Lack of development?

He was ripped apart for adding nothing to the community and saying the same crap over and over again. As far as you are concerned, your recent appearance on xenForo was a joke as well. Your reply was equal to what you and others complain about xenForo announcements; Full of words and little information that benefits anyone.

When you bought xenForo you all knew that things were uncertain. A lawsuit was at hand. The company suing had hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue comfort zone and were suing three people of a company and then people that weren't even involved in the company. You stuck around and then when the going got tough, you whined. Your ability to see past the order screen at time of purchase is your fault, not xenForo's.

You can jerk each other off about how you predicted this all you want, Mark.B. You haven't actually predicted anything but what anyone with a brain could come up with on their own. Times are hard. Maybe they aren't handling this the best way PR wise. They aren't PR people. They don't have the luxury of being the best at everything in life.

It's pathetic that this has consumed this much time out of your life for a product you have no interest in being involved in. Kier just went through a divorce, apparently, and some of you are taking xenForo breaking your heart harder than he is probably taking the divorce.

I never bought XenForo, which renders your fanboy rant null and void.

This discussion has been mature and sensible until now.
It's no surprise that it's one of the fanboys which brings it down the to the same level as the discussions on xenforo.com.

Not a fanboy at all. Own licenses from vBulletin, xenForo and Invision. Started out with phpBB. If xenForo falls, I will move on to new software. The world, will in fact, not have ended.

As far as never buying xenForo, your rebuttal is quite entertaining. You devoted much, much more time of your life to a product that had an uncertain future. This, no doubt, is why you are so bitter right now. My original point though, remains. Your refusal to see past your commitment to moderating xenForo.com is on you and no one else.

We argue a lot but I agree this time around. Nothing more to add.

You believe what you like.
It was my decision to walk away when I did, for my own reasons.

I still know the truth and you still don't.

I agree with his post because when you left Xenforo, you did so to 'take one for the team'. To prove a point. That point is now null and void after all the negative posts you've made in this thread. Not that it matters but I lost some respect for you as a person because Kier and Mike were your buddies. You helped them out from the beginning but you didn't stick around when the going got tough. And I understood why you didn't because you weren't getting support from them. Now a days you just seem bitter and that ain't manly.

Edit: I probably would be bitter too so I don't blame you.

It's telling that I'm the one being attacked and criticised.

Still, if it helps you to reconcile what has gone on, go ahead.

What are you, 12? Who cares if you know the truth if you aren't going to share? Does it get you off that you can post that on the internet? I don't understand how you posting that shit betters your life or actually improves anything in this situation? How is "I know things that you don't" part of your "mature discussion".

You are not educating anyone anymore than Kier and Mike are right now.

Bamastang's post probably seems like an attack but he's just speaking his mind when most would hold their tongue just out of the respect they still have for you.

You are being attacked and criticized because you are exactly like Kier and Mike. Hell, you are almost worse. You don't provide any information to people yet you post about how you have the information constantly. In some ways, you are worse. You have the opportunity, according to you, to actually shed light on xenForo's situation. However, you would instead brag about this knowledge and reveal nothing.

This is why I don't get involved in any discussions on xenforo.com and limit my input to here.
People like you have turned it into a toxic cesspit, throwing insults and the like around at anyone who doesn't agree with you.

You want answers? Ask the three company owners to provide them.

It's like another form of trolling basically. Not even subconsciously, more in-your-face kind of trolling. You probably don't even realize your doing it.

Stop bragging about having the answers and not sharing with the community. No one is as toxic as you right now. You were well respected and many still do hold you in that regard. So when you show up on xenForo and make a childish coming back post that solves no problems but creates more, then you in fact end up as the toxic person.

So I'm toxic for not providing any answers?

Which would make Kier, Ashley, Mike and now Slavik and Jake what exactly?

Part of the company.

Man I wouldn't even waste my time Bama.

Deluded.

You say that now but if things actually do perk up for the better what would you say then?

When you want to respond to why you feel you need to share no information but claim you have it, you can set yourself to a higher standard than Kier, Mike (whom you claimed you were protecting out of respect) and Ashley.

This basically explains where this has truly become messy: they don't have much skill in community management. This really is a big problem when your customer base is essentially constructed entirely of community managers of various stripes and qualifications. A lot of the reason for armchair vivisection of XenForo is because here we have a bunch of people who in fact are successful at managing a community, finding themselves part of a community that is being mismanaged. Now, methods and strategies can differ wildly as our experiences on this, but here's the key: methods and strategies imply you're actually doing something about it, and XenForo's essentially doing nothing (please don't tell me that post from Ashley was effective community management, it was essentially a rehash filibuster, and with this being something like the fourth time in the past year we've gotten one of these, it's now crossing into the territory of being insultingly patronizing). This lack of action, then, is the primary issue.

Now that I've reiterated my takedown (because my criticism of XF for lacking community management while having a customer base of community managers is as old and tired as the rehashed crap we're getting as "news" nowadays), let me outline where'd I'd start off if, by some warp of fate, it were my responsibility to try and mend fences here.

Let's assume a challenge that I think can be largely backed by what we know: development is stalled for whatever personal reasons for the foreseeable future. This makes "well just back on developing" not an option (there's an entire other post I can write about how XenForo's previous community management philosophy consisted of "throw red meat to the crowd", in which case we can see the obvious issue when the meat's run out, but I'll defer that for the moment too).

Now, then, with nothing "new" out in a long while and nothing "new" hitting the shelf for a while, what do we do?

First off, somebody needs to be officially deputized to deal with the community. Volunteer, probably, considering their financial situation. That introduces some difficulty, but I'll get to that later. This Community Manager needs to clearly have the authority to speak on behalf of XenForo, and to hold the responsibility of dealing with the moderation of the social stuff and in taking on the role of becoming the channel through which communication at the very least appears to happen (that's right: even having something who takes all your concerns and files them into /dev/null when you aren't looking is better than having nobody to file your concerns).

Secondly, get the support guys out of the community moderation/management. They shouldn't be fielding that stuff, it's a gigantic waste of bandwidth, and our new deputy is in charge of handling that now. Let's be frank, very rarely do you run into a technical-minded person who should be handling the day-to-day foofoo of a PR department. Dedication, technical prowess, work ethic and some very hard work are all good things, but they aren't qualifiers for dealing with people effectively.

That's basically it, in short form. In long form we can of course then discuss how our new Community Manager is going to sit down and basically build a channel where the community feels like the organization has a stake in the community again, but I have a tendency to ramble and if I started going into everything I'd do in that person's shoes, I might just be still typing when something finally does happen there.

Now, there are definite challenges. This is going to come rather bluntly, but the biggest thing that is necessary is that Kier needs to be able to get over himself. No, I'm not referring to his real life issues, I'm referring to the fact that by getting an actual representative in his organization, if it's going to actually work, he has to get the hell out of the way. He can't decide in two months after his Community Manager has smoothed things over that now that the daggers are sheathed he can tolerate coming back and get back to just posting videos and discussing his hatred of shoes and expect the rather ridiculous level of adulation from everybody that he used to get with such things. First off, except for the biggest cultists, that ship has sailed, and secondly, he'll just get in the way if he muddies things up with that crap. And that's of course the other part of "getting over himself": he has to be willing to actually cede control of a portion of his baby (managing the community) to somebody else. That's a very hard thing for essentially every entrepreneur to do, and a lot fail at this step so I don't fault him for that as I've seen it time and time again firsthand.

This also isn't a panacea. The most die-hard haters and fanboys will still be haters and fanboys. You can't manage those types anyway, only decide whether or not to expel them when they become overly obnoxious (and that's my own personal definition of the two groups: when you are either antagonizing or white-knighting something so much you've become obnoxious about it, you're now one of the two). And if things are truly swirling around the drain, well... nothing'll fix that. I'm obviously assuming there's something to salvage here, but if there isn't then, well, they can just keep doing what they're doing and they'll get there in time.

Oh yes, and obvious oversimplifications are obvious. I'm aware. Many millions more pixels would have to give up their lives for me to deal with nuance here, so deal with it.