Quick Site News

[Nix]

Welcome to the new ARCHIVED xenfans.com community.

Update: January 2012

The XenFans.com Community is running in Archive mode, ​

allowing you to login, view discussions and download attachments.​

Is registration free? Yes! (always)
http://xenfans.com/register

Can I get a premium membership? No! (entries locked)
From July 1st, 2011 we no longer accept new premium account upgrades.

Can I post to help others? Yes!
We highly motivate you to assist those who can use help.

Is this the official xenforo limited business site? No!
We're a xenforo enthousiast community. xenforo.com is the only official site.

How new and exciting is all this xenforo news? Very!
We're certain you and I are not the only one. So welcome to the xenforo universe - sign up for an account, browse around for information and news. Share or download resources. And read or contribute to documentation.

History and the Future
We've started this site near the end of June '10 with a blog, and have extended to articles and interviews, and have been helping alpha test the product since alpha 2, and are excited to have the beta 1 version running publicly here.

We welcome everybody and hope you sign up, participate and learn / share something. And if you have a xenfans web site feel free to point it to ours or contact us on how we can work together. We see other non-commercial xenfans sites as colleagues rather than competitors, of course.

Of course, since it's a beta, things might change, might go wrong, or simply explode. Regardless, we're happy to hear from you so feel free to leave a comment, complaint, bug report or other feedback. Together we can improve the xenforo products and services, as well as the xenfans ones, our site here, and of course your own xenforo powered site. Do allow us some time to get organized, make sections of the site public, and introduce our team.

XF and xf, or xF, etc?
We consider the xenforo company to be called: XenForo Ltd. And therefor we will prioritize spelling to: XenForo and abbreviate it to XF.
We consider the xenfans.com web site to be called: xenfans. And therefor we will prioritize spelling to: xenfans and abbreviate it xf.
We try to avoid using xF or xenForo, but it's not against our rules of course.

 

[Floris]

Quick Site Update: Wednesday; October 6, 2010

Worked on testing the reported bugs at xenforo during the night, and prepped the site for a revamp. So we could go live with the xenforo beta 1 forum.
Documentation for the user-guide is prepared by Nix, and I've worked on the layout for the pages where we will host them. We're hoping everybody likes it.
I've worked on prepping the forum structure, so we have a logical start and we can grow from there with monthly reviews.
I've worked on prepping the pages structure, as well as the templates - so our site makes more sense to newcomers.

We've populated the forums with important content, and went through the back-end and hope that the beta 1 will run stable enough to be live-tested by our visitors. And we will open the site, while we're working on it. Slowly updating the header, the pages markup and the documentation content as we have time for it.

More news soon!

 

[Floris]

Known and confirmed issue. If you register and login with Facebook: Works fine.
If you register with Facebook you get 'invalid value' <-- sucks, we know We're looking into it!

 

[Floris]

We've been prepping the user-guides for a while, and have written additional sections. But we have to start somewhere. We've also marked up the Pages node, so it's to our liking. And yes, we will be publishing these instructions once we have a bit more user experience under the skin (so hopefully those instructions are as good as they go).

Nix has been helping write the documentation, and I've helped make the Page node markup and putting it all together.

Today on XenFans.com we've started with the first batch and made it public.

You can view it here: http://xenfans.com/pages/how-to-begin/

It's a resource for everybody, but our work. We will of course update it as we get feedback, correct what is perhaps wrong (things changed during alpha->beta->final stage) and we will extend on it with video @ vimeo walkthroughs that are good quality, short and simple.

Linking to the content from your site is obviously appreciated, you might think it benefits your members, help your staff, or yourself, to learn more about XenForo.

Users are of course also welcome to write up something and submit it to us, we have no problem giving you full credits.

Videos if we embed them are free to be remotely embedded.

Text and images however is our work, we rather you consider fair-use than blatantly copy/paste everything. If you do desire to link to it all, please contact us on contact@xenfans.com for written permission. Those who ask get a lot further!

The user-guide is finished for 25% which is the part: how to begin.
Tomorrow we will make another 25% public, which will be: all about posting.
By the end of the weekend we will have hopefully finished the whole user-guide section, covering 'your account preferences' section and the 'social' section.

I think it's worth a mention. As we worked hard on it, and we hope it is a useful resource to you and your members.

Future user-guides are hopefully crowd sources, and we populate those as we run into those questions. So don't be shy to ask for anything. We will do our best to make easy to understand documentation for newcomers to the board. Which can be a resource for your staff.

Enjoy! http://xenfans.com/pages/documentation/

 

[Floris]

Quick Site Update: Thursday; October 7, 2010

We've updated the header with new tabs, access to the 'old blog' has been restored.
We've also updated our policies page; which you can find here: http://xenfans.com/help/terms
And shortly we will be moving the products/services WordPress 'pages' to XenForo 'pages'.

 

[Floris]

Today we've gone ahead and put the content online from the user-guide "All about Posting". This is for newcomers who want to learn how to participate in discussions (or how to make new ones) and explains how to extend their posts with smilies and (media) attachments. To name a few things. You can find the documentation here: http://xenfans.com/pages/all-about-posting/

 

[Floris]

Quick Site Update: Sunday; October 10, 2010

We've taken the weekend off to relax with a beer on the irc chat room with Kier and the others to discuss the awesomeness of XenForo and how much we're enjoying it. Of course .. we've talked to the people on the forums and we're processing the feedback to improve the site. Such as updates to the documentation, testing of submitted add-ons and building of todo lists, as well as thinking about upcoming projects and what not. Oh, and we've got a plugin installed (until beta 2) to test the node collapse/expand plugin by Cezz.

Quite amazing how we've got over 75 members and over 300 posts in just a few days. If only we could fix the facebook connect issue.

Got any tips for users or developers? Or perhaps know the answer to a question? Or maybe you have a question or a friend to invite to the site? Post it here, and invite your friends. We might not look as much right now, but those who know me know I take my time, have a roadmap I work to, and while we started with a blog, we've now got a forum (and the blog is still live) and we're working on the documentation section. We've got a few more things to come, so stay tuned.

 

[Floris]

Psst, http://wetalknation.net is converting away from 20 vBulletin powered networked sites into 1 XenForo powered community.

 

[Floris]

Quick Site Update: Monday; October 11, 2010

We've finally had time to sit down with the guys from XenForo and Cezz and test and debug the Facebook issue we had. And figured it out yay .. *(cheer). People can now properly associate accounts and new users can now properly register an account via Facebook.

In other news, wetalknation.net has been converted to XenForo, and running great.

 

[Floris]

Quick Site Update: Tuesday; October 12, 2010

Not only have we improved a few tiny things to the template (so it loads faster) we've also improved the dedicated server, you should notice a significant enough speed bump.

We've also worked more on our documentation structure, in preparation of making more data public. Keep an eye on the user-guide as we will complete another part of it today. If anybody wants to submit their own user guides please let me know. We're very interested in publishing your work (with your credits).

The Resources forum has been extended with a Releases sub forum, your submitted releases are moved into it. This is (for the moment) the place to upload and download releases (such as graphics, addons, styles, etc). Other resources, and guides, tips and tricks are still in their old spot. If you have any recommendations for our forum structure you can always poke one of our team members.

In other news; Rumor has it that in the next couple of days beta 2 of XenForo will be out. Keep an eye on our announcement forum so you don't miss it.

 

[Floris]

Premium Account - Give-Away

We're quite new, and we know it. But thanks to the contributions of a few users we've been able to get the first 100 registrations and first 500 posts. Thank you! In return we've been working hard on the documentation, our site, and are now also giving away a few Premium accounts; And we won't have many of these on xenfans.

The first member that registered was Doctor, thank you! It didn't take long after I opened the site again, and he was already a member.

Our first VIP guest Kier has taken the time out of his busy schedule to hang out on our forums and our chat room to answer a few questions.

And one of the first full fledged add-ons (though we received quite a few in a short period of time that were all amazing) was submitted by KingKovifor who's been nothing but a great resource and support guy on the site.

Their accounts have been updated to Premium. And they won't expire.

Normally a premium account grants users access to our client-area for a period of time. Any xenfans.com release or service discount available in that period is up for grabs. So these people are quite lucky!

And normally to get a Premium upgrade a user has to donate to our community, but we're giving away two more Premium upgrades with no time limit to a couple of users. After that, a donation is the only option for this year.

All you have to do is do something interesting, something unique, contribute to our community in a way our staff notices, or just be super friendly. We're browsing around and participating in threads, and we're always keeping an eye open. If you get spotted by a team member you could be the one getting a Premium account upgrade at no cost.

Disclaimer: There are currently no products or services-discounts available, but we're working on it, obviously

 

[Floris]

The Client-Area forum has now been made private and is only accessible to team and premium members.

 

[Floris]

Quick Site Update: Thursday; October 14, 2010

There is finally a custom favorite icon added to the wetalk/xenfans sites. I am sure someone can make a better one. If you are up for the task feel free to, and if we like it we will use it. A premium membership might be waiting for you.

We've finally had the time to make the Your Account Preferences section public, it's under the documentation > user guide. Direct link: http://xenfans.com/pages/account-preferences/ We're still looking for feedback, so if you have a better image, a video or want to otherwise contribute, please do so! There's a feedback forum but you can also just send me a PC on the site.

Other bugs and features are still being tested and played with. We might put new features up, but during this early beta it does not mean they will stay. The next big update to our site will be beta 2, I can't wait!

We've added EzIRC live chat to our XenForo installation. Test it out here: http://xenfans.com/chat/ or install it yourself via http://vbirc.com/xenforo

 

[Floris]

Services Information

Since a few months ago we've been writing an internal tool to help our friends convert from another forum product to vBulletin 3.8 - even from vB4 to vB3. Brandon has been added to our team and has received great feedback on vbfans.com and xenfans.com. With XenForo now out we've got more requests and more experience. Additional forum products to vB3 and Blog to vB3 support has been added. And we've lowered our prices and increase the amount of posts as a discount for September/October. With a few weeks left I felt it was worth pointing out if you're waiting and considering to move away from a forum product to XenForo this might be the right time - and I hope we can help.

We also have other services available, such as Moving, Backing Up, and XenForo Installations, even System Administration Services. If you need a professional backup, your site moved between hosts, or need help with installing forum software .. XenFans.com has trained team members that can assist you for a fee. Contact us for details.

The Installation service is now optimized and we are ready to lower our prices during October and November to $16 ($4 base price included). Let us know if you require any help.

Unofficial services such as unofficial support during the beta period is available via our public support forum or private ticket system. As well as our live irc chat channel. The Team and our Members are standing by to answer your questions. We help where we can, and learn from each other. For free. If we don't have the answer, perhaps someone else has.

 

[Floris]

Another update

I've spend today figuring out and testing the PayPal update system as well as the APC caching - so account upgrades should go through just fine from now one. (Also updated wetalk btw). And the pages should load a bit more snappy. We've found a few issues with both features and have addressed them. If you got any mails with broken links: Woops! Sorry about that. This should now have been sorted. If you still get them after the time of this post, please let me know and I will look into it again. The maintenance also meant we had to turn off the site or restart apache a few times, maybe you run into a page saying 'can not connect' - this was intentional but required to fix the matter. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Enjoy!

 

[Floris]

Quick Site Update: Saturday; October 16, 2010

It seems that the XenFans mugs have arrived .. sneak preview

 

[Floris]

Quick Site Update: Sunday; October 17, 2010

Information about the XenFans.com newsletters have been posted, including a copy of the blog-newsletter we mailed out earlier this month to our xenfans.com/blog members.

Newsletters

 

[Floris]

Quick Site Update: Tuesday; October 19, 2010

The user-guide 'first edition' is now complete. The sections we wanted and the articles in there are now public: http://xenfans.com/pages/social/

I want to thank Nix for her awesome contribution in writing it all and doing all the images. And I was glad to help structure and organize it so users can browse it and learn from it.

 

[Floris]

Quick Site Update: Friday; October 22, 2010

The last few days we've been reading through our list of received emails and personal conversations on various web sites. We're organizing all the input and comparing it to what I had planned or desire to have. Working together with xenDirectory, xenAddicts, xenFy and a few other great XenForo enthusiast sites is a priority and wish we had since June/July. I wanted to let you guys know we're not forgetting you. We're a bit overwhelmed with the communication and the amount of new content our site. The contributions by everybody are just amazing.

This week I've also been focussing on the guides and documentation again. Ben and Hagai have been writing a bunch of great developer and moderator guides. Nix and gnatster have been providing feedback (and processing it) to our documentation and I have been working on moving the blog content to our XenForo installation (away from WordPress) and putting the last of our earlier prepared user-guide documentation online.

We've announced the other day that Beta 2 has been released, and in the meantime xenfans.com has been upgraded. I've been testing some old bugs, compared features against beta 1, and re-applied our customizations in a more optimized manner again to the new templates. I am quite pleased with the improvements.

Behind the scenes I've been working on the server a bit, adding APC for improved page loading for example. I've published a guide about this to share my findings.

 

[Floris]

Quick Site Update: October 23, 2010

After spotting a glimpse of Kier's demo of posts with most likes, my brain immediately went to the list of features that I wanted. I've made a simple revamp called 'Popular' based on Kier's code, and asked Ceri May to assist me finishing the product. It's unique to our site and currently not shared. But I think our users will like it.

Addon for XenForo version 1, beta 2, "Popular" which is running live here: http://xenfans.com/popular

Thank you Kier and Ceri!

 

[Floris]

We've enabled the network & user bar in the top. Based on permission one will see either the login drop down, the user bar, or the user bar with moderating tools. Content on this bar might change slightly in the coming weeks when we fine tune it, but it's intended to be very static and always there.

If anybody wants the code, it's currently available to our Premium Members.

 

[Floris]

Quick Site Update: Sunday; October 24, 2010

We've finished version 0.0.1 of the node: Page template mod.

** Helps tweak the layout and css for the node Page, making publishing content much easier.
** Respects style properties and your board colors
** Only one template edit, no css customizations needed
** Puts page stats into a pretty footer
** Adds admin-only edit button in footer for quick page editing

If anybody wants the code, it's currently available to our Premium Account members.



Additionally a sneak peak preview image has been posted of the xenfans cleancut style as being made by Brian. We're looking for first impressions feedback before publishing it to our Premium (and later everybody) members.

 

[Floris]

A minor tweak to our style has been made, allowing for a fun background and a glass border around the content. I think a small hint as to what's more to come in the coming months. More after beta 3!

 

[Mikey]

Looks GREAT!