xda-developers: Big Changes To XDA Forums are Coming Soon

Tuesday, September 22, 2020

Big Changes To XDA Forums are Coming Soon

Today we have some news to share: over the coming weeks, we will be launching a ground-up forum redesign, which we’re calling XDA 2020. We’ve outgrown vBulletin (which was never designed to handle a community our size) and are moving to XenForo, a more modern platform that powers some of the biggest and best forum communities that you might already be a part of. While it’s difficult to pick an exact date for such a large project, we’re currently targeting mid-October 2020 to make this change and we’ll communicate more specifics as we get closer to the date.

While we’ll be gaining a lot with XenForo, including a new forum design with multiple templates from which to choose (two dark modes, two light modes, and even a “classic” template that is similar to the look of the forum today) and overall much better performance, there are a handful of XDA features and products that we’ll be sunsetting. Doing so ensures we can confidently take a step into the future and make a break with some of the more resource-intense features of the past that our small technical team is unable to support. Some of these features you may not have heard of, which is fine; many of them launched without fanfare and aren’t used much.

All DevDB threads will revert to regular threads. DevDB Downloads will be removed, and we are significantly increasing the max file size for the attachment system on Xenforo. Any files uploaded via DevDB should be downloaded as they will be removed by 12/31/2020. To help ease the transition, we’re working on a mechanism to contact developers that have files on DevDB to provide download links and suggestions on hosting files elsewhere.
Real Life Review will be imported and flattened with no interactivity for now. We have some exciting future plans for reviews in the community that we’ll share a later date.
Our current search system, powered by Algolia, will be replaced by Threadloom, which is built for forums, and in our view gives a better search experience.
The main XDA app on the Play store will undergo a major update in the coming weeks to work with the new forum backend. Support for XDA Labs is tentatively ending at the end of this year, but we’re exploring options to keep it going, because we know that a small handful of developers use Labs to distribute their app. We’re hoping to open source and find a team to take the reins and continue development, and if you’re a developer that wants to work on Labs, send a PM to svetius. We’d be delighted if Labs could continue, but as a small technical team and we don’t have the resources to maintain it. Over the coming weeks we will be taking steps to inform any developer that is actively using Labs about this change so they can plan accordingly.
All Tapatalk integrations (our legacy app for older versions of Android & integration into the main Tapatalk app) will cease to work. We recommend any Tapatalk users download the new XDA forum app once it’s available.
Authentication for Swappa, Xposed, etc will no longer work, but we plan to reintroduce XDA authentication shortly.
Our Forum API will be migrated to the XenForo built-in API

Attached to this post you’ll find a handful of screenshots that should give you a good sense of what XDA 2020 will look like, though they’re subject to change as we continue to refine the look and feel of the new templates. Undoubtedly, the migration won’t be perfect as it involves many moving parts. We expect 6-12 hours of downtime when we make the move, during which time we will have the forum in “read only” mode for as long as possible.

We ask for your patience and understanding as we make this big change. Once launched, we will make a feedback thread for issues, bugs, and comments.

We will follow-up once we have a confirmed launch date, and as always, thanks for all of your support.

-svetius, js1999, and bitpushr