Hi Folks,
Just wanted to share with you guys my story of moving from vBulletin to Xenforo ~6 months ago and back to vBulletin last week. In my book Xenforo is good software but vBulletin (4.2) is great software.
About 6 months ago, I decided to move to Xenforo for varying reasons but mostly I thought it was superior to vBulletin and I was still cheesed about the licensing change here at vB. Xenforo does look nicer and all the Facebook like AJAXy interaction is pretty sweet. What XF has in style it lacks in substance. I did several test imports and even had my members kick the tires on the test install for a while.
All was well and great and we moved over to a live install. The import went well. Initially, some users were impressed but the biggest gripe was the default fonts. A quick CSS change and that was fixed. Over time a small group of members became more vocal about not liking the software. One guy swore the editor stunk and was flaky. I couldn't reproduce the issue for the longest time and didn't believe him. A while later 2 more members reported the editor issue. Finally, I ran into not being able to add text when editing a post and said so "Oh, that's what they're talking about". The post editor is core functionality. A look at the XF forums shows it's a longstanding issue that hasn't been patched. What the ....
That was the beginning of the end of Xenforo on my site. Something the test install didn't highlight was the utter lack of admin tools like merge user among many other things. Heck, it cannot even email me when someone registers. I found a mod for that but that's not the point. Registrations went from ~10 per week to maybe 3 with Xenforo.
I realize it's still young software but updates with XF are practically nill. In 6 months I upgraded my board once. Developers are mum about when the infamous 1.2 is actually coming.
vBulletin ran a sale last month and I pulled the trigger on a forum only license at a decent discount. I didn't want the full suite. I'd previously run it on this site and never used the CMS. None of my member's used the blogs so a vanilla forum is perfect for us. A couple of test imports went well and we moved back to vBulletin last Friday.
Members seem to be happier. Registerations are at 3-5 per day now. vBulletin is like an old tennis shoe to me; No matter how unrulely the ACP can be with options scattered everywhere it's home for me and I fell right back into admin'ing things the vBulletin way.
Anywho, I know for a while it was 'the cool thing' to move to XF. I just wanted you guys to know the grass isn't always greener on the other side. I could've saved myself a lot of time and effort if I'd just stuck around until 4.2. Now I'm looking forward to vB 5!