Former vBulletin lead developer Kier Darby to develop new forum software?

[steven s]

Then you definitely need to see an optometrist.

I too drank the Kool-Aid. If vB4 is working for you, great. I owe a lot to vB3 when I moved from phpBB v2.
My biggest gripe is it is just too slow and support is virtually non existent. The problems I run into are not significant to warrant a service ticket. Support have more things to do.

My biggest concern with XF is that it may be being designed to serve some social agenda rather than a commercial forum. Kier's remark "There will never be a dislike button" is a prime example... Never is a long time and if customers want it, it should be there. Saying it never will is short-sighted at best and a personal agenda at worst.

I'm sure someone will have a mod to add dislike.

Most of your posts make me wish there was a Dislike button.

I wonder about all these "wow, finally xf is so good" people that are so picky about vb4 when there are minor (well for me) things not included like the profile customization. Will it ever be in xf officially? Seems to be an initial positive wave. <snip>

Kier and Mike are listening to their future customer base. Their is a sense of community that has been lost here.

[ThorstenA]

Kier and Mike are listening to their future customer base. Their is a sense of community that has been lost here.

My hundreds of suggestions were mostly never even commented by Kier and the former vb3 developers. The suggestion forum was mostly ignored. But yes, now they could make a 180 degree turn and are completely different? Please.

An idea from me - made a product on vb.org about it - to speed up nearly every page (only display who's online guests in forums, thread, forumhome for non-guests) was just taken into a new vb3 release without even saying thanks for that.

Generally they did better than IPB in that time, I give them that.

But saying: They are so cool, everything is possible - not so sure about that. Keep an eye about the development speed of the last years before IB bought them. Not great, sorry.

Let's see what they have to offer for now. For now, they have nothing to offer. Promises only.

[MRGTB]

My biggest concern with XF is that it may be being designed to serve some social agenda rather than a commercial forum. Kier's remark "There will never be a dislike button" is a prime example... Never is a long time and if customers want it, it should be there. Saying it never will is short-sighted at best and a personal agenda at worst.

I saw that reply also. And though pretty much the same, that he should not be ruling it out as a feature. I think his reply was - "Lets not go there"

[BirdOPrey5]

Most of your posts make me wish there was a Dislike button.

:tiphat: (this would be a smilie tipping its hat)

[steven s]

My hundreds of suggestions were mostly never even commented by Kier and the former vb3 developers. <snip>

I guess it's that vB3 along with vb.org has filled all my needs so I never needed to suggest things.
Although I did suggest displaying a warning that your PM box was just about full which was implemented. Before the warning you would just be cut off.

Let's see what they have to offer for now. For now, they have nothing to offer. Promises only.

I agree. We all need to wait and see. I'm just glad that there may be another option.
I have no plans to move my 3.8 site to v4 and didn't really want to go to IP.B.

Maybe things will change with 4.1, I don't know.

[MRGTB]

I love the feature that adds a thumbs Up and Down to posts (replies). Which you can Vote up or Down to give Bad or Good rep. That feature would add loads of fun and extra spice to threads.

[feldon23]

For all the folks who are trying to sandbag xenForo because, after 10 months of development, it's not feature-comparable to vBulletin 4, I suggest a reality check.

When you put a good development team with 10 years of forum development experience, building a from-scratch strong foundation, with a truly agile platform, everything else will just fall into place.

Based on everything I've seen, Kier and Mike are getting all their ducks in a row so that xenForo will support all the mountains of features which have been bolted onto vBulletin over the last 10 years, and do so with a lighter footprint and more flexibility and interoperability possible. For it's time, vBulletin was an excellent platform. But nobody could predict the tens of thousands of lines of code that would be bolted onto it over the years.

Kier pushed for a rewrite for vBulletin 4 and IB resisted at every step. Imagine if the last 2 years had been spent rewriting vBulletin, instead of 1 year of infighting, followed by 10 months of independent development?

It's probably too early to make any long-term predictions of how the forum market is going to change over the next 1-2 years. But right now, the momentum is behind xenForo, who have built a very smart platform that allows extremely fast development.

[ThorstenA]

It's probably too early to make any long-term predictions of how the forum market is going to change over the next 1-2 years. But right now, the momentum is behind xenForo, who have built a very smart platform that allows extremely fast development.

I doubt that. But I am happy to be proven wrong.

Building a blog would take lots of months as Kier said in their forum. They did not give us any roadmap.

[pipedreams]

I doubt that. But I am happy to be proven wrong.

XF has generated a lot excitement/hope that I have not seen since vb 3.7 was proposed and to be honest I think XF is becoming everything we had hoped vb 4.x would be.

[Gladius]

This whole thread needs a reality check... vB's biggest and best competition with a full suite and a bucketload of improvements in various areas over vB is still not good enough for pretty much all of you still posting here to consider switching over to, yet Kier's bare-bones pre-alpha is enough to start gushing over and talking about switching to? Heck, if he had a whole team of 10+ working on it it'd take him over a year just to match v3, let alone expand on to the point of v4. Not to mention the bugs - ironing the bugs in the millions of lines of code takes YEARS and thousands of people using the software, constantly reporting bugs. And where's the ImpEx equivalent, the business background, support system, staff... none of this is even remotely realistic unless an investor with a big sack of cash steps in to fund Kier's baby.

Call me pessimistic, but the best that Kier & co. can hope for is is a niche product that only his biggest fans will buy and possibly those who need a product that just happens to match his design and feature philosophies that you'll only start seeing glimpses of over the next few years as features start being added. There are already around 30 PHP-based forum solutions on the market, so just finding a niche not already filled would be hard enough.

Sorry guys, but this ain't 1995. Kier & friends could code day and night for the next decade and never catch up to vB or IPB. The romantic days of solo/duo software developers scoring international hits are long gone.

(And just to clarify, I'd like nothing more than to have an alternative to v4. But I'm not even that hot on IPB, let alone xen, which at best needs another 5 years to be anything more than a curiosity to watch.)

[ThorstenA]

XF has generated a lot excitement/hope that I have not seen since vb 3.7 was proposed and to be honest I think XF is becoming everything we had hoped vb 4.x would be.

It is of course that, what would vb4, considering that

- Kier was still lead developer and he would be the "head" of all decisions
- all developers left except Mike.

The second part worries me, it will take lots of time to code all these addons.

Kier told IB he needs 18 months with more than a handful developers to produce a vb4.
And without these developers and only 1 left? Fact is, we will wait to see a real release.

The more IB produces, the more I see cluttering here. Clearly there is no "man who controls it all" here. I feel a bit lost as there are no " I am responsible " posts here. No ones responsible, lots of people are leading their own groups. And we see that in the product.

Still, xf is far away from any vb release way. In fact, there is no xf at the moment. Or do you want to compare the vb4 (vb5?) promises to the xf promises? I see the vb forum far more advanced than the xf forum.

[MRGTB]

Matching vBulletin 4 doesn't hold much water though in my book (features wise). Sure, it may take years for XenForo to reach the same level of features. But then IB have an awful lot of "bug fixing" to do right now that's stopping people from wanting to use it (no matter how many features it boasts). People want a quality product that's seen as being Bug Free "first and foremost" every time.

So people will jump ship to XenForo, if it's seen as being just that, and with new features being added that work right (first time). IPB 3 is not as powerful as vBulletin 4 (features wise) you'd have to say as a whole, but it's not stopped people flocking over using it instead of vBulletin 4.

Ask yourself why?

[Gladius]

No, they won't. Just like they're not massively jumping ship to any of the 5+ other well-supported and already established forum solutions or suites. We all know the reasons why that is and they're pretty much the same when it comes to xF.

[MRGTB]

You think not, well you tell me why I'm using a free (very basic) forum board instead of installing state of the art vBulletin 4? I'll tell you shall I. I would love to use vBulletin 4 and can download it now. But I ain't using a bug ridden forum board product spawned from hell. And believe me, I'm not the only person with that same view.

And that's why XenForo WILL capture sales

[Gladius]

Yes, so you fit a very, very narrow niche that Kier's bare-bones product currently covers. Incidentally, so does every other forum software out there. 90% of them free. His will be full price. Spot a bit of a problem there?