Ya i am not in IT so i know shit about it! Just that the new layout is lame-o! What exactly happened the first time around when this site changed from .com to .org? I know shit all about hosting websites just that the site had a changeover before but everything still stayed the same!
Okay, everyone seems to be taking this for a bit of a ride, so here it is from the top lol:
1. The software we currently used is called Xenforo. At the time, this was one of the leading softwares for forums (it was very competitive for features.) We were originally hosted on vBulletin, which today holds maybe around 20% of the market share for forum software solutions.
2. Xenforo today, holds about 20% market share. Ranking-wise, it's probably #2 or #3 in terms of recommended software.
3. Discourse (which is what Reddit runs off of) is the #1 ranking forum software in the world. Free, open-source, and public = lots of support, lots of plugins (many of which have been made official plugins,) and it incredibly full featured.
We are considering switching because we have been having what feels like a LOT of problems with both their hosting and the software itself. The support from the developers was never really top-notch, but we didn't really have to use it a tremendous amount. Now, without making virtually changes to the site, we've had a SHIT LOAD of errors and problems, of which I can't even get these guys to barely talk to us without telling us we're being cry babies, as paying customer who shell out $2400/annually for a managed service. And that's just hosting, that doesn't even touch all the add-on licenses and renewals for support (Xenforo developers love to give you 1 year of support, then make you pay again to download whatever the latest version is.)
It's expensive for what we're getting.
I've compiled a list of add-on's, features, and more used functions here on the forum (that we've been nickel and dimed for) and Discourse either has those features implemented as CORE FEATURES, or they offer them as free-plugins.
After posting our issues on the Xenforo community board, I had numerous other license holders private message me about their own bad experiences with the Xen support team and developers. Even right now, they haven't apologized for their shitty service and it's our fault for being unreasonable.
When we changed from .net to .org, it's because Ryan Bailey, the original person that owned the .net domain, was threatening to sell the forum out underneath all of us (he told us he was selling it to Dutch Passion, who when I reached out to them, they said "who the fuck is Ryan?") He was a snakey piece of shit that didn't care one god damn bit about this place or any of you, which is why most of you don't even know who that is.
That was a just a domain change, that wasn't a software change.
Xenforo feels like it's run it's course. We've ran this software since I want to say 2019, it served it's purpose, but it's broken, lacks features, and why pay a company that treats us like shit?
We are looking at hosted solutions for Discourse, because we do not have a dedicated IT person, nor do I even remotely want to go down that path ever again. We will pay a little extra so we don't have to play doctor everytime something breaks. That's "taking back our time."
Migration-wise, I am looking into the logistics for how to transfer over what we have here to be there.
There's going to be some re-learning of some things, but for the most part, it's STILL A FORUM, and the concepts are incredibly similar. Create topics (what we call threads.) Reply to them. Post videos. Boom, I just recreated Live Stoner Chat in 3 short sentences. See what I mean?
ppp
