Is your site dependent upon add-ons? Should it be?

[Tracy]

I don't spend a lot of time over on the XenForo site other than to check out any updates in the resource manager for add-ons that I use.
But I did recently take out time to check out the off-topic area as sometimes there is some funny stuff there. One of the posts I found there though was not funny, but fairly serious.
And it brings up the topic title of this thread.
One of the more prolific developers for XenForo add-ons (over 600 with many of them paid) has not been responsive to requests for assistance for a few months on the Xenforo site and on his support site apparently and is getting near the point of having their paid add-ons removed from the resource manager listings over on the XenForo site.
This will affect a lot of people, as many are dependent upon several of his add-ons to extend the software to what they feel it should have been in the first place.

They are now having to try to figure out how to continue offering the same feature set while being able to upgrade to the latest version.

Before anyone tries to claim that I'm calling out a certain software, this is not a XenForo limited issue as I have seen it with my time with using Invision and also with Woltlab. In fact, I recently read of a similar issue with the newest version of Woltlab and a site owner having issues with getting feedback from one fo the developers they use.

The question is... have you contemplated how dependent your site is on those third party add-ons? How many of those are life/death for your site and how many are "nice to haves"?
Have you developed a plan for if/when those add-ons are no longer supported? Will you simply stick on the version of the software you are running? Will you remove those add-ons and not have the feature sets that you or your users may have become dependent upon? Will you look for a bespoke offering, realizing that the same issue can come up with it as with any other 3rd party add-on?
It is one reason that many look for a script that offers more of what they need as either 1st party add-on offerings or built into the core in a more fully developed suite compared to a component created system.

We all need to realize that most of the developers used by site owners are 1 or 2 man operations (usually one). And life happens. Someone can have a heart attack/stroke, get struck by a car, have a legal issue or a myriad of other things that would directly impact their ability to offer support and updates to their offerings.
Does the developer being a 1/2 person operation ever play into your purchase, or is it just about the features that the add-on offers and you haven't given thought to what happens in the worst case scenario?

I personally use the Snogs flag add-on and although it is not life and death, it's a nice feature for my users to see where their fellow members are connecting from to give an idea of conditions in that locale. I also have purchased paid options of this developers offerings, so I am somewhat impacted, but none of the ones I have are deal killers for the site.
Most of my other add-ons are from 1 person developers and several are critical to the site. If they ever ceased, I would simply choose to stick on the version of the script that they last had an official release of, even if the core script updates had features I would like to have.

 

[joelr]

There is a heavy and hidden "cost" to third party mods.

Yes, they're cheap at time of purchase. Yes, they're fun. Yes, they extend your community in useful ways.

But you're relying on hobbyists to do this for fun in a sustainable manner. Just look at the number of hobbyist sites who are still online after two years, and then ask if you trust a hobbyist developer to have all of the pressure of customer service, service tickets, new features, new apps, maintenance updates to stay in lockstep with the core software ,etc. It's a lot to juggle, and I admire the devs who offer mods!

As @Tracy pointed out, the cost of a one-man development shop disappearing overnight is a real fear and cost that should be factored in.

The model of core + active third party was viable when forums were new and cool and a lot of devs were playing around with forums for fun. Now that the forum market is shrinking, you really have to be careful about relying on mods and third party authors.

 

[joelr]

I should also add that it's fascinating to see the divergence in forum communities now between XF and IPS, especially in regards to third party development.

XF still openly hosts links and support discussions to third party mods. IPS, which tends to be generationally ahead in their market outlook, has removed the third party marketplace (the software still allows third party mods, they're just not hosted or discussed on IPS).

 

[Tracy]

I should also add that it's fascinating to see the divergence in forum communities now between XF and IPS, especially in regards to third party development.

Yes, and it's the reason that I felt this topic would be a good one to post.

@Opus X is looking at moving away from XenForo (which I sold him really cheap) to Invision because he believes that he can use Pages to create a lot of the content solutions he wants for his site like a link directory and a reviews feature. And he can because I did when I had that site under IPS 4.x.
He specifically does not want to use a lot of outside add-ons as he has seen the current issue that I have in having to wait for add-on updates from another prolific XF developer to be released before I can contemplate upgrading.
And if he will take the time to learn Pages and the Invision templating system, he can probably do a lot of what he wants. Granted, not to the level of the XF add-ons from XenAddons, but at least well enough to create meaningful content.
His big issue (as mine is) would be the hosting. He doesn't have the funds to pay for SaaS solutions so he has to concentrate more on self-hosting, either on one of my VPS instances or on a lower end VPS that I would help him maintain until he got up to speed on managing a Linux server.
Minimizing, or eliminating add-on dependency is a great goal, but no matter what script you use is usually unrealistic. None of them are perfect and we all want some function extended or a special little feature.
Where we all need to pay attention is how negatively the loss of those add-on features would affect our site and to make plans for it happening, because it usually does. It doesn't necessarily mean that the developer gets out of the field, it can be as simple as them stopping doing development for a particular script and doing it for a different one that they prefer.