I love MyBB. It's simple, clean and easy to modify, but I'm concerned.
The way I see it, is that MyBB is slowly dying because of the lack of compromise of the community and the developers.
- MyBB 2.0 seems like it's not coming. They had great plans but AFAIK they are in a very early phase of development and even not sure if everything they planned was the way to go. TBH I'm considering moving into another system.
- Lack awareness of the current trends in Internet. You don't have to transform a forum software into a social network, or make it cushy, but the lack of mobile support is worrying. It should come by default, and not force us to go into 3rd party themes with lots of flaws. 40% of my users are mobile, and 60% of my visitors too. That's not only in my forum but also in all the blogs that I own, that are quite a few. I also want to prive for mobile users and I feel that I'm on my own with MyBB.
- There are a bunch of good plugins, but in general most plugins are unmantained. MyAlerts is really basic and I'm worried that it won't get updated anymore.
All this makes MyBB really amateurish. Don't get me wrong I'm really grateful for the effort the MyBB core team made to make this possible, and I don't think I have the right to demand someone who works for free to make it better or whatever, but I think it's necessary to raise awareness.
Quote:All this makes MyBB really amateurish.
I think it just makes them behind the curve. They dropped the ball when it came to choose a plan to 2.0. Instead of focusing on using frameworks and libraries they should have 100% focused on mobile.
Even now, I think they should stop caring about everything except mobile compatibility for 1.10. Everything else, and I mean everything, is unimportant.
Being neat and clever aren't cutting it. Admins need mobile and we need it now. I think MyBB team understands this but they get caught up in the weeds by allowing other parts of development to be involved.
No one honestly cares about anything except having a base design that's responsive. Everything else is backend mumbo-jumbo that's either specific to certain forums or can be done with plugins.
We don't want to see 1.10 break more plugins either. Bad enough to deal with all the template/theme issues but then having to rewrite plugins for things like php 7 compatibility seem secondary to the real need for mobile readiness.
For the most part I don't think the bulk of admins care if the code base uses older standards. Our site visitors don't care either. The big 1.8x difference to members was the use of jQuery but I'll be honest, I think it's poorly done for the most part. My members honestly enjoyed the function of 1.6x better and had no problems with it. Sure Jquery does offer more opportunities and it's nice it was added but did it really improve user experience over the older code? I don't think it did.
There is a certain loss of vision imho when it comes to how the team moves forward with their development plans. You make a plan that makes sense and is doable. Then you go at it and make it happen. What you don't do is sort of think about maybe get opinions then one day code some and more wait wait wait okay maybe blah blah...then nothing.
Put the responsive theme on the top of the list for 1.10 and begin the work. Stop doing anything that isn't part of that goal.
I wonder who is going to agree with me?
(2017-12-11, 07:57 PM)Euan T Wrote: [ -> ]Have you read this? https://blog.mybb.com/2017/10/21/a-fresh-perspective/
- As an act of compromise given the slow development of 2.0, the team are currently focusing on 1.10, which is a new feature version that starts to bring modern standards to MyBB's legacy codebase. It also brings new features, such as a responsive theme, alerts, etc. Sugegstions for 1.10 can be found here: https://community.mybb.com/forum-199.html
- Again, see the above suggestions forum, and the planned features subforum: https://community.mybb.com/forum-194.html
- MyAlerts is fairly basic, but it is still mostly maintained whenever it breaks. The plan it to integrate alerts with the core of 1.10, which would massively improve it and lead to there being better support for it as a core feature.
Thank you, I didn't see the post, I'll try to participate a bit more in those threads.
(2017-12-11, 08:12 PM)labrocca Wrote: [ -> ]Quote:All this makes MyBB really amateurish.
I think it just makes them behind the curve. They dropped the ball when it came to choose a plan to 2.0. Instead of focusing on using frameworks and libraries they should have 100% focused on mobile.
Even now, I think they should stop caring about everything except mobile compatibility for 1.10. Everything else, and I mean everything, is unimportant.
Being neat and clever aren't cutting it. Admins need mobile and we need it now. I think MyBB team understands this but they get caught up in the weeds by allowing other parts of development to be involved.
No one honestly cares about anything except having a base design that's responsive. Everything else is backend mumbo-jumbo that's either specific to certain forums or can be done with plugins.
We don't want to see 1.10 break more plugins either. Bad enough to deal with all the template/theme issues but then having to rewrite plugins for things like php 7 compatibility seem secondary to the real need for mobile readiness.
For the most part I don't think the bulk of admins care if the code base uses older standards. Our site visitors don't care either. The big 1.8x difference to members was the use of jQuery but I'll be honest, I think it's poorly done for the most part. My members honestly enjoyed the function of 1.6x better and had no problems with it. Sure Jquery does offer more opportunities and it's nice it was added but did it really improve user experience over the older code? I don't think it did.
There is a certain loss of vision imho when it comes to how the team moves forward with their development plans. You make a plan that makes sense and is doable. Then you go at it and make it happen. What you don't do is sort of think about maybe get opinions then one day code some and more wait wait wait okay maybe blah blah...then nothing.
Put the responsive theme on the top of the list for 1.10 and begin the work. Stop doing anything that isn't part of that goal.
I wonder who is going to agree with me?
Well, I'm not a developer but I can understand my users needs. 100% that mobile is top priority. The frontend is the problem really, and what my users care about is about user experience.
I don't think that any of them care if I use another template system. They want to use their mobile phones and be able to participate.
If I had to sort my priorities it would be: 1) Mobile 2) MyAlerts as default. 3) Everything else.
Quote:If I had to sort my priorities it would be: 1) Mobile 2) MyAlerts as default. 3) Everything else.
And that's what I think the team doesn't fully understand. The very serious dire situation for many admins running MyBB which is now very far behind when it comes to mobile compatibility. We're losing popularity and members.
I don't give a crap what frameworks are used. All pointless if I don't have any visitors because my site isn't mobile friendly.
Yeah that's wird but many of us have to work into plugins and develop many friendly plugins, i use my own GoMobile versions and keep it up to date, and a nice design for pc, so i have many users into my forums, but they want tapatalk, that is a very unsecure app for mybb. You never understand what users want all i try to do is keep myself and users with nice add ons and more, but at this point i have to work more and more everyday
I know mybb team is very bussy, because many times i have sent mods, themes or more and it takes sometimes a day and sometimes more than a year to validate or review the mod. I have a mod for 1.6.x that was never reviewed and was lost since 1.6.10 i have sent it and there is 1.6.18 version and the new 1.8 until 1.8.14 and that mod is still waiting validation
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.
I think mybb is good and goes fine in the right direction, the only problem here is mybb is free and maybe it needs some patreons like other stuff to work on it seriously as a paid project and retribution for they awesome job
All the required stuff is posible but users wants it all for free, quick, easy and with support. Sometimes we need to pay to get some parts working at our own needs. And it is not expensive like other scripts i have verified many of them and every customizations is a paid one and the prices are like 15 or 25 dollars, but mybb have many of that features for free and many good free plugins.
I've been out of the forum scene since 2013. I've recently got back into it and most of the forums I used to know have either died or significantly decreased. It also seems like the average age of the forum member has increased by a lot. That tells me that it's the same people still on forums. Are forums attracting new members to forums?
I feel like forums are on the decline and most I've looked at have decreased in activity. Mobile use is obviously up and forums usually aren't laid out the best for that. I think mybb is simple to use and view, but there's a large group that think mybb is outdated.
Forums in general are on the decline imo. Factor that in with not being compatible with how possibly 30-50% visitors reach your site and being somewhat outdated. I enjoy mybb, but yeah I'd say there's a risk.
From a semi-developer point of view, using nice frameworks and templating systems actually allows these mobile friendly changes to be made much faster and secure.
Sometimes you need to build the foundations before building the roof
Quote:Are forums attracting new members to forums?
No, we are not. And it's in direct relation to mobile friendliness. Google itself has penalized sites that aren't mobile friendly. So we are all losing out in search results. Members want SEO friendly URLs all the time but that's unimportant in comparison to mobile friendly.
https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/6196932?hl=en
Quote:Starting April 21, 2015, Google Search will be expanding its use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal. This change will affect mobile searches in all languages worldwide and will have a significant impact in Google Search results
Notice the
significant impact part?
MyBB team needs to quickly address this.
We all can't just custom alter our forums to be responsive because we will break many functions and upgrades and cause a lot of extra work which some of us don't have the expertise to deal with.