MyBB Community Forums

I warned the developers a long time ago when they started with those childish announcements and replies like "it'll be ready when it's ready".

They saw themselves as some sort of demigods of the forum of the forums elite, talking to us users like they were doing some favour to us by quote/unquote "spoon feeding" us.

I was starting to do some nice stuff, intricate layouts, learning how to make plugins. All the communication wall, the extremely nonchalant responses, the unresponsiveness made me give up.

MyBB's death certificate was issued when they released 1.8 not giving a flying cent to all the plugins that ceased to work. That was fatal.

Not only they didn't help people upgrade the plugin library, they also stopped supporting 1.6.

So all of a sudden MyBB's best asset, the plugins, is reset. That's when most people just quit.

On top of losing all that made MyBB appealing, 1.8 offered no innovation, no steps towards mobile.

How can such intelligent and capable people make so many basic mistakes at so many levels when dealing with the real practical world out there?

Don't take anything I said as an offence. Just think of all I said as a wake-up call. This move towards 1.10 instead of going for a simple and modern 2.0 may be the final nail on the coffin. MyBB might become a Jurassic park for a small elite of vBulletin_3.8-minded nostalgic nerds from the USA, Turkey and Iran.

Good luck.

(2017-12-15, 09:04 AM)Sector Wrote: [ -> ]MyBB's death certificate was issued when they released 1.8 not giving a flying cent to all the plugins that ceased to work. That was fatal.

It's normal for plugins to require (minor) updates when the software they plug into does (major) updates.

Even for the big players... look at Firefox, they just ditched their entire addon library in favour of webextensions because they saw this as the only way to go forward. Most MyBB plugins continued to work with a single line change (compatibility version number). As for incompatible changes, you always have those with updates, it's unavoidable.

(2017-12-15, 09:04 AM)Sector Wrote: [ -> ]So all of a sudden MyBB's best asset, the plugins, is reset.

Hardly a reset. Just not true.

Is their an alternative to MyBB that is mobile friendly then?

Well, not as I'm aware of yet, but I'm not really sure

But you can use some responsive theme

(2017-12-15, 01:32 PM)YeahIamBlond Wrote: [ -> ]Is their an alternative to MyBB that is mobile friendly then?

Yes. Flarum, Discourse and a bunch more.

Quote:So all of a sudden MyBB's best asset, the plugins, is reset. That's when most people just quit.

Agreed. But 1.8x didn't break nearly as much as you think. However, the plan for 2.0 would break everything. That's just not a good plan and I think some of us didn't want to bother with 1.8x knowing it was the end of the branch. Why do anything for 1.8x when 2.0 was maybe 18-24 months away? So it was limbo.

To be fair to the team answering the "when is 2.0 coming" just about every day is tough to do. They couldn't give a release date given the amount of work still needed to be done.

1.8x was misguided. It's not that much of an improvement over 1.6x and was very buggy with a lot of security exploits. We're 3 years from release and they are still fixing stuff. That doesn't give me a lot of confidence in a 2.0 product.

Why oh why oh why didn't MyBB focus on mobile? I just don't get it. But what I really don't understand is why this isn't pushed forward immediately in a 1.10 release. All you gotta do MyBB is one thing...make a default responsive theme and release it as 1.10. That's it. Do that and MyBB is on track again. You want to do it with Twig and if it makes it easier than do it. You don't have to make major changes to get that done. But it will make a huge positive impact for your audience.

MyBB risks losing their base without a responsive theme. And I'm not talking in a year. I think they gotta get this done in a couple months even if it's buggy. Use 1.8x code, convert the entire template system to Twig then make a default responsive theme and release 1.10.

PLEASE!

Flarum is still in beta as I know, I forgot about Discourse...

I recently upgraded to MyBB. We had been running on phpBB 3.0.x for almost a decade, and we realized that our old version of phpBB was no longer being supported and wouldn't support the plugins and features we wanted to add to modernize our site. After careful consideration, we decided that MyBB would be our best choice for a forum platform. I still think MyBB is the best overall forum system out there.

However, independent forums face an uncertain future. Over the past five years, I've watched a lot of forums die, including some that were once fairly active. Forums, especially nonprofit ones, have been hurt by the growth of bigger, better-funded social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Reddit. Also, more people, especially younger ones, now rely on their mobile devices for using the Internet, and a lot of forum themes aren't mobile-optimized.

Forums still serve a vital purpose - they can do many things that social media sites can't do. In my experience, forums that serve a clearly-defined niche have been more successful than "hangout forums".

I can't say much about MyBB development, as I haven't really been paying attention to it. I just download and install the latest patches, and that's about it. When developing anything for the Web, the goalposts are always moving. The pace of technological change is rapid and difficult-to-predict, so it's important to be agile and able to adapt to change. This probably makes development a lot more complex, especially considering that so many people use MyBB for so many different reasons.

Quote:Also, more people, especially younger ones, now rely on their mobile devices for using the Internet, and a lot of forum themes aren't mobile-optimized.

Exactly what's going on. I don't see anywhere near the young audience that I once had joining. They are on mobile all the time and unless were friendly to that environment we'll all be brushed aside.

The biggest strength of MyBB is being able to extend it. But to do so we have to have a reasonable base to work from. Currently we don't have that. Anyone wishing to be mobile friendly has to do an immense amount of work and it also creates broken plugins and updates going forward.

(2017-12-11, 11:02 PM)Whiteneo Wrote: [ -> ]Other mods and themes come up but same situation, so it is hard to tell the team something, because they said me it can not be verify due they have own lifes and more than only see mybb, and i really understand but that is not only for me many developers have the same problem, and i know we are many users and staff have no time to review every mod, or extend day by day.

This team gave the community the middle finger a long time ago. This type of response has become common place on the open forum, but is totally unacceptable. Team members work for free, nobody really expects anything of them. So if any team member feels the need to express such an attitude, why not just withdraw yourself from the team. Come back, when you have more time on your hands, if you want to.

MyBB is so far behind the curve now, that even if they were able to produce a responsive theme, that would not put them on par. The user friendliness of the editor is at least one other issue that needs to be addressed, and is always being raised on the forum. Why CKeditor is not being punted as being incorporated into MyBB is beyond me.