My Feelings on xenForo

What's worse is that asserting that position makes Kier & co appear to be dishonest, and you better believe IB's lawyers will drive that point home at a trial. That will creep into the minds of the jury and weigh against Kier & Co, affecting the credibility of everthing Kier & Co claims. It might be presented like this:

Kier & co are / were on a vendetta mission to destroy vB, the software they believe they are responsible for creating, yet were essentially left out of the windfall James Limm realized. They ran from vB taking information regarding current vB customers and in full knowlege of the strategic plans for future versions of the vBulletin software with them, and immediately began developing software to compete with vB using this unfair advantage. They told vB's owners it would take 18 - 24 months to do a rewrite of vB and then proved they could do it in only12 months with their own software. This was all part of a plan to destroy vB..​

Just to be clear -- all that is PURELY speculation of what an opening statement by IB's lawyers might sound like. That took me 5 minutes to write up. I'm sure IB's lawyers' will come up with a version way more damning. They'll back it up with a little evidence, and the jury will buy into it.

 

No offence Mark, but even I thought the other day keep seeing you reply to posts in that vBulletin 4.2 feedback thread. You're kind of acting like some unofficial spokes person for vBulletin now, you after a staff job there now or something? I don't see things quite like your seeing them, after all vBulletin 4.2 is NOT a complete rewrite and underneath all those new features and changes it's still just a glorified version of vBulletin 3 really in my eyes using old code. Many others see it that way as well, don't kid yourself. I don't see people leaving XenForo in mass to start using vBulletin 4.2 so far, do you?

After my testing using it, here is my honest opinion. As you can see SOME have not been won over by it.

Well that's it really, I've been reading for ages people on XenForo acting like they've never done anything wrong. I beg to differ on that one same as you.

 

Yeah, Kier's hands aren't completely clean. Now I dont know what the truth is, NONE OF US DO. But I have an open mind on most things, except on the point of the non compete agreement. I think Kier & Co. broke that. What I can also see is that Xenforo is probably going to BK unless someone dumps a ton of money in it. Mike is AWOL and Kier is off doing other things besides developing Xenforo. A small, growing company needs to keep selling licenses to stay afloat. They need a new version that they can charge for every 2 years or so just to stay liquid. The lack of development activity tells me this is probably already over barring some kind of angel investment.

And for those who think IB is the bad guy for suing -- guess what. I havent seen a successful motion to dismiss, so they must have some actionable claims as far as the judge is concerned. If anyone expect IB to sit back and let a new competitor come onto the market when they can stop it, then your sadly mistaken. No large company would do that. Its part of being in business.

 

Maybe it's just me who thinks this one is a little strange, but has anyone noticed how you keep getting these new members joining XenForo and right away make their first post on the Pre-Sales Questions forum saying something "they know will get negative replies from other members there". It's like a game is being played out to tempt the XF fan-boys into posting ranting on purpose, done so the Pre-Sales forum looks a right mess.

This is what the person posted and it makes me laugh because one, they mention vBulletin (to bring it into the picture of things). Then carry after that putting XenForo down. Add the two together and you know what will happen next. Read tons like this now, and it's always the same!

 

We'll have to agree to disagree on vB4.2 - it looks the same to me and handles the same, and works the same. It's just so out of date in looks and feel. The recent activity option is a visual car crash.

I agree. There seem to be more posts along that theme, the "I'd like to buy but am concerned about xxxxx" type stuff. It is hard to know whether this is some kind of trolling or not. But you see the same oddities in vB and IPB's pre-sales forums too. There's a saying, there's nowt stranger than folks. I think if I'd found out about Xenforo now - and read posts like this - I'd be equally cautious.

 

Never really took notice before that the same thing happens at vB or IPB. Just one of them things then I guess.

 

Don't be silly, why does everyone who makes positive remarks suddenly "want to be a staff member"? I couldn't fit in working for anyone else, even if I actually had the required skills (which I don't).

You don't see things like I see them, fine, but remember I actually do run a vBulletin-based board so the decisions being made directly impact me.

I have never said it is perfect. Personally I'm not that fussed for full rewrites, it would mean re-learning everything. However the fact is that vBulletin is pushing forwards again, at last.

 

Only kidding with you, but the way I was seeing you keep answering peoples questions there wasn't like how I remember you before. Just saying, that's all! :adminaddict:

 

Well that's because the product isn't how I remember it before, it is much better. I won't criticise for the sake of it. I currently think the product is good and very stable (I am running a beta live now, which says it all), and the development direction is good. So I say so.

 

Yeah! vBulletin 4.2 ran well on testing for me.

 

Anyone buying XF at the moment is taking a big risk. There could conceivably be no further development of the product. And the fanbois will scream; "So what? You have a working product"; but that's no good in the long term if it is not updated for security, php versions, MySQL versions, and much more.

 

I see the point you're making, but if you run a site on dedicated hosting. MySQL and PHP versions don't really come into play. Hence why you see vBulletin 3 and 2 forums out there still being run. It's only really an issue with shared hosting and cheaper VPS where you have no control over that side of things.

 

No that's no good either. I have a VPS, I could run php4 if I wanted to. It wouldn't be a good idea though, it has security issues and is unsupported.

My whole reason for initially having to move from XMB to vBulletin, was because development stopped and both the software and the platforms it would run on became insecure.

There is no situation in which you can justify sticking with unsupported software, unless like Digital Point you have the skills to support and update it yourself. Most people don't.

 

But what does that really matter, if lets say you run vBulletin 3 and have no intentions of upgrading to vBulletin 4. There's nothing wrong in sticking with what works well (if having full control over it), and has worked fine for many years! PHP 4 - is not suddenly going to break for you overnight and has no effect on the end user using your forum working perfect with it. So what does it matter unless your installing other forum software that requires a higher version of PHP?

Also, who says the latest version of PHP doesn't have bugs or some security issues not spotted yet?

 

You just cannot do it like that, if you don't want your site compromised. vB3 isn't so bad because that is still being supported for security releases but go and have a read up on what happened to XMB. Once it was the board of choice for many, it was even included in cPanel as the default "bulletin board". Look at it now. It hasn't moved on since I last used it in 2003.

And if there is a security issue in the latest php, they will fix it. Try asking them to fix one in php4.

 

So do you not think there are sites out there operating running PHP4 still?

Yeah, but was that not the forum software itself getting compromised. What's that got to do with using PHP 4? :idk:

 

It was compromised many times. It has had numerous security issues. And at one point it was being supported by what amounted to a bunch of kids. Often very rude kids at that. Those with real experience of the product and the required skills pretty soon cleared off and it's a ghost town now. It is very sad. I skinned my XMB to look a bit like vBulletin. It was modified to the hilt but it just fell off the face of the earth.

 

I've never used XMB like you and AWS (I think used it) as well, known nothing about it at all. Apart from some called left there to start vBulletin or something, I think?

 

Anyway, I was mainly saying there are lots of vBulletin 3 forums out there and would suspect most are using PHP 4. From what I gather only vBulletin 3.8.x in that version branch supports PHP 5 anyway, correct me if wrong.

 

Tons and tons and tons of unfixed security holes in PHP 4 that any guy knowing how to use google and write in PHP knows how to use, thats what matters.