[Darth-Apple]

Hy folks, I take up the topic of MyBB 1.9 or higher, my thoughts about it or what makes me wonder about it, what happens to all the plugins? As I see the new version, it will not be possible to adapt the plugins. Some developers, including Darth, will think about another platform, which is already up to date, and will only be further developed, to switch to this at some point and to do without Mybb entirely.

Because staying on the current version becomes a risk security at some point, or it will still run on the PHP and SQL version .. etc. how do you see the situation?

Well, I don't think it'll be an immediate security risk. Once 1.9 is released, I expect 1.8 will continue to be maintained and kept secure for at least a year. That should give ample time for most of the popular plugins to be converted to 1.9  .

Well said. This is at least what they have said they will do this time around. In the past, they didn't, but this is a very different release. (1.6 was quickly EOL-ed once 1.8 came out, but 1.8 -> 1.9 is a much bigger jump so I assume they will make good on their word. I have no doubt they will continue to support 1.8 at least for a little while). 

That said, I myself am very concerned about the state of this software. It's sad because it's truly a one-of-a-kind solution. It is the only software that is so customizable that it can easily be made to look and feel like IPB or Xenforo or another paid solution. No other free software even gets close. But there are issues with it out of the box that are nowadays turning a lot of users away (namely responsiveness, notifications, the dated theme, etc). MyBB has sadly lost a lot of steam. 

It's sort of a self-fulfilling prophesy in a sense. They're losing users, meaning that developers (both official devs and plugin/theme devs) are also leaving. This means that the software is changing more slowly and therefore they lose more users in the process. I worry that 1.9 will have to have a very high-profile, enthusiastic release to really turn that around. I sincerely hope that they can pull it off, I deeply hope that they are not running out of time, but they seem to still be stagnant development wise. They aren't much further ahead today than they were in 2017-2018. This time last year, I think most of us were very confident that 1.9 was still in the pipeline. Now, I'm seeing a lot of people genuinely ask the question: Is MyBB going to have a future?

If it were up to me, I'd make a 1.8.25 release with a default responsive theme and a modernized look, right out of the box. Every single resource would be directed towards this and everything else would be put on the back burner. This would allow every theme from here on out to be responsive, which would address the single biggest weakness of the MyBB platform. In doing so, they would attract more users, and therefore more developers and more help torwards finishing 1.9.

Unfortunately, the devs have spoken against this idea in the past, despite very passionate endorsements from some high-profile forums (including Labrocca from HF). If I recall, Labrocca even offered to fully fund this and pay a full-time, professional developer to accomplish it. From what I understand, they disagreed on the roadmap and didn't feel that a simple, responsive update of 1.8 should be in the pipeline. The idea ended up never coming to fruition, and a lot of people attacked Labrocca very fiercely for ever suggesting it.