Also it is open source so if you want to customize it to fit your needs you are welcome to do that.  Try doing that with a purchased $400+ social software on the market. You can't because they are typically encoded so you can't touch the code. 

I personally have been in the social business since 2005, i have used much of what is out there, ended up dumping a bunch of money into professional software that ended up to not meet my needs and i was never going to pay their highway robbery prices for custom code, especially when i am a programmer myself.   I bounced around from one software to another from Elgg to something else, and free this and paid that.  I had heard about Oxwall but to be honest i didn't like their dating software, had heard bad things about it which turned out to be wrong informaiton.  So one day i decided to give it a try and i never looked back. 

Does it do everything and have everything, no!  But it has enough of the stuff i needed in the core to work with.  It is open source so i can code if i want to, and its free.  The bottom line is that Oxwall has enough of the common features as its core to make what it does not have simply trivial.  And tons of world wide users must agree because they use it every day. 

I am not paid by Oxwall in any way to endorse it, i am a volunteer who helps out on the forum and i help people that i can help.  So if i can save you some heartache and some years of bouncing around i will, and that is why i think you should give this software an even shot.  I think if you have been around the software arena as i have you will find it has some very strong attributes.  

I hope that helps... :) 

dave

If you want something where 100% of the focus of development is the forum, then go for a forum software.

I don't think you understand the software that Oxwall is, it's not strictly a forum software.

True phpfox has some nice stuff in its core, but i think you'll find that it also has issues and that it is not cost effective over the long term.  But be my guest i used phpfox as well at one time and look were i am now.  Enjoy your venture and we will see you back here next year when you have had enough of phpfox.   It is your right to shop and compare so i shall not stand in your way. 

Daniel, I don't think I understand your original post. When a YouTube video is in an Oxwall wall post you can view it full screen. From within the admin panel you can quickly change font colors. By using the savvy CSS editor you can change any element to your hearts content and those changes are saved even after core updates.

Your point on the emoticons is correct as these are not currently built into Oxwall. But in all fairness let's not forget that Facebook became the largest social network on this planet long before they ever implemented emoticons... read: http://mashable.com/2013/04/09/facebook-emoticons/

I would vigorously disagree with your position that Oxwall is terrible software. I have actively developed community sites to include discussion boards for nearly 19 years now. I've worked with most of the known names and my all time favorite discussion board is YaBB but I digress...

In my humble opinion Oxwall is stunningly brilliant on many counts and it just keeps getting better with every update. Bear in mind that Oxwall was never targeted to be a "discussion board" but rather a streaming community site and to some extent you might even consider it as a Facebook sorta clone like you might consider jCow an Twitter sorta clone.

If you dig deeper into Oxwall and note the clever PDO usage with prepared statements as well as a host of other well thought out (smarty cache) and superbly executed coding you have to give this platform a lot of respect for all of the hard work that has gone into this project. Just as examples take a look at ow_core/form_element.php  or ow_core/application.php by Sardar Madumarov.... and what you'll see is some very top notch coding :-)

If you've never committed your own time into an open-source platform such as this you may be unaware of the enormous time and effort that goes into these builds and how sometimes all the programmers here is complaining and unappreciative comments... which leads me to my last comment....

With all due respect :-) >>> Rather than drop in the developers form here making comments like "never seen such a terrible software in all my years".... it would be more constructive and beneficial if you could make suggestions on what you feel would make Oxwall better. Those suggestions can then be reviewed and could possibly be implemented into future updates. I would always encourage you to help Oxwall to become better and feel free to submit your suggestions over at http://oxwall.uservoice.com/forums/13756-ideas-for-oxwall

I would suggest you run Oxwall for a while and give it a good test run. I think the more you use it and become familiar with it the more it will grow on you :) Cheers!

But on the other side, Oxwall is realy nice software. It gives you a social community package for free and it works very nice.

But,

Development could be better. They are far behind other social software.

Think about responsive, Oxwall is not responsive. (Only some pages). In this time, almost 60% of dutch people use here smartphone.

Also, there are no emoticons. Yes, you can by them. But why? Evry forum or social or chatpackage have emoticons.

This 2 reasons are THAT reasons i am not use oxwall anymore. Sad but true.

I choose for jomsocial. Its responsive, emoticons and the code is more optimized for faster loading pages.

I dont like to blame anyone from here, because i know these are good people who work very hard, and try to give a fantastic support. But if i was a developer, i realy should start to make everything responsive. They lose a lot of users now.