General Community > Chit Chat

Mod Site

(1/8) > >>

vbgamer45:

--- Quote from: Tomy Tran on June 24, 2012, 08:37:06 PM ---Good morning,

I have seen some forums built by XenForo recently. Since that time I dont know is there an accidently but I feel that our new applied modifications is reducing. We have new 9 mods through 2 months, any way, I visits some forums by XenForo and Xen is really pretty, and I think SMF should come up to 3.0 very quickly and should have some utilities like in XenF such Gravatar intergrater, consider to use fb, g+, so.cl, twitter or any new social networks appears later for user's profile. Search by google or siteself is available and Google Analytics is in Core 3.0 this should have good bridges to Joomla base.

Thanks.

--- End quote ---
As a mod maker I am really discouraged from making mods for the SMF mod site. I submitted a mod almost two months ago and still waiting for approval.
There is way too much involved in the approval process, always seems like a battle to get approved. It is a waste of resources just to have people looking over mods when they can either be improving the site/smf itself, or creating their own mods/themes.

For me it leaves me making simpler mods in order to hope to get approved then having to deal with a complex mod and deal with all the issues and non written rules or just plain out going the paid mod route.

I can easily get a couple mods out a week but I don't want to go though crazy long mod approval times

Right now the mod and theme approval process is killing the community.

Kindred:
Tommy,

Everything you list should be mods, IMO... Many of us don't bother with integration with social networks, and links from profile to those can be easily done with the existing system. Likes etc are definitely useful and used mods, but I would be opposed to seeing them in core.

Most folks don't use gravitar

And google integration.., as explained, probably not. There are privacy issues. Especially with the recent Stupidity in the EU with the cookie laws.

Old Fossil:
XenForo is not all that good looking IMO.

Besides why pay for a forum when smf is free?

I'm no coder so I feel the customisers need to go through the mods and themes to be justifiable.

Why have a mod which does such a simple thing it is better suited as a manual addition?

Also I have looked at some mods on my test forum and thought how the heck? and wondering how certain mods became approved.

I can think of 2 mods in particular  (same author as it happens), one mod you have to manually go into the mysql settings to save the database otherwise all the settings are lost at each upgrade.

The other mod the author took over from another and despite the mod having a huge following ignored the current users and began the mod as though it were brand new. Thus making a lot of users angry.

Then again I'm no coder so....

Arantor:

--- Quote ---Right now the mod and theme approval process is killing the community.
--- End quote ---

I've always been a fan of having some kind of approval process, but it needs people who are knowledgeable, competent and can put the time in to review mods and themes in a timely fashion. There are such people around but they don't have the time to put in, and it is quite a dull process. Though as some may remember, I was always a fan of people sharing the load... back in the day all it needed was each customizer (as it was then) taking one per week and the queue would have been dealt with timely.

The main reason for having such a process is simply that there just aren't the people around who can jump in and deal with problems at a code level so that if people use a mod that hasn't been looked at, it could screw things up very badly - far worse than I think we've seen.


At this point I don't want to blow a certain trumpet but I actually took some of these into account with relatively little work. I think I should share what was done and why, not out of promotion but as thoughts as to what route(s) SMF could take in the future.

Gravatar isn't a huge deal to implement and while you might not think it's important, if you use a forum as a blog, it can suddenly make a great deal of difference.

The social networks, though, my answer to that was still to use custom profile fields but have a set of templates for which people could generate the relevant profile fields should they want to use them. It's low maintenance, adds no performance hurt if not used, just a shade more code in the custom profile configuration area.

Likes I made a core feature - at the expense of kicking out karma. I find karma a bad idea generally, because it's a per-user rating rather than per-content. I'd honestly prefer to see SMF include it in the core too.


--- Quote ---And google integration.., as explained, probably not. There are privacy issues. Especially with the recent Stupidity in the EU with the cookie laws.
--- End quote ---

Heh. Well, I won't defend the implementation of the law, because it's indefensible. But the spirit behind it, that I can fully support (and as you can imagine it's caused more than one argument elsewhere over how much should be supported in the core).


--- Quote ---Besides why pay for a forum when smf is free?
--- End quote ---

Because it's a choice. There are certain expectations with a paid system, that simply cannot be guaranteed with a free system, notably regarding support. I'm not saying that the quality of support is better, but it is a reasonably expectation that a paying customer will get support in probably a more timely fashion.


--- Quote ---Why have a mod which does such a simple thing it is better suited as a manual addition?
--- End quote ---

Because a lot of people do not like tampering with code directly.


--- Quote ---Also I have looked at some mods on my test forum and thought how the heck? and wondering how certain mods became approved.

--- End quote ---

It is likely that the mods in question were better written in their first outing; updates are not subsequently re-approved.

Tomy Tran:
A total and many sides view from you ;) I just raise something to discus more and brain-storming before complete a package. Just my idea and the choice is yours. On approving mods system, I know the fact, it's not too long with me but I think you should change the way of approving to encourage the mod makers to give the community large of choice:

 - All the mod makers who can create a mod could submit mods to extension area.
 - Any un-approving mods will show in red or in yellow page or some way of notice to users before download that the mod is NOT approved.
 - Any approved mods will has a medal or labeled like approved or Certified mods.
 - Users can easier to vote or report a mod than current system.
 - Any user downloaded a mod will receive automatically a email ask to vote, report a mod or comment or take survey after a period of time like on Agoda.

Just some idea happened through my mind ;) the decision is your choice ;)

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page