- Joined
- Feb 7, 2015
- Messages
- 184
Pretty simple explanation why there has been a huge increase in marketplace transactions...they just released v4.5...doh
To the point about 4.5 driving sales, well, yes, that was a given. Which is why I want to see if the reaction is still valid when 4.5 is 6-8 months old and people get around to deciding whether to renew.
So I decided to go to IPS site and login only to discover I still have a license that is expired so I'm going to renew and get a couple
Interesting. What kind of stuff do you do?IPS has come a long way since the days of it being free and I'm very happy with where they are now and can't wait to take my XenForo add-ons I'm working on and code then for IPS.
Various add-ons, customizations, etc. I just don't do theme work.Interesting. What kind of stuff do you do?
I think this has less to do with open source and more to do with the forum market as a whole being largely stagnant. Even those adopting newer technologies are mostly still displaying content in the much the same way as bulletin boards did in the 80s. I believe this is mostly because 'good practice' promotes the use of greater levels of data normalisation (level 2, 3, 4 etc), which in turn manifests itself in the traditional structures we see in forums today. But as we've seen, graphing databases (we built our first graphing [xpath] database in 2006) offer more variety in the way we store relationships and in turn can influence the way we design our applications.The open source forum market is... oddly stagnant though.
As I said:I wasn’t going to be bold enough to suggest that forums as an entire industry have stagnated - IPS in particular has done a number of things to suggest otherwise.
more to do with the forum market as a whole being largely stagnant
FB are trying different ways of presenting groups. But, within groups themselves, trying to maintain a long form discussion is very difficult. I like the way FB has implemented bookmarks, although terminology and labelling is a little skew.But it does point to a question, how do we evolve the format beyond incremental improvements in UI... can we even do so?
IPS does image uploading well, possibly best of breed. But industry wide, wider video support for transcoding would be welcome, either natively or passing off to AWS or similar. XF do this quite well already with their FFmpeg functionality.Yes, there are things we can do to improve some workflows e.g. uploading media but that’s not a step change.
As an industry, its possible.how do we evolve the format beyond incremental improvements in UI... can we even do so?
It is also anticompetitive (smacks of a cartel - illegal in most jurisdictions and for good reason).Surely vendor specific features are the differentiator? IMO there is no financial benefit for IPS to interoperate with XF for example, and such interoperability is an easy way to diminish their respective selling points.
I think you're very much overstating it. Under the hood all forums are much the same. Strip away the graphics and the bells and whistles and you'd be hard pressed to tell the difference between a thread in IPS, SMF, XF, or MyBB. That is why forum developers focus on presentation layers and adding other functions, like galleries, articles, etc.And if the different software is almost identical to the point where it may as well be just a different skin, it makes it difficult for an innovator to come into such a controlled market. Maybe I overstated it - but I think there is logic to this.
That's not practical and isn't really a thing in any industry. XF isn't going to change their structure every time IPS adds something new or vice versa. The best way to switch software is by using officially supported importers, which do exist.As a forum owner, I would love to see standardization in the database structure across all forum software. That would allow me to much more easily switch software, which in turn would actually drive innovation in those other areas.
I understand what you're saying. I should have been more specific. I was talking about only the db structure of the core function of every forum, how they store posts, threads attachments, and such. That doesn't curtail any sort of innovation or individualization of the different softwares or additions to the database structure for other functions.What happens if a developer has some great new ideas, but it requires some marked differences to the 'standard' database structure employed by all the existing forum systems out there? Would it not be an uphill struggle to attract existing forum operators using the standard database to the new software, where they would need to either start over or import a nobbled version of the important user generated (and other) data?