Uh huh, and...?
I got my first custom PC, by working for it. I saved $1,000 and got everything needed, and built it with my uncle. 🙂
Why are you sick of new promotion forums ?
- Thread starter Dylan
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I got my first custom PC, by working for it. I saved $1,000 and got everything needed, and built it with my uncle. 🙂
D
Deleted member 1609
I work hard as well, but most of my money currently goes to my new baby, not consumer electronics. 😛
Ooooh. Excuses! 😛
The number one forum software isn't even vB or phpBB, it's some Chinese one called Discuz. It's kinda like vB, but with a less bad theme and a lot of the oddball social network features which vB3 was guilty of abusing.
There's a translation for Discuz, but it doesn't have much of a following outside China, plus if I vaguely recall, there was a problem with the licensing.
After that, it's vB and phpBB, about equal, but vB is so dated and so insecure that you'd have to be crazy to adopt it in the modern day.
Those three take up most of the forum market. After that, it was SMF. And then, it was XenForo and IPB. And then, the others. That's the market. And I see a lot of Discourse, even banks are adopting the thing, Sitepoint which is an admin site far bigger than TAZ uses it, etc.
But to be fair, it's market-share is only like half of MyBB. It seems to mainly be used by big boards though, probably due to the costs of VPS' having taken a while to come down, plus culture.
Discourse has a large backing purely because it was created by Jeff Atwood, it's funded by venture capital and his name can summon a legion of programmers. It's an awful software. But it's probably the most modern thing on the market, especially with XenForo stagnating for over five years.
XF2 was a huge disappointment, I was looking forward to it, but it showed just how out of touch Kier is with the modern world. It's the new phpBB.
The market is always moving, and if you stay still for too long, then you wind up getting swallowed up. And to be fair, Discourse is always hopping onto the latest and greatest JS spec technologies, the main problem is the theme and the insistence on certain things like "trust levels".
The problem with trust levels, as opposed to group promotions is that the software is constantly doing things on it's own whims, often without your input or control. Sometimes you can override it, but it all becomes a little onerous, would be better off creating and configuring the "trust levels" yourself.
IPB is basically just an enterprise version of XenForo, with the millions of bells and whistles enterprise entails, although I'm not sure there's much of a difference any-more with how clunky XenForo is compared to modern sites.
And hey, IPB is nothing great, but at-least they're somewhat trying with the reactions, clubs, etc. I don't expect it to be sleek and hip, the thing seems to be the sort that would cater mostly to enterprise, but I do expect it to keep up with the changes in the world.
I might follow up on this post, to help to break it up.
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One thing I like about FP as opposed to TAZ and Sitepoint is that saying criticism about Discourse and XenForo won't result in a mob jumping on you. E.g. you calling it barebones or me criticising the theme / trust levels in Discourse.
I'm not really sure about Sitepoint, but I won't test it.
Simply editing my comments has tripped spam filters before.
I'm not really sure about Sitepoint, but I won't test it.
I've seen passionate members of a site spreading links on blogs before, but doing it yourself might come off as a little spammy, especially with how much spam gets posted these days and the filters built up as responses to that.
Simply editing my comments has tripped spam filters before.
That kind of mentality isn't cool. Everyone has a right to their own opinions. As long as you're nice, I won't trash you for disliking something. I'll just agree to disagree. 🙂
That's because China is yuuuugggggggeeeeeee. I mean, it's huge. Most American companies want a piece of the China pie.
Yeah, Trademark infringement. Discuz sounds like "Discuss." And on top of that, if IB feels threatened by Discuz, you can bet your ass they'll come after them.
I say the same about phpBB.
Anyone running SMF is going to face a lot of spam, and a lot of hacking. I've seen it first hand. But I understand what you meant here.
In my opinion, though, MyBB is just too basic. I know someone that uses it, but doesn't realize that it doesn't have good SEO for it. xenForo does.
vBulletin broke SEO's of many sites as soon as vB4 came out, same for vB5. Because of the way they index their pages nowadays.
Let's step backward here. Discourse is more open-source, the backing from VC's are for coding and coding only. It's not like vBulletin where he can just brand it and sell the actual thing as if it's the next big forum software. The idea with Discourse according to Jeff (and yes, I met him) is he's trying to eliminate "bloat." When I met Jeff, Discourse was very much competing with vBulletin. xenForo was brand new at the time (ForumCon 2015, I believe). In my opinion, he risks his software to look too basic. It's why I never converted to Discourse. He wanted to sell Discourse to me, not business to business kind of thing, but he wanted me to be a customer of Discourse. But I just didn't like it. I still don't, even though I've seen a few sites customized with Discourse.
Actually, no he isn't. He never designed XF2 to "change things." He designed it from day one to eliminate previous problems with XF1. Most requested feature of XF2 was the ability to add new breadcrumb items. We can do that freely now. His original idea was to eliminate the bottlenecks of XF1, and make xenForo faster. And he successfully did. I love xenForo, but a lot of the software needed to be streamlined, and fix some of the feedback he got. There was really nothing wrong with xenForo, other than a few bottlenecks that we didn't like about it.
Don't put too much stock onto "js." The core codebase, ideas, and whatnot are the reasons why most forum software stopped using it. It invites similar hacks to "php injunction." It's been done with vBulletin in the past. Don't be surprised if vulnerability arrives for the new js codebases. Eventually.
xenForo is quite simple if you just pay attention to everything. My opinion? You just don't want to re-learn things.
IPB wants to be the enterprise version of vBulletin, it's why they keep charging people more for the software they develop. Not xenForo. xenForo is only $140 just to get the base forum. IPS charges "Forums" for $100, but at checkout, they're selling you the whole package. $625 for Suite Core, Forums, Calendar (FREE!), Commerce, Pages, Blog, Gallery, and Downloads.
Granted, you can remove some of that off the list, but they want YOU to buy them.
With xenForo, Pages is part of the xF core, Blog and Downloads are in "Resource Manager," so I mean, they're scamming their customers. Pages should be part of the core, not the way they charge it! *facepalm*
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Discuz is the #1 forum software in china. Not the most popular software overall. According to many "Market share" websites that track this, vB is still the most popular, unfortunately. With XenForo at #2. They mostly track the top "1 million" sites or so.. If you search DP's cookie search reports, it will say XenForo is currently in the lead with a relative marketshare
Why were you even expecting anything out of it? From the start, they have stated that XenForo 2 is just going to be a feature parity of the current software. Meaning, they re-coded it from the ground up and the promise was to make it have all the features the current software has. Although they have released a few new features, they are just small and minor. The new features will be coming in 2.1 and 2.2.
The thing I dislike the most about XenForo 2.0 though is the shit ACP
.XenForo has been out for years before 2015 😛 I had an XF license in 2011 😛 I'm positive it was out in 2010 though.
Downloads, yes. Blogs, no. The resource manager isn't meant to be used as a blogging system and has a lot of faults if you try to use it as such.
Pretty much what I said.
The thing I dislike the most about XenForo 2.0 though is the shit ACP
I know. Still relatively new. Most people at ForumCon [2014/2015/2016] didn't even know about xenForo. Most of them talked about other forum software. (I was one of the first users of xenForo, ya know! I was a beta tester along with everyone else in 2010.)
Eh. Yeah. Thing is though, some admins use it as Blogs, because the container is built like a blog post.
XenForo is fairly well-known from what I've seen, to be honest.
I find it hard to believe that people wouldn't know about it, then again, ForumCon is limited to a small geographic area, so maybe the information doesn't flow as well to it.
If I recall, XenForo is based in the UK, so it's only natural that they would have less of an influence and ability to send people to San Francisco. A large number of people from MyBB are also in the UK.
You really need a ForumCon in Europe and other areas, as no one's going to pay to send people all the way to San Francisco just for a forum conference, to be honest.
The only ones in the area are probably Discourse. NodeBB is based in Canada, a lot of MyBB is in the UK, ditto for XenForo, I think one software was in Australia. phpBB had a meet-up in Turkey, if I recall.
If one was held in the UK, there would be a very good chance of both XenForo and MyBB showing up, dunno about phpBB, maybe.
I find it hard to believe that people wouldn't know about it, then again, ForumCon is limited to a small geographic area, so maybe the information doesn't flow as well to it.
If I recall, XenForo is based in the UK, so it's only natural that they would have less of an influence and ability to send people to San Francisco. A large number of people from MyBB are also in the UK.
You really need a ForumCon in Europe and other areas, as no one's going to pay to send people all the way to San Francisco just for a forum conference, to be honest.
The only ones in the area are probably Discourse. NodeBB is based in Canada, a lot of MyBB is in the UK, ditto for XenForo, I think one software was in Australia. phpBB had a meet-up in Turkey, if I recall.
If one was held in the UK, there would be a very good chance of both XenForo and MyBB showing up, dunno about phpBB, maybe.
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Elaborate
It is. That's what Jordan and I have been saying.
Hey, don't look at me. I was thinking at the time "How is it that none of these people know about xenForo, apart from a few folks?" It doesn't matter whether ForumCon is "limited" to a small geographic area (wrong, btw - it was in San Francisco starting with 2014), or not... If you are a forum admin, you should at least know about the hottest forum software in town. Pure and simple.
Quite on the contrary. vBulletin was based out of U.K. before the IB acquisition. It's why people trust xenForo Ltd., it's made up of former vBulletin developers.
Again; quite on the contrary. ForumCon was actually backed by a corporation. The reason why that corporation (which was VigLink, by the way) didn't decide to host it there is for money constraints. The whole point of the event was to push marketing to like-minded forum owners, which didn't pan out as intended. I was even the guy who posted on xenForo, and pushed the event forward... By the time ForumCon came around every year, I would have reached 50 thousand views. So, if there was ever an event in U.K. That event will explode. Problem is, it needed more scale to even consider doing an event in U.K. Let me put it this way: Gamescom is about as big as E3.
I remember taking a glance at some of the ForumCon notes.
It mostly looked like a bunch of social network companies trying to hawk their wares, and not much actually relevant to the market.
If it doesn't even have unveilings of new versions of software people actually care about and back and forths with a panel of developers, then what's the point. The closest we got to that was Jeff Atwood.
It's almost a joke when they pay more attention to a five minute Facebook clone than they do the market leaders. I'll even settle for the Discuz Team being flown in from China, as they would have their own take on how forums are done there, plus they're essentially the vB of China.
That is a translated version of Discuz: http://codersclub.org/discuzx/forum.php
They don't really particularly care about internationalising it though, so you're not going to get any official support there, perhaps the main reason no one really uses it outside of China. Plus, it is very... It feels very 2010ish.
Incidentally, on their official site (not that one), I noticed that people really like making marketplace / cash type plugins (plus lots of ways to spend it) for some reason lol
Has a ForumCon been held in the last few years?
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No. They re-tried as TecSummit in 2016, I believe... It was a lot better than ForumCon, but only because they wanted to expand outside of "Forums." They even brought some of the biggest names in sports to the event.
See, what they needed to do was to bring more than a thousand people. Which was the intent. HostCon brings thousands of sponsors, advertisers, and whatnot resulting in millions of dollars in revenue.
Let me put it in another perspective for you:
StartupGrind usually hosts their event in Redwood City (my hometown), every February. Every time, they attract - read my letters: 4,000 People. Every. Single. Year. So much, that they had to reserve the city hall which is right across the street from the venue, all the way to 3 streets. 3 buildings. This year alone we had something new at night, where they asked nearby business owners to leave their bars open to the event. That's how big it was.
Viglink's whole idea was to market Viglink's services to new people, but falls flat on their faces because many people from Europe complained it's not in Europe. The forum world is big, but nobody wanted to travel to their event.
*sigh*
Some of the major forum software make like $50/month from donations, with the costs for the servers being paid out of pocket by the staff, that's a far cry of what's needed to fly someone to San Francisco from Europe.
XenForo is probably in the best position there, because people are at-least somewhat willing to give them money.
I'm curious why people won't do something in Europe, is it really such a wasteland with no money?
I know, but some owners can afford it. Maybe not from Europe to U.S., but definitely from any state in U.S. to California. A ticket to and from a place like Las Vegas is $70-80 (and up, depending on where you bought the ticket) bucks from California. A trip to and from California to Alabama costs anywhere between $100 to $300 (some are higher, again, depending on where you bought it from). These are a few examples. I do understand the apprehensiveness of some folks, I just disagree with the "backlash" and flack it got. Considering there are similar conferences with the same kind of name. I think that ForumCon was named after a similarly named "HostCon," and decided to start going in that direction.
The event(s) has and had their benefits. You could even meet an investor during the event. Oliver "disagrees" with the notion, but with every (or any) conference, there's many different backgrounds. That's why you go to them. That's why I kept pushing people to go. Nobody wanted to listen. Because if events like ForumCon become popular, the forum world gets bigger every year. Same is true for HostCon, and any other event like it. CES, GDC, E3 wouldn't be the juggernaut(s) today if it wasn't for the traffic it gets.
I also think that "ForumCon" is misused. But I'll leave it at that for now.
It was ForumCon that prepared me for other conferences or events in the years that followed. I got better and better every year since then. I learned to bring business cards, bring my shirt, and any other marketing preparations with me. From that point on, I understood how events work.
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If I want to go to a conference, there are about a dozen technology conferences around here, even more when I was in London.
I am not going to sit on an economy class flight for 14 hours with a screaming baby nearby squeezed into a tiny little space with someone's elbow in my side, just to go to a forum conference.
Long haul flights are extremely unpleasant. You'll likely have to get a visa, stand in a queue with a hundred people in-front of you to check-in, pay for internet to pass the time for a couple of hours, maybe get searched, and then, get on the flight.
And then, when you arrive, you have another half an hour queue to get through customs, and you have to pray you filled out the silly little form properly and that they don't decide to make trouble for you.
After that, you're all jet-lagged and you pass out in the hotel. The next day, you go to the conference, step up onto a stage, feign enthusiasm despite being totally jet-lagged and go into full marketing mode deflecting doubt after doubt.
The day after that, you might have more presentations, and then, you go on another unpleasant flight back. That is why no major projects go to ForumCon, with the odd exception, and it's an even bigger reason for admins.
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