Yesterday the Xfire website was updated. Since the forums are quite likely the part of the site where people spend most of their time, this change could be considered one of the most influential Xfire website updates to the date.

The new forums are now accessible with this URL: http://www.xfire.com/forums/
(previously the forum index was behind such cryptic an address as http://www.xfire.com/xf/modules.php?name=Forums&file=index)

It has long been in plans to update the forums from the phpBB 2 system that's been in use since the beginning. As the forums grew and more people posted there, various issues started appearing caused by the limitations and bugs of the forum software (SQL errors anyone?).

Initially the new forums were implemented to Xfire Clans & Guilds (now Xfire Communities) and they were being tested and developed there. As is the Xfire trend, the new features are first brought up in small scale, out of direct publicity, to let people play with them and to make the features work better before pushing them out in large scale. This has been true for the Xfire Communities, blogs, advanced Xfire In-Game, video recording, Live Video broadcasting, web game detection, other instant messenger protocol support, and so on.

This same method was also true for the forum software. After the majority of the big bugs were fixed and the forum software built from ground up was feature complete enough, it was now brought up from just the limited test of communities to be the main forum system of the whole Xfire website.



The new forums built from scratch are still not completely free of problems, but now that all the population will use them, the rest of the bugs will be found very quickly and with great probability will also be the focus of web development for a while. At least one important feature that didn't correctly work in the old forums now works very well. This, my friends, is the feature overlooked by many people. It's called SEARCH.

Aside from the forums, another easily visible change in the new website is the yellow GAME STORE button up there in navigation bar. Have you tried to fill in that shiny blue sphere with X shopping cart yet?


If you have feedback of the new forums (I know you do!), you can leave them here as comments or post to the forum announcement topic: New Forums System - 22 October 2009

Joonas