Dumb post of the month award for this one.

People have different tastes,all forum platforms have skins that some people dislike, starting flame wars over things like this is plain stupid and leads to threads getting closed.

Well said, sir. ;)

In your first post you were saying you couldn't see why people thought the script was 'so amazing' and in your next post you say

There is a difference, here. If it's the colour scheme you don't like then that's totally understandable as it's utterly subjective (though it's scientific fact that there are rules you can apply to combinations of colours to produce results which are preferred by more people).
And you might not like the way some things are laid out, and the same applies.
In both of these cases, it's possible to change these style elements of the site as they're cosmetic.
Your first post criticising the script, however, implies that you don't like the way it works and this is difficult to understand since it's so much better than vB. Still a subjective opinion, yes, but come on!

I don't want to fight either, but posting unqualified criticism is likely to provoke a response, don't you think?

Agreed. Latch criticised more than the style, though.

I also understand how some people might not know or appreciate the history of Kier, Mike and Scott. They were the key developers who were responsible for making vBulletin the world class software it was.
They have lots of loyalty for that reason. So when there is much fuss about what is happening at Xenforo, for many people, myself included, what we are seeing here is, in fact, what vB4 *could* have been if the trio and the other developers, being the most valuable asset of Jelsoft the company, had been used wisely by the new management. Instead Internet Brands did the worse thing possible and elbowed them out of the door. Scott has taken a different career path, but Kier and Mike have done what they do best, and in my opinion better than anyone else. And that is make forum software.
I hope this explains why many peoples' loyalty lies over at Xenforo even though, like me, their business currently depends on vBulletin.
Now can't we all be friends?

Please don't mis-lead people into thinking XenForo is something it is not.

You keep saying XenForo is so much better, yet, you have failed to give a valid reason as to why. Sure, XenForo may have some features that vBulletin does not have, but look at the features vBulletin has that XenForo does not have.

Personally the only thing I have seen on the market that is better then VBulletin is IPB.

hehehe , i will say ... they already have done a nice job for the skin.... rather the default skin of Xen is much better than default of vb , we may customize everything , thats not a matter of concern

The Matter of Concern are : -

Too much of JavaScript usage
Too much of animation tags usage
Really i don't see a Proper CMS , in Action , vb4 had a bad , BUT HAD A CMS to Use
The Use of Widgets are Unavilable
No Additional Feature which will make It a bit different from vbulletin 3/4 ... really to say
No Image Gallery
No SEO Optimisation or use of Chronical URls
No Preset Sitemap Present
No Tagging Option prsent
No FaceBook/Tweeter Integration Feature Like that of vb4
......... these are only a few features

FOR These to develop a be a "vBulletin Killer" .... will take a minimum of 3 - 4 years may be much more remember vbulletin is what you see have done 7 - 8 Years of complete work . and now it is the best in it's market

I will only welcome Xenforo as a Competitive that Kier has made it , and now we will witness a new vb5 , Completely New System , much Simpler and Super ..... thats why i welcome Xen so that vb will now be greater than that

Where have I said it is something it is not?
I'll tell you why it is better. Because it is coded better. I have seen it.
It's brand new software, not even available to use yet, so of course it does not have anywhere near the necessary features. It's the potential that you are missing.

Maybe if you actually read what you are posting, you would see how you are mis-leading people. Anyways, the only people I actually see using XenForo is new communities or Kier fans.

--------------- Added [DATE]1280840501[/DATE] at [TIME]1280840501[/TIME] ---------------

Well, I'm done talking in this thread.

P.S. If you are so dissatisfied with vBulletin, stop using it.

How can you say it is coded better when they same people coded both vb and Xenforo? That argument is moot.

He probably means that with 8+ years of knowledge from the start of coding, they are doing things different then they ever could do with vBulletin where existing code had to be taken into consideration and even the current database design and large number of external applications.

PS Also remember that they where in the team that set the way towards vB4 as it is now.

No SEO optimization? Clearly you don't what you're talking about. XenForo is SEO'd out of the box. In fact it's SEO'd so well that there's really no need for an external plugin like vBSEO or similar. That's something I can't say about vBulletin, even the 4.x series, embarrassingly.

I mean if you can shed light on how you came to that conclusion I'd like to know. Because as a developer, I see: use of H1 title tags, semantically correct layout structure, auto generated meta description, and canonical URLs with 301 redirects.

So if you can explain how XF is not SEO'd properly then perhaps I will take your opinion seriously ;)


I'm not standing beside XF just because of Kier. I've been with vB for (7+! years) since the 2.x series. Fact of the matter is vB has slipped up as of late, quality control has gone down. The latest 3.8.x security exploit is a prime example. These factors are what prompted my decision to switch, and because of the potential XF offers.

BTW I see tons of active devs on the XF forums, many of them eager to start developing plugins for XF. The script has tons of potential - as others h ave pointed out of the reasons why is that it's not "weighed down" by old technology. vBulletin has been in dire need of a rewrite, while XF uses an entirely new codebase, designed for modern tech. Sure, it may not be "all there" yet in terms of a feature-set but that's the least my worries. You need to look at it with an open mind. From what I've seen so far, Kier seems intent on developing this software with performance, usability, and scalability. That makes me really excited. vB on the other hand is scrambling to fix bugs with each new release, oftentimes breaking other functionality in the process. The state of vB is a real drag right now. Maybe it will pick up in due time. But I'm not willing to wait. The 4.x series still has yet to reach the quality and polish of 3.8.x, six months later..

Complete seo can be said as optimisation of all important/most visited pages on the site like forumdisplay / forumhome , showthread needs to be optimised for better usage but wherever i see i see js , js and js , really , the script has nothing more than js to be frankly said , also as it seems it does not have a preset sitemap , nor it has submission tools for submission of content or anything

Even say if SEO is done ok, say better than vb has
What About the Other Things..... which i have stated or which are on your Quote , to be challenged as a "vbulletin killer" , i should prefer the term "IPB" nowdays to term as "Long Term vbulletin Murderer" as It is Simple and Sleek

1 More Note : - Just try to turf off your JavaScript from your Browser and See how much nicer your script will look

I'm loving xF software - simple.

someone mentioned vB5 details ie all new coding, simpler... where was this posted?

Also xF looks and kicks major ass. once they get a calender and photo gallery, Im getting on board that bandwagon. The 'Everyone Feed' alone is getting me to buy it.

The script degrades elegantly when JS is turned off, it's a non-issue really. I'm not labeling XF as a vB killer, just pointing out that it's already ahead of vB in certain respects.

Use of JS doesn't hurt SEO, Google sees the page without JS enabled. Users benefit from enhanced usability. It's a win-win.

We haven't seen the admin backend yet, so who knows, a sitemap generator may already be built-in. To me that's a trivial feature though. If not built in someone can easily make a plugin, it's just a matter of generating an XML file with all thread links.

Oh that's ridiculous. Your credibility just went flying out of the window.

Your argument is like suggesting that the same car designer would produce a modern car which would be no better than one he designed 8 years ago. :rolleyes:

Ok for a start, vB3 and now 4 are based on older code which is something in the region of 8 years old. It was originally developed with the current (at the time) php coding technology to fulfil the needs of forum communities in the early 2000's. Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, most social media sites hadn't been invented, yet. The web was still young.
vB4 has evolved from that old code which is now outdated, bloated, inefficient, bodged and well past it's sell-by date.
Given the chance to re-evaluate how a forum community should now work from the ground up, and to code it, from the ground up, with the latest technologies and encompassing what the modern internet user expects and integrating into the latest social media sites, 'the same people' have coded a *completely* different and vastly superior product to vB.

LOL, when it's available, you'll see plenty of people adopting it irrespective of what they think about Kier. I think you have an agenda of some kind. Can't figure out what it is, though.
Good.
I plan to when Xenforo has the features I need.

I get the sense he's miffed over the fact he forked over $200 on a vB suite license after seeing XF and doesn't want to admit it. :p Can't see why one would be so defensive towards a brand otherwise.

I know. I dont defend something just based on having purchased it. I bought 2 vB licenses and after seeing what xF can do, I cant wait to move on to the next evolution of online media communities. I will still run both vB sites. Just use xF for the 3rd and on. When something better comes along, I'll keep going. I dont get married to 1 particular software. You only buy 1 numbered series of the software anyways.

This software isn't a vBulletin killer until we see the final product.

I lol'd at the xF reference - good one! :)

JS usage: Disable JS and it will work great. Also, I don't see the JS affecting page loads by much and it makes the general browsing of the forum much more elegant.

CMS - They have already explained they are working on solid forum software and they have a CMS in mind. Might I add that there's no point building a CMS until there's a solid forum foundation to build it on.

Widgets - It's in its alpha stages, how do you know what they do and do not have in mind?

The easy usage differs from vB. There is also no moderator control panel and all of the controls are in-line which a lot of people prefer.

Image gallery - Again, it is in alpha.

SEO - please go and browse their forum again. www.xenforo.com/community

Sitemap - It could have a built-in sitemap for all we know? Just because we don't see it, doesn't mean it's not there.

Tagging option? I don't recall vBulletin 4 having this (then again I don't use it).

It does have Facebook integration and it has been suggested that its easy to integrate other social networking sites.

Exactly. In a few years time, XF might have outdated code and be a lot harder to change. The good thing about XF is that Kier and Mike are the owners and the developers, they have complete control whereas as part of IB they didn't have free rein over the product.

I was among the ones to be utterly disappointed with vB 4.0. But now I must say that vB 4.0.5 put vB back in the map.

I saw xenForo and it's amazing. I love it's simplicity, which is important to end users. My conclusion? Both vB and xenForo will be strong and both will have their fair share.

Only IPB must be biting their nails now.

To answer the original question, no, at the moment, Xenforo is certainly not a vBulletin killer because it lacks the features people (like me) will be needing.
However, considering the software has been developed in such a short space of time and has been designed (unlike vBulletin) from the outset to support plugins, and having seen more of Xenforo than most people, I would say that the required features will come thick and fast both from Kier and Mike, and the enthusiastic supporters who will no doubt be coding like crazy when the software is released and documentation available.
So going forward, yes, I think Xenforo has the potential to be the market leader, but it's a fair way down the line, yet.

IPB,MyBB, heck even smf2 beats VB4.

the old vb3.6 - 3.8 however was the best, and i continue to use two 3.8 licenses

Maybe you forgot:
3. You are too dumb
or even
4. if I appreciate anything all other people have to follow my opinion because I know it all because I am god.

xenForo is looking like a strong competitor from the start.

What is going to allow me (and many other webmasters) to change over would be a modification community and designers that can style the sites. It seems like there are lots of 'mods' that are already part of the script itself, so it will obviously reduce the need for a large modification community, but there needs to be one nonetheless.

Also, one of the major pieces of xenForo is going to be the integration of Facebook and Twitter features. Those will set xenForo apart and will allow for the social networking integration to continue to expand and mix with the forum sites. :)

Great work so far! :up:

Thread cleaned up, please stay on topic.

hehe nice one you had me going than :D

Agreed. It still has a long way to go but overall the foundation is there and more importantly so is the communication. They stand on solid ground, and must be very happy. After all, a happy devs are productive devs.

May I ask you what are some of these features?

I listed them here : http://xenforo.com/community/threads...orums-com.261/

I love it - it's addictive. It's the most fun I've had posting on a board in years.

Oh I hope not, I'm so tired clutter.

Is it a vB killer? I don't know, but I do remember when MySpace was king and people laughed at the idea of Facebook being any real competition. I have no idea how or why that happened because I don't use either one, so I don't know if it serves as a cautionary tale. But it does show that popularity on the internet can be viciously fleeting. The end user makes you, and the end user breaks you.

The initial software development package for any project leaves something to be desired. If a project as far into development still has issues, with the volume of manpower and resources backing it, a project with far fewer resources will have difficulty keeping up with consumer demand, to say nothing of exceeding it. For all of its shortcomings, vBulletin is still by far the most complete forum resource. I wish Kier and Mike and all else involved all the best, however, they face an uphill climb to prove superior to existing technology. There are finite limits to what can be done with present coding and one has to question how close we have come to reaching those limits ... Kier is unquestionably brilliant but is just as limited by the technology as anyone else. I'll respectfully take a wait and see approach.

Without a photo gallery for the members and a calendar system (hopefully with event attend/not attend) it isnt a killer per se, because it has other features that currently smoke vB. Once it gets those set-up, (not in the initial release... hopefully xenforo 2.0) It wont even be a discussion.

A huge factor is going to be how extensible the software is, and from the looks of it, developers won't be disappointed. I'll say from a personal perspective, I rather work with an intelligent OO platform than, say vB 4, which was released before it was fully refactored and is really a headache to work with.

If the XF keep developers in mind, the modifications people need will be developed for it.

I was one of the first members on xenforo ,

and i have not got to try the xenforo admin cp , but alot of the way the front end works is awesome !

as for IPB looks can be deceiving , i would say that 1/2 of the things you take for grated on vbulletin is not on IPB in any form , good luck finding a MOD for it as i went threw all there mods in 3 hours.

vBulletin 3 is by far my favorite .... im trying to get my ipb site up to par in functionality, now dont get me wrong there are some things IPB does better than vb. but until you get your hands dirty you don't see what its lacking because you don't really think of it as a "Feature"

I can write a book on things i dont like about vb4 and another book about things i dont like about IPB , but in 3 years and with a certain someone picking me up when i fall vb3 is as close as im going to get to a software that does what i need it to.

The only reason why i even looked towards IPB when starting Truck Pullers.com was i was so excited about vb4 screenshots ect... then i got to use it and i was like hummmm this isnt what i expected , then i was contracted to build a vb4 site and let me tell you what ..i would rather take a butt whippin before doing that again. so here i was thinking how much i didnt like it looking at the forum index and the gernal layout of the log in and everything...

then i clicked on an IPB site and was like OMG , it appears that's VB copied the Source code from IPB , no way... its a replica

i was very disappointed , im vb to the bone!

so i asked myself....

Why would i invest in something that's brand new and full of bugs when i can buy an established software and it looks the exact same?

Now knowing of what i took for granted , i would of still picked IPB because im not starting a forum on a soon to be EOL vb3 series , got to think about the future. xenforo would of been an option a year from now, however i have put extensive amounts of modifications to the IPB board im close to where i want it to be so we will just wait and see what happens .

as for now and knowing what i know , vb3 is the best hands down but i wont upgrade until weeks so i don't get exploited again ! 3 times in 3 years vb :(

I'm still here and hope that vb3 goes all the way to 3.9.9 before they EOL it :)

Well imo IB is at a serious crossroads. VB4 is essentially like Windows Vista are really big "OOOPS WE F"D UP BIG TIME!", yet here I am typing this on Win7 64 which is pretty good OS. MSFT managed to get their crap together. IB needs to sort their crap out big time. I am impressed with xenforo so far, even amazed at how fast it is developing. If I can import my vbull community into xenforo, have a vbgallery equivalent, good mods and all then it would be a consideration. On the otherhand if IB would just get their crap together I could be content with vbull for many more years. So.. to answer the question "Is XenForo the vBulletin killer?" well.. that is up to IB!

Please stay on topic. The topic is XenForo, not vBulletin or IB.

The Personal Conversation feature is great. Has anyone of you tried it yet? So much easier to use and view than standard layout PMs (imo).

I've used it but don't see that much of a difference to be honest... PM's were never something I thought needed improvement.

Isn't that like Xenon's old PMs as Threads hack?

Ok so a conversation is displayed like a thread, yes, so you can follow it much more easy than PMs. But you can also invite people into the conversation, so they can read it from the start. And then remove them from it if you want. You can also specify the permissions whether people invited into the conversation are then able to invite other people.
Beyond this, there will be the ability to report conversation messages to the moderators to be handled by the reported message system.

It is just amazing, the whole of XenForo.

I have been posting on XenForo since the introduction 2 few weeks ago and it is just simply addictive. Like somebody else pointed out already above... I haven't had such a pleasurable experience at/in any forum-powered website in... I don't know how long.

--------------- Added 15 Aug 2010 at 11:06 ---------------

Okay... repost.

What I tried to say is this: It is just amazing, the whole of XenForo. This is what a lot of customers have been expecting from vBulletin 4. But things went quite different...

I have been posting on XenForo since the introduction 2 few weeks ago and it is just simply addictive. Like somebody else pointed out already above... I haven't had such a pleasurable experience at/in any forum-powered website in... I don't know how long. As a loyal enthusiast promoter and very active community member of vBulletin (I run one of the most successful vBulletin powered websites in The Netherlands (5 million hits per month and counting) I was a big, big fan of the product until after the 3.8 series (let's say it in those words then :)).

I think one of the KEY factors in XenForo's success will be the outstanding UI/UX. What I loved about the vBulletin 3 series was it's fantastic UI/UX (for that time) and you see the same quality now appearing in XenForo. Most of my (paying) customer suggestions to vBulletin 4 the last couple of 9 months were aimed at the lack of quality concerning the UI/UX of that product. I believe it's fair to say that it is just... well... just take a good look at XenForo to see what a good UI/UX is all about.

I strongly believe the UI/UX is an important key element, I would even say vital for the success of any software-product nowadays. I know not everybody sees it that way (remember the success of MySpace for example?), but for me it is KEY in deciding what software platform is the best for my community website. This was always vBulletin 3.x

And the developers behind XenForo understand this. They have the same vision and apply pixel-perfection when it comes to the UI. When you work with XenForo you can just see and feel in no-time that so much thought and care has been put into the whole UI/UX. This - IMHO- sets XenForo completely apart from any other major forum product available on todays internet market. Again, I tried very hard to offer all kinds of UI suggestions in the last 9 months to the product I have once loved so much, but it just wasn't picked up. I won't share how everything felt for me after the 'Gold' version was released, because I am not alone in this by now and this thread should be about XenForo as I've understood.

So, when I saw XenForo and used it for a few hours I was almost immediately sold. Why? Because... it literally solves ALL of the many, many, many UI/UX issues I saw and experienced and reported in the new version of vBulletin. Really. Solved. So it is very simple: should I spend more and more and more of my free (!) time trying to offer suggestions/ideas/feedback/bugreports to improve a product without seeing much results or should I go for a fresh new product that provides us with an outstanding fresh, innovate, intuitive userfriendly UI/UX immediately?

Also it is clear the development team behind XenForo have a strong vision when it comes to the essential value of the UI/UX of their product, so for now and in the future we can be sure the frontend will be in good hands and will keep being delivered to us in this outstanding professional quality.

Mind you, we only know the frontend by now and haven't seen the backend of XenForo. But, if the backend is as good as the frontend, then XenForo will become a serious alternative for people to look at who are not happy anymore with their current platform or the future of it. And I predict this will be a lot of people.

Exciting times. Very curious to find out what 2010/2011/2012 will bring in the world of forumsoftware!