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- Jan 1, 2001
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Quick Site News: Monday; March 7, 2011
The last half year I have been analyzing my ideas behind XenFans and the traffic to and from this web site. We're a great bunch of creative people with good community web sites and we're all in the same universe when it comes to bulletin board software systems and building or running communities. And we all are member on a lot of communities we all enjoy being a part of.
We support each other via contributions, sharing resources or helping out where we can.
I have been updating our 'goal' of what I want to achieve with the web site here for short and long term. And adjusting our strategy as we grow, and based on the natural flow of our community here.
One of the speculations I had was the company name, and as it turns out investing in xenfans.com for $9 was not a mistake. And another speculation was that we will see a 6 months beta stage. Overlaying my personal plans with this site I assumed that the stable release might be early Q2 or end of Q1 2011. (First I thought it would be sooner, but understandably the claims filed against them might have pushed things forward a bit).
With todays announcement by XenForo Limited we now know that on March 8th (tomorrow) we can expect the first stable release. Together with my plans for the site it's time for some minor changes to xenfans.com (some slightly announced earlier this month).
We had scheduled to increase some of our prices by the end of Q1 2011, with the release of XenForo 1 stable, I green flagged this. But my plan to increase our prices quarterly has been adjusted to be yearly now. Expect no further price increases this year. A few services we've invested in will be discontinued in April as well. And we might adjust the specifics of a few of our services as xenforo increases offering theirs.
Other changes such as products, styles and documentation, support, and whatever else we're offering will be rescheduled to have their life cycle increased, as well as to be developed faster. Now that we know the core engine of XenForo to only improve, and not just change (due to beta stage) we can invest in spec-policies to help bring consistency to our styles, add-ons, and such. In return for your contributions to our site, your membership and your donations, we share what we have the best we can. If we add a promoted users to our frontpage, expect us to release it as an add-on in Spring. If we introduce an April Fools Day style tweaks on our site, expect us to share it with our members before April 1st.
The Premium Accounts is an exclusive club and we're revamping it to as such. If you're interested in being part of the club please consider an account upgrade. This summer we will discontinue the premium account upgrade and extend everybody that ever became or is a premium member to expire on 31st of December 2011 (plans for 2012 are uncertain at this point and I don't desire to speculate).
With the increase of prices for our services and products, we return this to our premium members by increasing every discount from whatever it is to 50% at some point in Spring.
The above are a few changes that we will do internally and publicly. And they will not happen overnight, but a preview of what's to come this Spring/Summer is worth a mention.
Let's start by upgrading XenFans.com to the stable build first, and publish our monthly March newsletter on the 8th or 9th of March.
Talking about the newsletter, if you're interested in having your web site linked at the bottom of the March newsletter tomorrow, please contact me. It costs $25 but it will be mailed to over 450 people, and included in our newsletter thread where we publish our newsletter.
The last half year I have been analyzing my ideas behind XenFans and the traffic to and from this web site. We're a great bunch of creative people with good community web sites and we're all in the same universe when it comes to bulletin board software systems and building or running communities. And we all are member on a lot of communities we all enjoy being a part of.
We support each other via contributions, sharing resources or helping out where we can.
I have been updating our 'goal' of what I want to achieve with the web site here for short and long term. And adjusting our strategy as we grow, and based on the natural flow of our community here.
One of the speculations I had was the company name, and as it turns out investing in xenfans.com for $9 was not a mistake. And another speculation was that we will see a 6 months beta stage. Overlaying my personal plans with this site I assumed that the stable release might be early Q2 or end of Q1 2011. (First I thought it would be sooner, but understandably the claims filed against them might have pushed things forward a bit).
With todays announcement by XenForo Limited we now know that on March 8th (tomorrow) we can expect the first stable release. Together with my plans for the site it's time for some minor changes to xenfans.com (some slightly announced earlier this month).
We had scheduled to increase some of our prices by the end of Q1 2011, with the release of XenForo 1 stable, I green flagged this. But my plan to increase our prices quarterly has been adjusted to be yearly now. Expect no further price increases this year. A few services we've invested in will be discontinued in April as well. And we might adjust the specifics of a few of our services as xenforo increases offering theirs.
Other changes such as products, styles and documentation, support, and whatever else we're offering will be rescheduled to have their life cycle increased, as well as to be developed faster. Now that we know the core engine of XenForo to only improve, and not just change (due to beta stage) we can invest in spec-policies to help bring consistency to our styles, add-ons, and such. In return for your contributions to our site, your membership and your donations, we share what we have the best we can. If we add a promoted users to our frontpage, expect us to release it as an add-on in Spring. If we introduce an April Fools Day style tweaks on our site, expect us to share it with our members before April 1st.
The Premium Accounts is an exclusive club and we're revamping it to as such. If you're interested in being part of the club please consider an account upgrade. This summer we will discontinue the premium account upgrade and extend everybody that ever became or is a premium member to expire on 31st of December 2011 (plans for 2012 are uncertain at this point and I don't desire to speculate).
With the increase of prices for our services and products, we return this to our premium members by increasing every discount from whatever it is to 50% at some point in Spring.
The above are a few changes that we will do internally and publicly. And they will not happen overnight, but a preview of what's to come this Spring/Summer is worth a mention.
Let's start by upgrading XenFans.com to the stable build first, and publish our monthly March newsletter on the 8th or 9th of March.
Talking about the newsletter, if you're interested in having your web site linked at the bottom of the March newsletter tomorrow, please contact me. It costs $25 but it will be mailed to over 450 people, and included in our newsletter thread where we publish our newsletter.
news forum. We've also upgraded the board to 1.0.1, looking forward to 1.1 or 1.0.2 - we have yet to hear any confirmation (officially) about the next release (anybody know? Link us!).
