xenforo 1.2 delayed i talked with mike

No, that's totally and utterly wrong. When you have already chosen XF over IPB or vB4 and have already migrated your business forum over, because Xenforo was an active community and the developers were posting every day and the "feeling" was good, despite the lawsuit, you cannot just suddenly "switch" again. You cannot just jerk your customer base around with another migration. That's just from a forum member point of view but there are other considerations, every migration takes a hit on SEO, ranking, traffic, goodwill, staff time in doing it, skinning, styling, importing, it is a very long and expensive list when your aggregate stats are hundreds of thousands of posts or more.

And Xenforo cannot take that attitude either, it cannot treat customers with the arrogance that says "if you don't like it, get lost" because sooner or later, everyone WILL get lost.

I think here we are seeing a difference in opinion between people like me who earn a living from several forums (and it is a financial investment of some importance) and people who just run hobby forums. The latter obviously can do what they want. But for the serious players, switching AGAIN is not an option in the short term. Maybe this is why so many of us are getting twitchy. We've placed money and goodwill in two developers who are now simply ignoring us.

 

What you're saying amounts to "the product works so shut up and stop complaining". Which is said very often. And which completely misses the point now and every time it's ever been said.

That might be fine for hobby boards. But for some people, this is their livelihood, their source of income. Floren outline that perfectly well in his original few posts, the fact that people are choosing to ignore this doesn't alter the truth behind it.

 

Mark, if you start building a new house getting all your materials from a same builders yard. You don't ask if they'll still be around for the next 6 months. My point being, it's a gamble and you cannot depend on something always being there, not even forum software. Everyone knew when purchasing XenForo, that there's a court case ongoing against them, and from a corporate giant named "Internet Brands".

People took that gamble at the very start, so don't see how they can complain their forum depends on it later like some do. Maybe they should not have invested in XenForo, going instead with a safer bet like IPB.

 

Utterly pointless comparison since you only need a builders yard while you're building the house, not afterwards. Besides it's nothing like that at all.

the case has been clearly stated by Floren and others, and it's irrefutable. It's not so much of an issue for hobby boards like mine, there's much less at stake. That's why I'm not making a massive fuss about the matter, as you know well that I would. I don't fight other people's battles though. Done enough of that in my time and got bitten. If it does't affect me, I'm not getting involved.

 

I still think your missing the point, one that XenForo has been involved in a court case from day one, you, me and everyone knew the risks that come with that and took it. So no use crying about it later, acting like you never knew XenForo one day might be gone. Come on!

 

Nonsense, not everyone will have known, it's not like they mention it on the purchase page! Only those who came initially from a knowledge of who they were will have known that at the outset.

Many businesses neither know nor care about other companies' lawsuits, how many people don't buy Apple products or Samsung phones in case they lose their respective legal battles?

 

So lets say then, you was running XenForo now instead of vBulletin 4 at BCForums. Tomorrow, they announce they've lost the court case and are closing down "end of XenForo". What you going to do, blame them for your forum now being stuck with XenForo 1.x.x version forever. How can do that, when knowing at the very start they could lose the court case and just have?

You took a gamble, you lost. Do you blame the bookmaker when betting on a losing horse? It's not their fault you picked a Donkey coming in last! You have to take some responsibility for your own decision, not keep passing the buck because unhappy you made a wrong one that later back-fires on you.

 

The issue here is about them NOT announcing things. You've just described a scenario where they DO announce something, so you've rather missed the point!

 

Unfortunatetly, you seem to have forgot what you was even going on about. :lol2:

 

George I see your point. i am not running a forum as a hobby, it's part of my business. And, after investing over $600 in it in just 3 months, writing a book, setting up some unique features etc. it's clear I don't take it lightly and it's not (only) a hobby. What I am trying to address here is our 'passion' for this gossip and overthingking all this stuff. The script WORKS great. I am not running a big forum, but it's pretty active and I am online almost each moment I am awake. I have run forums for the past 10 years, worked with ALL main scripts (phpbb, smf, mybb, vb, ipb and now xf). For me it's the best deal and I will not switch back to VB, that's for sure. I might even move my 4 vbs to the new script eventually.

As long as you have a working script that can handle the pressure (and from what I read HUGE forums switched and work nicely), I wouldn't worry anymore. Even if they don't release any new version, I don't care. As long as my current installation works, it's cool. If I'd get such a big site and need some custom work, I can always hire a programmer to install custom features and, if I do a proper search, I can get some excellent service at a small price even.

So, whether they release the new RC in 2 months or 20 years, I am all set. The script works, I run my thing and try to focus on what's needed: promotion, constant content etc. I have the engine, now I need to drive the car

I agree that they should be more transparent, but to be honest it never really bothered me so much. Let's say I heard about the lawsuit few months ago, though everyone knew about it. And got my first real look at XF 3 months ago, when I instantly bought my license. and I don't regret it. Maybe my way is not the best (to live under a rock like this), but in my life and business I always tried to focus ON MY WORK only and then worry about others. I've done countless migrations myself and, even if I don't like it, if needed, I'll move the forum to whatever script I have to. Wouldn't be sweet, but as long as you've built a good community, traffic and content, this is not really such a huge deal anymore

 

It's pretty obvious no amount of complaining is going to persuade them to post an announcement on XenForo, if it was they'd have done it by now looking at the number of threads already posted locked. I'm giving up, can't be bothered waffling on about it anymore. These threads about it here are now going around in circles and sounding more and more like pure XF bashing threads, will just have to wait until they do it in their own time - like it or not.

Time to give it rest.

 

I warned people in the very beginning about XenForo. Not because I dislike kier or think XenForo sucks, for me its a logical business decision to avoid XenForo until things are settled with the lawsuit and I see some history with the company. Too many people have too much emotion about this whole thing and are making emotionally based decisions IMO. Thats bad for business.

 

I agree.

I admit when XF first appeared I got carried away in the whirlwind and stated that my site would convert as soon as possible.

Then I realised the reality was, we'd lose masses of functionality and at the very least we'd need to wait a year or so for XF to mature and more addons to come.

As time wore on and vBulletin improved again, I began to realise that my members wouldn't appreciate the sudden switch at all. And there is also the massive learning curve - I am no coder, but I have learned over the years how to manipulate vBulletin to do what I want. I'd be starting from scratch on XF.

But still, I maintained a "long term" ambition to convert - until these recent nonsense of the owners acting like they did when they ran vBulletin development. But as I said earlier, you cannot get away with that when it's your business. And so now I know, XF is probably not the best choice for my site, and that's a pity because it IS a great product.

I am considering selling my licence while it still has any residual value, I cannot see me ever using it.

 

Found that also when using XenForo, it's very different indeed from what I've been used to before with vBulletin and MyBB. Which even though I'm no coder, could usually get my head around many basic things changing how they work to suit, or when dealing with some HTML in the code e.t.c. Tried at first getting to grips with how XenForo works code wise, but soon give it up as a bad job. Don't mind admitting, I don't have a clue how to do things with XenForo at all and I'm utterly lost really. I'd just have to run it stock and leave well alone, which I don't mind doing!

I can understand why you stuck with vB4, agree it doesn't have what you need looking at your community and doubt it will for a good few years to come yet. I don't think that "Gaming Add-on" you wanted is going to get anywhere either now, not after reading one of the people involved has pulled out recently claiming he's been carrying other people involved in the project doing most of the coding, now venturing out doing his own thing instead. I think that will end-up a lost cause myself, which you said was definitely needed for your community if converting over to XenForo.

Unless you understand how XenForo code works very well, I really don't see how you could have converted your vB4 forum anyhow. Not when you've made loads of changes like you have, all of them needing to be implemented (carried across) into XenForo coding. Always got the impression that's mainly why you never converted, you felt you was unable to do it and why later decided instead to start giving your vB4 forum an XenForo style look. Knowing it was never going to happen now.

It's OK if your doing a "clean install" or converting a "stock board", no worries then. But that's obviously a far cry from your situation with your board being modded to death making things much harder and complicated. Don't expect you'll ever convert to XenForo, no matter if the mods you wanted are there or not in the future. Even read you say the reason you've not upgraded your community to a higher vB4 version (your still using a very old one), was because your unable to do it due to all custom changes you've made since. You've kind of backed yourself into a corner from what I see, always thought you wanted to avoid doing that being stuffed with an old forum version to try and keep up with the times?

Did exactly the same with the MyBB forum myself run for nearly 2 years. Changed that much, in the end was stuck with that version until things finally broke being on shared hosting and having no control over MySQL and PHP versions they installed later breaking it. Which happened after they upgraded PHP to a higher version one day. Think yourself lucky you don't have that to worry about, was pretty miffed after spending two years working on that forum and being happy with it. Then one day start getting loads of deprecation PHP errors ending it just like that, two years work down the drain because of shared hosting and why I lost all interest hosting another forum online after that. Just couldn't warrant paying "VPS Dedicated" each month for the little traffic the community was getting, so that was that really for me.

 

In my case, I converted a few smaller forums to vB 4x, but left the big sites on 3.8. Frankly, I never saw a reason to move away from 3.8... Be it to IPB, Xenforo or vB 4.

On the upside, looks like there will be some nice things in vB 4.2...

 

Due to fact IB keep sticking unwanted bloated stuff in vB4 to suit themselves mainly, such as "Skimlinks" and other stuff. I could never go back to using the latest vBulletin software ever again, would only use the older vB3 series. But then you've got the problem of needing better hosting to control what version of MySQL and PHP is always used to keep it working problem free now it's old. Already said above though, that's not an option for me anymore, because starting a NEW forum and growing one on today is more or less an impossible task.

I'm forever seeing forums with tons of content listed on them already, but naff all happening there. What chance does a NEW forum stand (bar none).

 

Agree with most of that - except that I am not running an old version of vB4. I have been largely keeping up to date now for about six months. The product is so stable now that I am back to what I used to do...deploying each upgrade a few weeks after release (to allow for initial bugs to be fixed), which is what I always did on vB3.

Two night ago I upgraded from 4.1.11 to 4.1.12 which is the very latest version, I even deployed the newly integrated Forumrunner on the same night. Total work time, including all the file edits and style updates - less than three hours. vB have really got themselves sorted on that score now, I can truthfully say.

 

Skimlinks is not bloat. Kier was thinking of adding it to XF at one point. Like Forumrunner, it's an option for those who want to use it, and to be fair quite a few do. It's the same with Forumrunner - I'd never have bothered with it before, but it is now integrated and it's integrated well - you don't even need to go near the Forumrunner site, not even to create your account! I welcome these integrations because it enabled proper support to be provided and brings them to a wider audience far faster than if the team tried to code them from scratch. Why reinvent the wheel?

 

Oh right! Wasn't aware you've been upgrading. Thought after reading an old thread you ages ago and a comment made in it. That you had issues trying to upgrade to higher vB4 versions.