FORUM SOFTWARE
The founder has lots of experience in forum software, and was originally going to choose Invision Community (previously known as Invision Power Board), as in the opinion of the founder, Invision's features and interface is considerably better than all of the competing forum products.
Invision Community was not chosen for three main reasons:
However, XenForo is still behind in many areas, and addons do not always fill the gaps. Here are some examples:
NO GHOST POLICY
Coming soon!
The founder has lots of experience in forum software, and was originally going to choose Invision Community (previously known as Invision Power Board), as in the opinion of the founder, Invision's features and interface is considerably better than all of the competing forum products.
Invision Community was not chosen for three main reasons:
- It lacks the ability to add a prefix. Instead, you have to choose a tag, and then a prefix from the tab. The prefix system is not flexible enough.
- You pay a yearly fee for support and updates, but the support is forum based, with no guarantee that you will receive a staff reply.
- Invision are pushing people to the cloud to a point where most of the new features coming out are cloud only (for no reason other than greed)
However, XenForo is still behind in many areas, and addons do not always fill the gaps. Here are some examples:
- The file check functionality did not detect a deleted navigation php file, which completely removed the menu. There's no menu reset button either.
- The interface is too manual. If you want to hide a menu option from a group, you have to use an expression rather than a selection box. If you want a notice to have a special colour, you have to write custom CSS. You cannot copy permissions across groups. You cannot bulk create anything. Where there is a "save" and "save and edit" button is very inconsistent. If you accidentally force members to agree to terms, you cannot undo it without a database edit.
- The support you receive is inadequate and forum based. The documentation is even worse.
- The template editor is poor, with no ability to revert to a previous edit, no syntax highlighting, no line numbers, and you cannot disable wrapping.
- The text editor cannot be resized and has no full screen functionality.
- There is a "view thread content" permission, which means members can only see thread titles. If they post a thread to the board, they cannot see their own thread content.
- There is no anonymous posting functionality.
- You cannot collapse categories, so if you are not interested in a category, you are forced to see it anyway.
- You cannot lock an individual post, or otherwise stop a member with edit permissions from removing a change that a staff member made.
- You cannot remove the defult profile fields, such as the location field. We were only able to hide them by manually editing the files.
- You cannot stop a boards content from showing up in search results.
NO GHOST POLICY
Coming soon!
