XenForo mastered the forum software. Now is time to go beyond with a road map.

[deslocotoco]

"mastered the forum software" really has been, great click-bait!

Care to elaborate your fallacy?

I did see a lot of metrics and graphics showing a lot of people moving from other software to XenForo, including cookies shifting the position.

Where is the 'click-bait'?

But if you care to elaborate, maybe i did not understand what did you mean because my english is very limited. Thank you.

 

[Anton Chigurh]

Care to elaborate your fallacy?

It's not a fallacy. The thread has been click-bait - it's not bad or good, it's just an observation. People who hate xF are chiming in, and folks are answering.

maybe i did not understand what did you mean

Correct.

 

[we_are_borg]

About the hub IPS could do that because you can link multiple IP Communities together.

 

[cornnfedd]

xenforo should call pixelexit and get them to help with the front page, they would probably throw something together for free anyway... but I would agree the website is a shocker and needs an update.

 

[Chris D]

I will add this, the new site is one of the projects keeping us busy. It’s actually all done (new 2.1 level code for tickets, customer area etc) but we’re experimenting on a few different approaches for the content / sales pitch bits.

 

[Karll]

FYI, but you can configure elasticsearch (/etc/elasticsearch/jvm.options set the -Xms & -Xmx arguments) to use much less memory than the out-of-the-box configuration and still get quite decent performance even for active forums.

Yes, that is a very important point! I reduced these settings to something like 240Mb, though combined with everything else on my VPS, its 2Gb RAM just wasn't enough as occasionally the OOM killer would be triggered to kill the (presumably) most memory-consuming process, which was somehow almost always ElasticSearch. (One time it killed MariaDB - that was a worse outcome!) So I bumped up the plan to 4Gb, and haven't seen any issues since that.

 

[cornnfedd]

I will add this, the new site is one of the projects keeping us busy. It’s actually all done (new 2.1 level code for tickets, customer area etc) but we’re experimenting on a few different approaches for the content / sales pitch bits.

Good cant wait....

 

[Andro]

I understand and I thank you for hearing our voices. But I at least would like to see 2 points addressed. One, if XF has plans on adding more developers to the team. 2, if or when Kier and Mike will participate in the community again after being away for so long?

I get a feeling like either of them isn't happening which is why it is not being answered whenever someone asks. Moreover it will divide the profits further.

I expect to see all XF developers active once again only during XF 3 Alpha testing like happened with XF 2.

 

[sbjsbj]

It is business as usual. Same for all businesses. When I confronted IPS guys either, they too just avoided answering questions in another thread.

That's business 101 for you. Avoid answering questions where the answers won't make customers happy. Saying a "no" would delete any hope one might have for the future. So, not answering at least leaves a small flame of fire and if you are lucky, nobody will notice that you avoided the questions.

So we talked 5 pages worth of dicussion and what has changed or will change? Other than letting the steam out? Nothing. Same as usual. Forums are coasting and XF is coasting. The perfect example is this thread. Chris took the easy way out of addressing none of the things I said or anybody said, except for 1 thing that they never will stop tyring and that they are working on projects. As vague and broad a reply can be without giving anything away.

Well, anyway, I move on. I am tired of repeating the same things over and over. I did my best to move the community further and can't do more than that. As I have a small forum my reach is limited. It is up to the big board owners to address the stuff, as they are affected the most. Or not. I don't care that much anymore. It is what it is. Thanks. Have a nice sunday.

 

[deslocotoco]

It is business as usual. Same for all businesses. When I confronted IPS guys either, they too just avoided answering questions in another thread.

That's business 101 for you. Avoid answering questions where the answers won't make customers happy. Saying a "no" would delete any hope one might have for the future. So, not answering at least leaves a small flame of fire and if you are lucky, nobody will notice that you avoided the questions.

So we talked 5 pages worth of dicussion and what has changed or will change? Other than letting the steam out? Nothing. Same as usual. Forums are coasting and XF is coasting. The perfect example is this thread. Chris took the easy way out of addressing none of the things I said or anybody said, except for 1 thing that they never will stop tyring and that they are working on projects. As vague and broad a reply can be without giving anything away.

Well, anyway, I move on. I am tired of repeating the same things over and over. I did my best to move the community further and can't do more than that. As I have a small forum my reach is limited. It is up to the big board owners to address the stuff, as they are affected the most. Or not. I don't care that much anymore. It is what it is. Thanks. Have a nice sunday.

Well, mostly i try to be optimist, like the half full glass thing. This Sunday specially I'm a little pessimist because i got a common cold and I'm in bed right now. Just thinking about moderating/administrating my Forum today i get headache.

The trolls and reports gonna have to wait until i get better.

Let's wait and see what happens in the next semester. The 2.x, specially 2.1 was a great upgrade.

Nice Sunday to all, guys.

 

[Deleted member 3691]

It is business as usual. Same for all businesses. When I confronted IPS guys either, they too just avoided answering questions in another thread.

That's business 101 for you. Avoid answering questions where the answers won't make customers happy. Saying a "no" would delete any hope one might have for the future. So, not answering at least leaves a small flame of fire and if you are lucky, nobody will notice that you avoided the questions.

So we talked 5 pages worth of dicussion and what has changed or will change? Other than letting the steam out? Nothing. Same as usual. Forums are coasting and XF is coasting. The perfect example is this thread. Chris took the easy way out of addressing none of the things I said or anybody said, except for 1 thing that they never will stop tyring and that they are working on projects. As vague and broad a reply can be without giving anything away.

Well, anyway, I move on. I am tired of repeating the same things over and over. I did my best to move the community further and can't do more than that. As I have a small forum my reach is limited. It is up to the big board owners to address the stuff, as they are affected the most. Or not. I don't care that much anymore. It is what it is. Thanks. Have a nice sunday.

Which questions?

Perhaps it's because you "confronted" us, instead of asking us?

 

[Deleted member 3691]

I can't speak for Xenforo, but it's really hard to provide a road map.

We definitely have one internally, and things move around all the time. We've had stuff on the 4.5 roadmap moved to 5, and stuff on 5 moved to 4.5. Things are are OMG MUST HAVES eventually become "meh" so they get removed or pushed back. Sometimes a good idea turns into a bit of a coding nightmare and is pushed back.

Releasing a public roadmap would probably just cause angst when things are taken off or pushed back.

"But I was waiting for feature X and now it's not going to happen?"

 

[sbjsbj]

Which questions?

I am over it. Moved on. I got my answers (or not as getting no answer is also an answer).

Perhaps it's because you "confronted" us, instead of asking us?

I asked as nicely as I could. Several times your team ignored my questions, even though I made a lot of effort putting my thoughts into these posts and I had nothing even slightly offensive.

And then this "angel" act is just exactly what I expected. Even though you avoided answering my questions, now at the same time I am the bad guy who "confronted" and didn't ask questions. Good try, really, good try. I almost believed you.

I can't speak for Xenforo, but it's really hard to provide a road map.

Road map is not the point here. Road map or not, the engagement of developers is important in a forum software community. Road map is just 1 tool of engagement. If that is not there, then there can be other 99 things. The problem is the engagement ofXF devs went to 0 except for Chris, who as a worker of XF has to save face and obviously defends his company and team. Any kind of a different behaviour than this wouldn't be expected from him so we get the typical businesslike answers. Which you also do all the time when you write here. Which brings me to my next point:

Releasing a public roadmap would probably just cause angst when things are taken off or pushed back.

That is so convenient, isn't it? Just say nothing at all or be vague as you can be, so God forbid someone may build up some expectations based on specific things. But, you prove exactly my point from earlier, when I said it is business as usual. Coasting is too sweet.

 

[R0binHood]

I can't speak for Xenforo, but it's really hard to provide a road map.

Is it really? When all you have to publicly publish is stuff that may be more iminent than the rest. Say stuff that may be released in the next 3 to 6 or12 months. Stuff that should have already been considered to be viable or not already.

Tons of companies do it. But maybe it's because they're much larger and can be confident in their roadmap announcements. I guess the "have you seen" threads could be seen themselves as 3-6 month roadmap announcements before the featuers themselves get relaeased to the masses.

Screw what the competition thinks even if it's publicly available. They already have their own internal roadmaps, goals and targets. What about the admins that make a living off their forums and rely on having the best software possible compared to the other sites their users are visiting and contributing too? Those admins that are perpetually paying 3rd party devs large amounts of money to fill the gaps that the core software isn't fulfilling, and have no idea if, and when it will ever be fulfilled.

I guess it's hard to do that when you're not releasing new features regularly enough to fill that 3-6 month quota. So maybe that's an excuse. (Not taking pot shots at any one company here, just highlighting the fact that forum software development across the board seems so much slower these days compared to the rest of the tech community for whatever reason, seemingly it appears to be simple lack of highly qualified man power)

Personally, overall I totally agree that it's not worth it for these forum companies to release roadmaps for the various reasons discussed at length in the past. It's probably not worth it to them at their size and I'd do the same given their circumstances. Too many downsides and not enough benefits, I don't blame them. Doesnt' mean it's right for their customers though. It seems they don't have anywhere near the same resources as the VC backed competition with much more staff. The companies that are set on growing to scale and satisfying the needs of the masses. So all these independent communites trying to make their mark keep getting left behind. Forums end up becoming niche communities in the grand scale of online social presense, even if it's the big boards of the past vs the mainstream social media communities that are truly cross platform and providing the features the global masses want.

Maybe I'm just jaded because progress seems slow as molases these days for the forum industry in general compared to the competition.

I still think it's impressive what XF has achieved and continues to achieve with their given staff compared to the likes of IPS and Discourse. But XF, IPS, Discourse and Tapatalk are all far from mastering and perfecting forums. Especially in 2019 when users are on multiple platforms and their content submission and consumption requirements have changed dramatically from 10 years ago. Forums and communities aren't text submissions, quotes and replies anymore. They're far richer, detailed and more nuanced than that, whether we like it or not. And the devices the users utilise to create and consume that content has changed dramatically.

I don't really care about a roadmap, as nice as it may be, as long as the software itself keep moving forward at a good pace. But that doesn't quite seem to be the case for any of the independent community software providers.

None of them are currently catering fully to the overall modern community platfrom requirements required to complete in the current landscape outside of the larger global networks, but it's all we have right now.

 

[Deleted member 3691]

 

[R0binHood]

 

[Deleted member 3691]

 

[Deleted member 3691]

I am over it. Moved on. I got my answers (or not as getting no answer is also an answer).


I asked as nicely as I could. Several times your team ignored my questions, even though I made a lot of effort putting my thoughts into these posts and I had nothing even slightly offensive.

And then this "angel" act is just exactly what I expected. Even though you avoided answering my questions, now at the same time I am the bad guy who "confronted" and didn't ask questions. Good try, really, good try. I almost believed you.


Road map is not the point here. Road map or not, the engagement of developers is important in a forum software community. Road map is just 1 tool of engagement. If that is not there, then there can be other 99 things. The problem is the engagement ofXF devs went to 0 except for Chris, who as a worker of XF has to save face and obviously defends his company and team. Any kind of a different behaviour than this wouldn't be expected from him so we get the typical businesslike answers. Which you also do all the time when you write here. Which brings me to my next point:

That is so convenient, isn't it? Just say nothing at all or be vague as you can be, so God forbid someone may build up some expectations based on specific things. But, you prove exactly my point from earlier, when I said it is business as usual. Coasting is too sweet.

We are innovating many things. Just last week we changed up completely our office tea bag and biscuit storage system which culminated in a 4% increase in tea making speed. And if you’re not impressed by that, then I don’t know what to tell you.

 

[R0binHood]

View attachment 53048

We are innovating many things. Just last week we changed up completely our office tea bag and biscuit storage system which culminated in a 4% increase in tea making speed. And if you’re not impressed by that, then I don’t know what to tell you.

I, for one, am very impressed by this news.

If it had been on a roadmap I would have been more prepared and thrown a celebratory party. Regardless, I still salute your improvements in this field and will dunk with you in solidarity until an update us pushed out live to communities across the globe.

 

[zappaDPJ]

I'd argue it's as easy as pie to publish a road map but hard as hell to deliver on it and probably suicide from a business point of view.

I don't want road maps I want stuff that makes my forums work the way I want them to work.