I was a big supporter of AF when it was a commercial entity. Used it for several years in fact. However the amount of features that have been stripped out from the commercial version to the "new" free version is staggering. I have no idea why features such as using a 3rd party PM module or icon if the user is online needs to be stripped out. None the less I found a DNN version of Yet Another Forum which not only has all the removed features of AF at its height but many more to boot.

With all the work already in YAF why re-invent the wheel, and have the devs here work with those devs of YAF. Makes no sense to work on a product like AF which is far behind YAF and with the slow pace of AF development may never catch up in any reasonable amount of time.

My 2 coppers.

Well that's kind of my point. YAF from a forum functionality standpoint is more or less done. No need to re-invent the wheel with building a PM system (which YAF has a excellent one already built in) or adding typical forum functions to it that AF is missing. All they would need to do is put the majority of their dev time into adding the social hooks into it. Which obviously saves a lot of this 'putting the features back it had before' time sink. It just makes little sense to me them taking the most inefficient approach possible when YAF is sitting on the proverbial silver platter.

As for AF glad they are putting back some of the functions they took out. But it seems one step forward 2 steps back at this point IMO. I already moved over the YAF and see no reason to every touch AF again. The social hooks are fluff to me. I rather have a fully functional forum then a half broken one that simply posts a update to a journal no one on my site uses anyways. *shrugs*

If all you want is a forum, than YAF is probably your best bet. It clearly has some of the best (if not the best) functionality of any forum available on .NET. But if that's the case, one has to ask why you are using DNN in the first place?

The problem with YAF is that it's a "Forum" first and and DNN module second. If you want it to integrate with "all" of the DNN platform, it's not going to be ideal, because they've chosen to "roll their own" functionality for everything. You don't see very many modules that have "YAF" integration, but there are starting to be TONS that have integration with the core social features (including the private messaging system).

I'm not that familiar with YAF, so maybe this is all on their roadmap but it doesn't seem likely to me. One of the reasons that AF took "a step back" as you mention is that it has to be reworked somewhat in order to integrate with all of the new functionality in the core. This has certainly caused some pain for AF users (myself included) but IMO it's necessary given the direction that DNN is moving.

Some people, myself included, are starting to contributing to the AF project, and progress is being made, albeit slowly. For example, the new beta fixes a lot of issues. Also, I'm getting close to releasing a new module that adds "Tapatalk" support to AF which is a killer feature for a lot of people. So I wouldn't right AF off just yet. If we can get a few more good DNN developers involved in the project, we could make some rapid headway.

Again, I'm not trying to say that there is anything wrong with YAF. From a purely "forum" perspective, it looks great. However, if someones goal is to have a DNN site that has many different modules that share the same social integration features, AF may be a better long term choice.