XenForos development pace?

[Pete]

Something something XF trophies?

Also, 'most of the free forums' do not have the features you're suggesting. Free forums are still debating on having likes as a core feature, let alone reactions (which everyone else has been doing for years)

 

[StateDOG]

Check out this amazing feature that Ipb is going to add to their newest version, 4.6. btw

https://invisioncommunity.com/forums/topic/461072-hump-day-sneak-peek-at-achievements/

For those of us w/o current client access can you share what's upcoming in 4.6?

 

[Pete]

It's a couple of spoiler images talking about - as the link implies - achievements. Hence my 'something something XF trophies' which from what the screenshots imply, is similar in base functionality (though the real implementation may do something quite different in terms of features)

 

[tony45]

For those of us w/o current client access can you share what's upcoming in 4.6?

This is from their blog

Web push notifications, native sharing & offline support

As we approach the release of Invision Community 4.6, I wanted to take you through some improvements for using Invision Community on a mobile device. Web push notifications For some time, we've used the local browser notification API to show users notifications. There's a big drawback though: use...

invisioncommunity.com

Health Dashboard

The support tool has served us well for many years. You can identify, at a glance, potential issues with your community both presently and down the road, right from the comfort of your AdminCP, and you can often resolve those issues with just a few clicks. But what if we could do better? What if ...

invisioncommunity.com

Anonymous Posting

For a very long time Invision Community has allowed community owners to choose how open or private their communities should be. Communities could optionally allow guests to post without registering, they could allow the use of pseudonyms or they could require the use of real names. This covers a ...

invisioncommunity.com

 

[StateDOG]

Thanks, yall...

 

[mysiteguy]

P.s. Hypothetically speaking, even if Ipb will stop altogether adding new super cool and useful features, it will take xf a couple of decades to catch up with their current way of moving forward. Even a snail is faster lol

That's the most hyperbolic statement I've seen in this thread.

 

[Deleted 106708]

But, when the HYS's start coming for XF, it's usually a really fun time for the next few weeks.

? ? still waiting lol

 

[FTL]

It's been years now (September 2020) since XF released any significant new features and the point release bug fix cycle seems to be getting longer too since they launched XF Cloud in late 2021. Shame, as it's a great product that I use for my site and it's so reasonably priced.

 

[JulianD]

I have to agree. Development speed is getting worse every year. The product works and it's stable. No doubt about that. But I definitively would like to receive more frequent meaningful updates.

I know they released XF Cloud this year but it's my perception that it took them a big chunk of development time from the base product.

 

[Frode789]

Development has come to a crawl on the base product indeed. It's now 2 years since the 2.1 HYS was announced.
Sure XF Cloud is nice for them as a business, but brings nothing meaningful for all of us on self-hosted.

 

[Web Diva]

Do you think a small amount of xenForo's slower releases or updates may be because of the recent economical strains in the past two years that are affecting most countries because of the pandemic, (i.e. strain on development staff shortages) because of it etc?

 

[FTL]

Do you think a small amount of xenForo's slower releases or updates may be because of the recent economical strains in the past two years that are affecting most countries because of the pandemic, (i.e. strain on development staff shortages) because of it etc?

Yeah, possibly. We don't really know the internal workings of the company, but it's possible, even though they work from home.

 

[DigNap15]

Do they have as many active forums as they had say two years ago?
Have they seen the writing on the wall?
Is it harder to find or think of new features (eg Windows rarerly has any useful new feautures) (nor does Word.
or are they putting all of their recoources into their cloud system?

The last update 2.29 seemed to fix a whole lot of obscure bugs.

 

[FTL]

Do they have as many active forums as they had say two years ago?
Have they seen the writing on the wall?
Is it harder to find or think of new features (eg Windows rarerly has any useful new feautures) (nor does Word.
or are they putting all of their recoources into their cloud system?

The last update 2.29 seemed to fix a whole lot of obscure bugs.

They really need to add a decent basic CMS system for articles like vB has. They don't have to be as fully featured as Invision as that would increase the cost significantly. If they had this one feature, then for me, they'd be golden.

After over a year of use, it still impresses me how smoothly and glitch-free XF works. It's really something.

 

[Chris]

I guess I'm getting old....I like reliable things, and don't always require the latest technology that won't be around in 6 months.
Do what you do, really well. Look at how many sites are still running the vB 3.x line....or even that one site running vB2.x

I know my thought is in the minority here.

 

[sbjsbj]

At this point it's beating a dead horse.

What worse is that they hired 2 new developers to the team and the pace got even slower than before. How is this even possible?

It blows my mind how slow the progress is. I know how fast people can develop addons, complex ones (which would be more complex than each HYS). And the official devs are more skilled than them + their whole job is to focus on XF because it's their job compared to 3rd party developers who do it in their free times. The official devs should create 10x the things we see in HYS but sure, I take the normal HYS amount, if we'd see it every 6 months. But it's now 2 years.

It's like a hate-love relationship. I can't praise XF enough with their solid, robust and fairly-priced software. On the other hand I really hate that XF hasn't shown anything innovative the past 10 years and at this point forget innovation, the web/mobile world is evolving while we are cheering that now we can add "banners" to our profiles... or that the user can change his username. Yep, that's from 2.2... I can't wait for 2.3 to happen when our avatars are now octagonal and we can use colors in our nicknames....

"XF 2.0 should make development faster" they said. + 2 new devs....
I am waiting for Slavik to explain us that the "market is booming", that he had never this much migrations. If I look at Digitalpoint's new released stats, XF is actually gaining more and more ground. They should make money more than before but we get the short stick somehow.

I wish they bought out addons and integrated them to the software. They will never keep up with the expectations anymore, they are slower than a turtle. But if they bought out addons, that would bring them back to square one. After that now they could focus on actual real innovative things.

Truth be told, we are sinking.

 

[Chris]

Truth be told, we are sinking

Sinking? I don’t get the dramatic expression here.

 

[sbjsbj]

Sinking? I don’t get the dramatic expression here.

It's an expression used when the trend is going downwards. Like a ship, when it sinks.

Will you argue that the trend is going upwards? Be my guest.

 

[Chris]

I would argue the trend on thinking a single piece of software is the only reason a community is successful is moot.
I’ve seen communities run on old Perl scripts be successful in 2022.

Depending on a single piece of software for a business model exposes a risk. XenForo does not charge enterprise level pricing, and shouldn’t be expected to deliver those results although often times they are.

 

[Bionic Rooster]