XenForo Is XenForo turning into vBulletin?

Tracy said:

And this is a biggie... and something a lot of folks do not think about. They hope that they will be able to get their data... but there have been many instances where that was just a hope and reality was opposite when a hosting provider folded.
As long as I have the skills and am already doing it, I personally see no big benefit of SaaS for myself or others in a similar position.

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I've made this mistake with Facebook.

I have a group of nearly 50,000 members. It's very active. I've tried to get them to a forum but they don't seem that interested. So, I'm stuck with the Facebook Group which I keep maintaining and growing but if anything ever happens, I'm at the sake of their actions with no real escape route.

Tracy said:

If it is the only site you run...then yes SaaS can be of benefit, especially if you don't want to deal with any of the back end stuff - which I honestly still enjoy doing. My issue is when you have multiple sites. If you are already running a VPS/dedicated server for other sites, why pay for that "extra service" if you don't need it? I mean both in the "server administration" and cloud only features that may be offered.
I like playing/experimenting with other scripts. Yes, you can do it on a home brew server to play with, but that does not give you the "live and in the wild" experience.
I think I pay around $55 a month for the 4 VPS instances (one which is a mail server) and the dedicated KimSufi server and my AWS SES account runs me about a quarter of a dollar a month. I know folks that waste more than that in Starbucks coffee in a week!

For the base forum comparison, Invision is ahead of Xenforo. But you have two different philosophies for the developers. XF is stuck in the desktop/old forum world and Invision is striving to move forward on their forum platform. As I mentioned, the forum itself is not a major part of the draw to my site.

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I'm in the same boat as you. I'd rather tinker with things and learn more. I wasn't much of a server admin before, but I've been learning more over the past few months. I prefer to have my own environment and self host things.

It gives me the opportunity to keep my sites faster, optimize what I want to and do things that you're not able to do on a cloud provider. I think it's a good idea for those that don't like to run their environment, but as for me, I'll continue to run my sites on my own server. I've been doing it for the past 20 years and I don't see myself ever leaving self hosting providers.

The money I pay for my server is basically my cigarrete money, beer or coffee, but I still have money left over to do what I want. I think it's great to self host and keep your sites under your own ownership.


If I didn't use a shared provider at the age of 14, I probably wouldn't know what I know now. I also like Xenforo, Invision and Discourse, but I still prefer to use Xenforo at the end of the day. I started off with SMF years ago and then invision, followed by vBulletin & now Xenforo, so i'm quite familar with all of the systems. I'll continue to use Xenforo until something happens and I end up hating the software like I did with vBulletin years ago. Xenforo gets the job done for me though, I love the showcase feature(add on) and easy navigation. Invision offers this as well, but I'd say Xenforo has better seo out of the box.

I also like how you can add your own header tags in forum posts, alt tags to images, and change the core title's if you'd like, especially on the forum topics through the page-container.

Shawn Gossman said:

I've made this mistake with Facebook.

I have a group of nearly 50,000 members. It's very active. I've tried to get them to a forum but they don't seem that interested. So, I'm stuck with the Facebook Group which I keep maintaining and growing but if anything ever happens, I'm at the sake of their actions with no real escape route.

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I think some may be under the misunderstanding that I "hate" SaaS. I do not. There is a time and a place for it... for some people.
For me, that time and place will have to be WAY down the road when I reach the point that I cannot do it myself - and by that time I probably won't care about the sites anyway.

As far as Xenforo goes... got a feeling they got too big for their britches and began ignoring stuff they should not have thinking that they were the king of the mountain. Seems that fallacy is starting to show it's ugly face though and reality is starting to come to the fore.

Cpvr said:

I also like Xenforo, Invision and Discourse, but I still prefer to use Xenforo at the end of the day. I started off with SMF years ago and then invision, followed by vBulletin & now Xenforo, so i'm quite familar with all of the systems. I'll continue to use Xenforo until something happens and I end up hating the software like I did with vBulletin years ago. Xenforo gets the job done for me though, I love the showcase feature(add on) and easy navigation. Invision offers this as well, but I'd say Xenforo has better seo out of the box.

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Personally. I'm on that boat.

I'd much rather use XenForo than any of the rest. I like VB6 but XF is way more advanced, and it looks better.