price but he'll get it done.

 

Paid Custom Addons

Chris Deeming has been really great with both xenforo and addon support and is online a lot. Out of all the coders I’ve asked for help from he’s contributed the most towards my site by creating most of the addons I’ve requested and helping out with general Xenforo issues. I've probably spent around $400 on his addons, custom and commercial. He’s so good at general Xenforo issues that I’ve even petitioned Xenforo to add Chris Deeming as moderator but they chose Jeremy/King Kovifor instead. About a year ago I was so inspired by Chris Deeming’s work that I became interested in creating my own high quality addons and Chris offered not only great advice but created tutorials on how to do so. At the time I was also on a shared host that my site outgrew and caused so much drama it turned me off from forums but Chris helped me transition to VPS. Unfortunately Chris has gotten swamped with current projects such as the awesome XenMediaGallery so good luck getting any requests done with him until he’s freed up enough.

 

Server Management

MattW is my current go to guy for server issues. I've spent over a $100 on his help in the past and it was all well spent. A couple months ago I was unable to create a test forum on Slavik's hosting service because I was getting slammed by Baidu Search Engine bots. Slavik suggested that I change hosts so I created a Paid Request thread. Out of all who offered to help, Matt displayed the most knowledge and helped moved my site over to a new host. Later on I switched to SSL, so I contacted Matt once again for his services since KnownHost said they couldn't do third party custom work. You should probably have Matt both install and uninstall services you pay for because the host doesn't always do a thorough job. MattW has done an excellent job each time I've required his services. I trust his knowledge and expertise more than my own host. If you need his services you should probably contact him through his own site because then you can upload any attachments you need to show him through convo.