[Mark.B]

Originally Posted by cellarius

Just read your posts. I even quoted the most relevant parts.

@Superman: This is not about who prefers what forum, but an IB-employee spinning the facts in a way that blames the vB5 fail on the customers. This is ludicrous.

That's not what I'm doing at all.

Below is my post again, for clarity. I am talking about the fact that forum software is generally in decline because it doesn't innovate, and the reason it doesn't innovate is because its existing customer base doesn't want it to and balks at anything that deviates too far from the norm. I also pointed out that this is why XenForo does ok (it's just the same forum structure and system that's been used for decades, with a couple of bells and whistles on top) whereas software such as Vanilla, that tries to be completely different, struggles to make any real impact. The trouble is, XenForo (and Invision as well) "does ok" amongst an ever-diminishing group of customers who want to run forums. How does any company break out of that and attract brand new customers who are used to Facebook and Twitter, without alienating everyone it already has? That's the issue.

Not one iota of the below text "blames vB5's failure on customers".

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Forum software generally needs to head somewhere different. None of the current systems - including XenForo - do anything other than tweak what is now a decades-old concept. There's nothing truly innovative in any of them.

The trouble is, what do you do? vB5 actually did try to innovate quite a bit (whatever people may think of the actual execution of that), but a lot of the changes got reversed during the early alphas because they were universally disliked. Now, a lot of the developmental focus seems to be on making it more like vB4 and vB3 rather than adding anything truly innovative, because that's what customers are demanding.

So the problem you have is - change stuff too much and existing forum owners will run a mile.
Keep things as they are and the market continues to stagnate as the general public seem to prefer nonsense like Facebook and Twitter.

I don't profess to know the way forward.

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