Goodbye, XenForo!

Hello!

I regret to inform you that I'm quitting XenForo. This means:

• No more new features for add-ons
• No more new add-ons
• Prices for existing add-ons will drop
• Free add-ons will become paid or no longer available

The reason for this was the unprofessional behavior of the XenForo administration.

For the last 4 years I have been an active member of the XenForo community and one of the few developers who release major add-ons for this platform. During this time, I have encountered many times the speech freedom restriction on their community forum and, to put it mildly, strange decisions on the administration part. Yesterday I again encountered this behavior of the administration. In response to this post, I sent a joke about what we got a 100 character limit on reviews. It has been deleted, 3 times, in the Off-topic section, then I was banned in this section. My post does not violate the rules, I did not receive any verbal warnings or comments on these actions.

Over the past years, I have encountered:

Deleting positive reviews without notice or reason​

One of the most absurd cases that I encountered in this regard was when people who did not buy my products posted negative reviews, after which all reviews on my resource were deleted altogether. I turned to the Brogan and some reviews were restored. And then they were deleted again silently! Cause? "I don't know which reviews were valid and invalid" © Brogan. As usual, I was ignored.

Deleting posts that do not violate the rules​

At any time, you can fall into disfavor with the administration and your posts will be deleted quietly and without notification. If you pay attention to this, you will get a ban. The reddest flag you can see is unpredictable behavior.

No updates or roadmap​

The last update improving functionality was released 3 years(!) ago! During this time, the community has not even received a roadmap, and dissatisfaction with this situation, as always, is simply ignored by the developers. As a developer, I understand that it is possible to develop XenForo from scratch in such a time period and XF developers are simply not interested in developing their product.

Ignoring the community​

They implement less than 10 small suggestions per year (only 2 this year), with dozens of popular suggestions that have been around for over 5 years.
Any feedback and criticism are taken in a negative way.

Thanks to everyone who supporting my developments financially and morally! I hope our cooperation will continue in a friendlier environment!

---

Inappropriate behavior after a conflict​

I am updating the post on March 21, 2024, six months after the conflict...

Aug 31, 2023
My attempts to prove that there was no objective the rules violation
Banning my account and insults from the administration

March 21, 2024
Ridiculous attempt to remove a review on TrustPilot

🍿🍿🍿

 

[mukhmd]

Sorry for being rude but yeah. Fuck Them. 👍

 

[XenTR]

Hello;

As a software developer, I must admit that I felt genuinely disheartened upon hearing about this situation. Developers are the cornerstone of a community's sustained growth. To achieve popularity within a community, it is crucial to support and encourage developers. I hope you experience more positive developments in your future endeavors.

Best regards,

 

[yasliqurt]

i did very sorry about this news really 🙁 you are so quality addons creating was.

 

[unknownone]

Not only has development been at a standstill for three years; now they are starting to censor customers. What a circus...
They have just been milking money from customers the past few years knowing there really is no future nor interest from the developers. They are simply just collecting money and showing nothing.

 

[FaeWhisperer]

There will come a time when I will raise enough funds to invest in the development of a new communication platform that will put XenForo in its place - in a closet of obsolete garbage

Start raising money. Do it!

I came from a forum long ago in 2013, this "Brogan" character and other staff members have been mentioned remind me of this admin I used to know (it's only found on the wayback machine at this point). One day this admin of the site (and only admin may I mention) I was on (forumotion) went nuclear and started to delete certain accounts in retaliation. I only stumbled across Xenforo because I came across RPNation, which in its state in my opinion is just as bad as the Xenforo People. I wanted to create/continue the forum I had come to love without a tyrant in its place- and to competitively go up against RPNation in it's full. Granted, I also chose Xenforo because according to them we do have full access to our information/data unlike Forumotion which states that none of our data/stuff we create is our own. But now seeing a different side of things makes me go O-o and I honestly do not like the 60 dollars I pay every month. The addons are beautiful addition that I wish forumotion would have had, but I want to start to make my own addons, become a full web developer and help you small bunch in whatever way that I can!

 

[Admin-Junkies.com]

It's sad. If they continue to do what they are doing, then soon they will have more devs leaving XenForo. The reason XF is as popular as it is, is because of 3rd party add ons. If it wasn't available, then I'd be hopping off to Invision Community. They are being ignorant and not appreciative to their customers and devs. At this rate, more people will leave and they'll end up losing much sales. Let us not forget what XF is without 3rd party add ons: a basic community platform. Great features, but no imagination on customization without add ons.

Anyhow, I know a couple of first class devs who are willing to work in team and create a new community platform. If that interests you, hit me up.

 

[Fatih]

I totally agree with @Admin-Junkies.com

Nowadays, many of the forum software is trying good innovations. There are many valuable community software in place. But the reason why I choose XenForo is definitely 3rd party add-ons. If they continue in the same way, they will lose many customers and devs.

As a forum admin, I always want continuity and stability on my forum. We don't want to spend to much time managing the forum. That can be XenForo or other software, it doesn't matter for us.

 

[Ralkage]

I was looking into your ChatGPT add-on's and wondered why they were all deleted; didn't really know XF staff have been poorly mistreating developers until I saw your post here :(

Hope to see you on the Flarum side of things! I used to be an extension developer and part of QA for the core team for Flarum and the community has always been great to us as well as the developers who contributed to each other's projects when extensions need upgrading.

I also wanted to do some add-on development for XF, but your post has completely turned me off to it especially if I post it in XF's marketplace and get treated like you did for simply joking around. Feels like XF is on the save level as VB since there is clearly lack of innovation from the core team on both sides to remain competitive. Even the reception of the new platform IP created which didn't completely reinvent the wheel, so that's another reason why I don't want to post any of my future add-ons on the XF marketplace lol.

 

[021]

I was looking into your ChatGPT add-on's and wondered why they were all deleted; didn't really know XF staff have been poorly mistreating developers until I saw your post here :(

Hope to see you on the Flarum side of things! I used to be an extension developer and part of QA for the core team for Flarum and the community has always been great to us as well as the developers who contributed to each other's projects when extensions need upgrading.

I also wanted to do some add-on development for XF, but your post has completely turned me off to it especially if I post it in XF's marketplace and get treated like you did for simply joking around. Feels like XF is on the save level as VB since there is clearly lack of innovation from the core team on both sides to remain competitive. Even the reception of the new platform IP created which didn't completely reinvent the wheel, so that's another reason why I don't want to post any of my future add-ons on the XF marketplace lol.

I would gladly switch to Flarum if it weren't for MithrilJS. As soon as I have time for hobbies again, I wanted to come up with a solution for them that allows extensibility, but still uses convenient frameworks.

Btw, the atmosphere in the Flarum community really seems much friendlier. Staff members communicate with you as equals, this is worth a lot ❤️

 

[xoop]

XF addon developers, unite and create your own official addon market 🙂

 

[Jordan]

I confirm that there is a big problem with the administration especially with Brogan who thinks he is a little above everyone. Is it arrogance from that? It is very likely.

I've also experienced this from Brogan. RIP

 

[021]

XenForo continues to prove its professional inadequacy, but is already in development​

Today I was sent the link to part of the XF 2.3 review. From there I found out that they removed jQuery and made very serious changes to the XenForo JS core in this update. These changes are very serious and break compatibility with all add-ons that used jQuery. Even if the add-on originally used VanillaJS, the changes to the XenForo core are fundamentally incompatible with your code. There are semantic versioning rules in development, according to which such major changes should have increased the major version of the product (i.e. it should be called XF 3.0, not 2.3, because in fact it is a different product). Now supporting XF 2.2 and 2.3 at the same time is an extremely difficult and expensive task. If the add-on is updated to work with XF 2.3, it is unlikely to receive updates for XF 2.2. The developers deliberately cut off that part of users who for some reason cannot upgrade to 2.3 from receiving the latest add-on updates. This means that if a vulnerability or some issue is found in one of the add-ons, you will not be able to fix it with an update, you will not be able to get new features despite the fact that XF 2.2 and XF 2.3 look and sound like the same product. And you will not be able to upgrade to 2.3 until all installed add-ons receive compatibility updates.

Many people have over 20 add-ons installed and literally every one of them will suffer from these changes. This update reflects the developers' detachment from their community, a lack of understanding of the real complexity of such updates, and plain professional inadequacy.

I'm sorry that so many communities are stuck with this software. I hope in a couple of years they will get really good and modern alternatives and XenForo will stop occupying such a market share.

 

[André]

XenForo continues to prove its professional inadequacy, but is already in development​

Today I was sent the link to part of the XF 2.3 review. From there I found out that they removed jQuery and made very serious changes to the XenForo JS core in this update. These changes are very serious and break compatibility with all add-ons that used jQuery. Even if the add-on originally used VanillaJS, the changes to the XenForo core are fundamentally incompatible with your code. There are semantic versioning rules in development, according to which such major changes should have increased the major version of the product (i.e. it should be called XF 3.0, not 2.3, because in fact it is a different product). Now supporting XF 2.2 and 2.3 at the same time is an extremely difficult and expensive task. If the add-on is updated to work with XF 2.3, it is unlikely to receive updates for XF 2.2. The developers deliberately cut off that part of users who for some reason cannot upgrade to 2.3 from receiving the latest add-on updates. This means that if a vulnerability or some issue is found in one of the add-ons, you will not be able to fix it with an update, you will not be able to get new features despite the fact that XF 2.2 and XF 2.3 look and sound like the same product. And you will not be able to upgrade to 2.3 until all installed add-ons receive compatibility updates.

Many people have over 20 add-ons installed and literally every one of them will suffer from these changes. This update reflects the developers' detachment from their community, a lack of understanding of the real complexity of such updates, and plain professional inadequacy.

I'm sorry that so many communities are stuck with this software. I hope in a couple of years they will get really good and modern alternatives and XenForo will stop occupying such a market share.

I just read through the linked XF community thread and tbh it's largely way over my head but I did notice Chris & Brogan-in particular-simply invalidated concerns similar to yours that were raised by Ozzy &-(*I think)-also by Xon.

Tbh I'm not surprised at all that both Chris & Brogan didn't just stop at lazily invalidating the concerns—but also hijacked, twisted and then dumped them back on developers—in general.

😄 It's sad af, and yet still quite amazing to actually witness such a cartoonish degree of self assumed infallibility & selfishness.
Almost as if Chris & Brogan simply don't give a flat flying fart about how significantly XF benefits from third party developers efforts.

Imo, as I've said before, there ought to be proactive collaboration efforts primarily driven by XF.

There's another poster-(*can't recall the name)-who brought up a great point about how XF should be considering some sort of NDA arrangements with select third party developers such to effectively enable collaborative efforts to be engaged well in advance of such a major core upgrade. ie: so to provide adequate time for devs to begin developing a reasonably comprehensive range of compatible add-ons prior to the actual core system public release.

Just my opinion, but if the wide range of third party developers add-ons weren't available for enhancing the stock standard XF system,...😂 I'd have been disinclined to waste my time/cash on a generic forum system—and as it stands, especially due to what seems to be "normalized" Marxism-esque superiority complexes which are very apparently & consistently presented & shared amongst notable XF staff.
I'm only using XF because of the add-ons & customizability.

 

[Aslar217]

Man, you gave me great support with getting CHATGPT to work on my forum and with other stuff too... You will be sadly missed by the community

 

[gogo]

Will chatgpt add-on keep update?

 

[Anthem]

Приветствую, видел вы рекомендовали фларум, подскажите, не планируете ли вы разработку плагинов под фларум?
Очень интересно бы смотрелась возможность привязки к форуму платежей через Bitcoin/LTC, так как сейчас возможность платежей на форуме есть при прибегании к системе Stripe

 

[021]

Приветствую, видел вы рекомендовали фларум, подскажите, не планируете ли вы разработку плагинов под фларум?
Очень интересно бы смотрелась возможность привязки к форуму платежей через Bitcoin/LTC, так как сейчас возможность платежей на форуме есть при прибегании к системе Stripe

Добрый день. На данный момент ничего подобного не планируется. Фронт-енд Фларум написан на Mithril.JS, что отталкивает от разработки под эту платформу

 

[stux]

Oh well, time to learn the structure of the add-on myself.
Won't be spending a dime on Xenforo if they are going to be a product that doesn't innovate.

Lucky me, got it running.

 

[btmgreg]

Will chatgpt add-on keep update?

Interested in the same :) Just want to know before I invest. Btw - the theming and styling for this forum is impeccable.

 

[021]

Will chatgpt add-on keep update?

Interested in the same :) Just want to know before I invest. Btw - the theming and styling for this forum is impeccable.

If you mean feature updates, then I wrote about this in the first post:

No more new features for add-ons

But I still plan to keep my add-ons working as long as there are customers with active licenses for them. That is, bug fixes will definitely be released.
It’s too early to talk about support for XF 2.3, this version doesn't even have a release date. It seems to me that this will be the most problematic update in the entire 2.x branch, so I won't rush to update my addons for this version