What is the current state of forum software?

When I started doing research on starting my forum (2007) I only knew of 2 forum software options phpBB & vB.

I quickly discovered many more options, but picked vB because I was familiar with it as a user, I liked the vast community between vb.org and sites like vbulletinsetup.com . And I was comfortable with my choice.

Then came the first wave of drama when IB bought them, next wave was the vB 4.0 issue.

I didn't get involved with the drama, but made the decision to change to IPB. And I've been happy with that choice.

Then we saw the birth of XF, at first it didn't mean too much to me, but my curiosity was peaked. I saw admin sites I visited converting to XF, and people praising it. I seriously looked into converting, but while there was some decent pull factor pulling me to XF, there was no push factor pushing me away from IPB.

Next we saw the drama which happened at XF.

Now there is additional drama with vB, XF is gone, and IPB is announcing what IMO is a nice plan for their 4.0 release.

But back to my question what do you think the status of forum software? With the flood of support for XF in it's short life I'd say that the market is ripe for a new entrant. Do you see this happening? Is there any person/company that is set to lead that charge? What would it take for you to consider leaving your current forum software?

 

The forum software market is definitely ready for a new entrant. Do I know exactly who that will be? Not really, both Launch.forum and Discourse were boasting about being the next step for forums, but I suspect it won't be one of those that redefines the forum market. No, it'll be something no one's expecting, something that hasn't got some massive advertising budget and that spreads more virally. Like XenForo I guess.

So I definitely think there's going to be a new forum script that'll 'disrupt' the forum market and redefine how forums work soon (it's gonna have to happen, the old way seems to be failing at the current point in time and activity on forums in general seems to be quite low), and I think it'll probably come from a new start up company or something of that nature.

We might also get multiple new forum scripts and companies now, just like how the console market has been recently flooded with Android based game consoles by independant groups and stuff.

 

We've been too slow with Launch.forum to make the impact we expected. Forum software is in a very vulnerable position, a bit of a stale mate.

You have teams either:

A. Trying to stay too strictly traditional. Result: No innovation to challenge market leaders.
B. Trying to go too far ahead into Social. Result: Running into huge social networks they can't offset, and making themselves unrecognizable to the forum community. I.e. losing the forum DNA.

We've had xenForo do a great job, primarily in group A. Their huge advantage was having Kier, the dev of the market leader, leading the effort. As a result, you get THE forum dev getting to have carte blanche, not being restricted by compatibility concerns of a legacy platform and existing user base. The great effect was xenForo, an immediate top tier player in forum choices, and its now battle tested at digitalpoint forums showing what it can do.

I think Discourse can do a great job too, but I think it would tend to lean towards group B. The jury is out on that. They are one to watch and not to dismiss too quickly, for sure. I'm not a huge fan of their initial UI decisions.

Considering A & B, you then get another discouraging factor in forum dev. Forums are not that sexy any more (for the startup world), have firmly established market leaders, and can't challenge the more widely deployed blog community easily. That is discouraging for new entrants. The result you get is underfunded projects like Launch.forum struggling to get to the finish line, and single developer projects that code for the love of coding and probably won't continue the project long term.

However, there are multiple brilliant guys out there in the forum industry that could build a serious contender. Just off the top of my head, imagine teaming up Shawn Hogan from DigitalPoint with Adrian Schneider of Syndicate Theory. These guys are forum experts, top tier devs, with progressive mindsets, and keen sense of the traditional dynamic/DNA that has to be maintained to appeal to the established forum community. If you examine the full forum community and identify its top devs, you'll find all kinds of candidates to build similar dream teams.

Now, we do have many features for Launch.forum in our product backlog that we just haven't been able to get to, but they are a pretty good jump forward. As much as I'd like to promise you'll all love the innovation, I'll only say that I think you'd love the concepts. Until we get them implemented, the old saying "ideas are a dime a dozen" is fitting. But we're still going to do what it takes to keep chipping away at our goal. For now, Launch.forum's current state is just a clean and easy forum, with some great new platform features, in alpha. We're still missing a bunch of essential stuff. Chip, chip, chip! =)

 

Xenforo only touched on where community software needs to go to become successful. I think stackexchange and Jive do so as well. With html5, GWT/ZK and other novel technologies available, there are some great possibilities for new community software.

 

To be honest, I think this is the reason new forum scripts should be started right now. vBulletin is doing a great job of destroying their market and scaring away their audience, XenForo has come to a standstill because of a lawsuit and certain other paid scripts that aren't IPB are stumbling. New devs should be trying to take advantage of this.

And not being able to challenge blogs is kind of irrelevant, since no one's making blog scripts either. Or at least, it's probably easier to compete in forum software than it is against Wordpress.

I agree that forums aren't seen as 'sexy' any more for startups, but I think community software in general should be, right? Or have all the worlds startups decided Facebook ain't worth competing with all of a sudden?

 

Blogs are stars in the #socialmedia era. Forums are not a de facto necessity. So forum software has a smaller target audience. As a result, it's going to attract less interest from the startup world.

Community software, in the startup world, equates to "social networking". All the big players want to be SaaS, and they want to control the user base.

xenForo was the fastest moving "real forum" software in the space. They improved upon forums without changing the DNA. If they survive the lawsuit, they will continue to gain market share, deservedly.

If Launch.forum can get back on track, I think we have the freshest ideas without departing too much from traditional forums. I base that on not seeing the majority of the most interesting features we have in mind being implemented anywhere. Of course, it's hard to do new stuff in a legacy platform, i.e. more stuff to break, more stuff impacted by cascading inter-dependencies. vB5's inline editing would be one counter example, but that's par for the course in dev trends.

 

I just read about Discourse on Jeff's Blog: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2013/02/civilized-discourse-construction-kit.html which really looks interesting. I do think they handicapped themselves (as to mass market penetration) by choosing to develop on Rails and Postgress as the standard is php/mySQL and those hosts are a dime a dozen. It will be interesting to see what happens here.

vBulletin went to chit with vB 4 and even moreso with vB 5. If you need ever need to alienate fanbase that has no problem paying for a superior product with access to an awesome community just look at vBulletin for *the* example.

Xenforo became the darling child just by bringing forums fresh look with a 'facebook-feel' with all the AJAX stuff. I still feel that Xenforo is one of the better choices out there. They quickly lost brownie points with me due the lack communication and updates. Xenforo still has a small chance to restore faith though.

Invision Power Board - Admittedly I don't follow IPB except for the updates I see here @ Admin-Talk but my opinion of IPB is that product and community wise it's probably the most stable of the three. I haven't heard drama come out the IPB side in years and they release frequent updates. Right now IPB is looking most attractive to me.

As to the up and comers: I'm not sold on Scott's SaaS idea. I don't like the idea of someone else having the keys to my community. Launch Forum looked interesting but I haven't heard much about it lately.

What I'd like to see is a hybrid of Stack Exchange and regular discussion forum. The ability to have Q&A areas like Stack Exchange with upvoting and regular forum discussions possibly on the same page.

On my forum many times a simple question gets diluted with dissenting opinions and discussion about those opinions. The ability to have question and an upvoted answer with all the discussion below it would be pretty awesome.​

 

I can answer this thread in three words:

It's all garbage.

 

Semi-related side note... I don't play well with others.

If I'm part of a team of developers, I get pissed off and feel like other people aren't doing enough... I end up redoing their stuff half the time and then I get more pissed off that I'm doing their job too.

I don't work well under a manager... I feel like they don't know WTF they are talking about most of the time and I'd rather be building something rather than talking about it.

I don't work well *as* a manager... This is literally how I manage devs... "I don't know, make something awesome." And then I get annoyed if whatever they come up with isn't awesome enough, even though I gave them no direction or input. hah

I'm all about the creation process (that's what I like to do), I don't care if anyone buys whatever it is. haha

...and that's why I'm the only one who works on my site. I can just create stuff whenever I feel like it, and don't have to worry about other people screwing it up.

 

I thought that was the status quo in the forum world! Remember, TED trying to not-get-hired in the movie? Same deal here.

We just need to get you a buffer. You get a sub-manager who you get to yell at. That person is really smart and open to taking medication to prevent any psychological response to your whims. Most of you probably did not watch "The Master". If you did, Joaquin underwent a deprogramming process to make him immune to the harshest of barbs. I'm not sure if he's into software or available.

Then you tell the sub-manager everything. And when you see something not moving fast enough, or not the way you wanted it, you really let them have it.

They then take some time, about 20 minutes in the snack room to get composed and eat carbohydrates. They call a stand up meeting with the rest of the team, and translate your requirements into its play-nice version.

It can be done!

Side note: I watch too many movies, and am too low on carbohydrates.

 

Hahaha... or I can just keep being lazy... building stuff when I feel like it and not have any timetable to actually *do* anything.

Plus I'd be the worst person to be doing support in the forum world... I'd be like, "I'm not gonna help you... it's not my fault your retarded and the $200 you spent doesn't give you a free pass to be retarded." I'm not really a people person. lol

 

I started with phpbb because I refused to pay for VB.... a year after as soon as my forum hit 500 or 1k members, switched to IPB. Could not be happier. I feel they benefited from the vb drama... the only issue now, is that support is quite slow to get.

 

I'm developing forum software that fulfills some of your criteria: :-)

1. No one expects it
2. Hasn't got some massive advertising budget

But so far this has not happened:

3. Spreads virally — Instead people somewhat frequently complain that they don't like horizontal scrolling and that their old habits are being broken.​

Here's a demo of a topic page.

I'm actually developing something like that. On the topic pages, there are vote buttons, and answers are sorted by votes, like at StackOverflow. The highest rated answer appears to the very left. Here's a demo, and some intro text / motivation (including how-to-deal-with-off-topic-threads).

 

Sorry for reviving an older thread... (and thanks for the shout out, Joe). Random Google search brought me here.

Any updated thoughts on this?

I've built several smaller-scale forum platforms on my own, but I'm not (and shouldn't be) in the business of creating forums. I'm currently in analysis phase for a pretty massive forum rebuild and it has been pretty frustrating evaluating all of the options.

Note - my needs here are a strong development platform and a community that will scale. Currently at 10k online out of just over 200k members. Growing pretty rapidly still.

vBulletin 4/5 looks like a joke. 3.8.x is nice, but I feel has fallen too far behind the times to be useful nowadays. You almost need a distribution of plugins and mods on top of it to bring it up to date. But, then you're still on an ancient platform with security holes just waiting to be uncovered.

XenForo doesn't look fully featured enough. Maybe I haven't looked at it too closely though.

Discourse is something I want to like. I played around with the demo again as a user, and I really like it. It's an awesome experience, and everything is done over a REST API. I also have doubts the flat forum structure and crowd-sourced moderation style will fit this particular community. I wouldn't mind having an excuse to learn more Ruby, but not particularly fond of rails.

phpBB looks like a mess still.

There are lots of other small ones, but I think community adoption is the key here. Being on your own (as I have been with vBulletin - for years) is extremely frustrating. This also rules out DIY, as I have many times in the past. There are hundreds of little edge case routines that you need as communities grow. It sort of makes me appreciate the mess vBulletin turned into originally.

 

Xenforo is still playing catchup for various reasons but what features would you say it's currently missing?

 

You do know most 'enterprise' solutions work a lot like IPB and vBulletin, right? I mean, feature wise, Jive and Lithium are absolutely nothing like Discourse, and a whole lot like the current market leaders, with all the same feature 'bloat' and the same design philosophy.

Of course, given how badly most enterprise forum software is designed (they often feel like something identical to a free or 'cheap' solution with stuff just implemented a bit worse and a mediocre style), I guess competition for them could only be a good thing.

 

Not sure what features you need that are missing be default, but XenForo can be turned into something enterprise-level without *too* much effort.

A couple things I did to ours to make it as such....

• Attachments and avatars stored in database (solves the problem of trying to keep files in sync across multiple web servers).
• Built a "scalability" addon that tweaks a few of the queries that individually might not scale well.
• Using ndbcluster storage engine for all tables. And this one is huge... All servers are fully write capable SQL nodes. The setup can handle around 20,000,000 SQL reads per second *while* doing around 5,000,000 SQL writes.

With that stuff, there really is no scalability or single point of failure bottleneck. Pretty sure we could handle over a million concurrent users... At that point the bottleneck would be bandwidth/connectivity.

One (of many) really nice things about MySQL Cluster (ndbcluster storage engine) is you can even do things like upgrade MySQL without a millisecond of downtime. I upgraded from MySQL 5.5 to 5.6 last November with zero downtime.

http://www.clusterdb.com/mysql-cluster/1-billion-queries-per-minute-mysql-cluster-7-2-is-ga

Definitely worth watching (regardless of what platform you go with)... We've been live with it since we got our new servers last May.


View: http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DnWItDTZL2c