vBulletin vs. XenForo

[Chris D]

Firstly I have to stress: This is not about whether you like Halflife2.net vs ValveTime.net.

I just have a personal interest in hearing your opinions on the forum software we're now using. Of course for many years we used vBulletin 2.x, 3.x and 4.x before recently changing to XenForo.

XenForo is pretty new. You may not have used it before. You may be much more used to the user experience of vBulletin and others. But have we made the right decision?

Again: This is not about whether you like Halflife2.net vs ValveTime.net. Not about whether you like how it looks or colour schemes. This is purely about the functionality of the two pieces of software.

Just choose your answer in the poll.

Thanks

 

[ríomhaire]

It has some nice features. I don't really like the WYSIWYG editor though. I was able to disable that in vBulletin but I haven't been able to find any such options in the new one. Also, both have needlessly flashy boxes for attaching images/videos/etc. Can't you just have a simple, fast, clean javascript pop-up?

 

[Chris D]

It has some nice features. I don't really like the WYSIWYG editor though. I was able to disable that in vBulletin but I haven't been able to find any such options in the new one. Also, both have needlessly flashy boxes for attaching images/videos/etc. Can't you just have a simple, fast, clean javascript pop-up?

Interesting feedback.

I'm beginning to love the WYSIWYG editor, personally, even though I hated vBulletin's and always turned it off.

If you're attaching YouTube videos, I believe as long as you just paste the YouTube URL in, it will automatically embed it for you. Though I might be wrong on that. I'll have to check. Same, I guess, could be said for Images but you'd have to wrap them in [img] tags.

EDIT: By the way, if you'd like to disable the rich text editor permanently there is an option in your Account Preferences.

 

[Chris D]

Just testing something.

EDIT: Yes, you can easily embed a supported video via just pasting in the URL. We should, in theory, be able to quite easily add more. So, for example, if another video sharing service is popular, we could provide similarly easy embedding etc.

 

[Vegeta897]

Like Riom said, I think the reply box is the only thing I don't like about XenForo. Everything else is pretty nice. I love the alerts. And I don't know if the image embedding is stock XenForo, but it's basically the best possible embedding I could ask for. Which is no simple feat.

 

[Robbo]

I haven't really used this to offer a fair opinion.
I liked the layout of vBulletin, it seemed to be simpler where in this there seems to be a lot more going on with the layout.

But like I said, I'm sure that in time I figure this out and the developers will polish the interface a bit.

 

[Chris D]

Like Riom said, I think the reply box is the only thing I don't like about XenForo. Everything else is pretty nice. I love the alerts. And I don't know if the image embedding is stock XenForo, but it's basically the best possible embedding I could ask for. Which is no simple feat.

Yes it is stock XenForo. Glad you like it

As I said above, it can be turned off if you prefer. It will just mean you'll need to do everything using bbcode, which, we're all comfortable with, I'm sure.

We could turn it off globally, but we won't. I genuinely believe it to be better for most people.

 

[Chris D]

I haven't really used this to offer a fair opinion.
I liked the layout of vBulletin, it seemed to be simpler where in this there seems to be a lot more going on with the layout.

But like I said, I'm sure that in time I figure this out and the developers will polish the interface a bit.

Hmm, we may have made the layout busier. I don't know. What aspects are you referring to in particular? To see a stock XenForo installation you could check out their forums http://www.xenforo.com/community.

 

[Vegeta897]

As I said above, it can be turned off if you prefer. It will just mean you'll need to do everything using bbcode, which, we're all comfortable with, I'm sure.

This isn't much of a compromise. There's no logical reason we can't have all these convenient buttons and not have it be WYSIWYG. I'm not sure why disabling WYSIWYG also turns off all the functions.

As it stands, the inconvenience of removing formatting and dealing with large pictures while making a post are worth keeping all these buttons. But it's still not preferable to the old way.

 

[Krynn72]

I've not had any trouble with this system yet. Like it a lot.

 

[Chris D]

This isn't much of a compromise. There's no logical reason we can't have all these convenient buttons and not have it be WYSIWYG. I'm not sure why disabling WYSIWYG also turns off all the functions.

As it stands, the inconvenience of removing formatting and dealing with large pictures while making a post are worth keeping all these buttons. But it's still not preferable to the old way.

I think I need someone to explain to me in detail exactly what the problem is with the editor. I've never had problems with it. There were initially issues with it pulling every single bit of formatting from the source such as background colour, font colour etc. but we fixed this.

 

[Vegeta897]

Inserting large images makes them appear in full size in the reply box. This is needlessly cumbersome.

That's about the only complaint since the format pasting is fixed.

But ideally it would be cool if you could just have all formatting and elements shown in code, but still have all the buttons in the toolbar.

 

[Krynn72]

For images/videos, I agree. I dont care so much about text and seeing the code for making italics, but images and video showing up while you're creating/editing posts isnt ideal, simply because of how much space they take up which makes them get in the way.

 

[Vegeta897]

Yeah I can agree on that. Sometimes I just like knowing exactly what formatting is going on in something, because it's not always completely obvious.

 

[ríomhaire]

As well as what Vegeta was saying about the embedding there's also issue when you're trying to avoid the embedding. If you paste an image URL it will often paste as a URL instead of just plain text which messes up any [IMG ] tags around the URL, so you have to break the link to get it to work properly.

Edit: Just discovered another issue. I originally had a normal [IMG ] tag without the space there originally but because I never closed it it tried to extend the image tag to the rest of the post, causing the rest of the post to just appear as a broken image, also practically erasing the text for me seeing as when I opened the WYSIWYG editor it just showed the broken image, not the text is was trying to read as a URL.

 

[Yorick]

The WYSIWYG editor annoys the shit out of me too. It's too ingrained in XenForo to be able to really change it over to something else, but I definitely looked into it.

This is the first I've worked with XenForo, and I find it (both as a user and as a developer) to be far better than vBulletin. The problem is that vBulletin has been around for over a decade, and it just keeps having new things built on top of it. They really need to throw everything out and start over. Given how slowly vBulletin 4 has had releases coming out, I think either that that's what they're doing now, or that vBulletin is like, dead.

I definitely have a few qualms with XenForo, but they're almost entirely dev-end stuff. I think I've managed to find a plugin, or get Chris to write one, for everything that I've wanted to implement.

 

[Robbo]

Hmm, we may have made the layout busier. I don't know. What aspects are you referring to in particular? To see a stock XenForo installation you could check out their forums http://www.xenforo.com/community.

I guess I was just noticing more stuff around the posts themselves. Having looked at the stock layout though I much prefer this one, the posts aren't separated properly in that one. I do like the new layout overall though!

 

[Bad^Hat]

Echoing other people's complaints about the reply box, in particular the image/video dialog boxes, they're so damn cumbersome to use. Besides that I don't really have any issues with it, everything's pretty smooth in general. Speaking of which, those issues I had with things not responding seem to have sorted themselves out, hooray!