Serious questions for the team

[TurtleKicker]

Not meant to be inflammatory, but am seriously concerned and would like some feedback:

1) What's the current status on SMF2? Not necessarily asking for an ETA (although if you have something rough, like "weeks" or "2-3 months" or "6+ months" that's cool). Are we to expect an RC4 next, or final release?

2) What is being done to alleviate the development slowdown caused by the departure of Aäron?

3) What is being done to alleviate the bleeding of mod and theme authors disenchanted by the delays in getting stuff approved? This is damaging the community and the project, which in the past thrived from a strong modding and theming community.

Thanks in advance.

[Arantor]

Interesting questions there, which I too would like answered though I suspect I already know the answers, and will wait for official comment.

[catfished]

I certainly would like to have those questions answered even though I'm just a SMF user.

[Arantor]

I certainly would like to have those questions answered even though I'm just a SMF user.

That's the thing I raised recently elsewhere. No-one is JUST anything. The people who've been screwed the most in the last 4 months are the community, IMO.

[青山 素子]

I, too, am interested in any information that can be provided.

Being active outside the team, I am realizing how little communication there is on the project development.

[JBlaze]

Excellent post. I'm sure that it will be ignored as well.

[sAce]

Excellent post. I'm sure that it will be ignored as well.

Well, I hope not !

[SlammedDime]

3) What is being done to alleviate the bleeding of mod and theme authors disenchanted by the delays in getting stuff approved? This is damaging the community and the project, which in the past thrived from a strong modding and theming community.

I'll answer this since I'm responsible for the Customization team and the delays in approvals.  Here's the deal... The customize team only has 5 active members right now (with another two on hiatus for personal reasons).  Of those 5, only a few are actually pulling their weight on the customize team and helping out with approvals as they should be and a few of us also have full time jobs (and me personally, I'm a full time dad during the day as well, while working full time nights).  As for bringing more manpower onto the customize team, I'm all for it, however the problem lies in finding quality help... not some fly by night person who coded one BBCode mod and thinks they know SMF like the back of their hand.  There are some prospective people who I would like to get onto the team, and this isn't the topic to discuss names, however I would like to personally see more out of them first, and not because I'm asking them to, but because they want to (thus not saying names).

I would also like to note that a majority of the mod approval delays are through no fault of our own, but of mod authors not reading and following our mod approval guidelines before submitting their mod (and some mods submitted didn't even *work* after installing), causing a large delay in their own approval.  As for theme approvals, I will take full blame on that.  I was not watching that queue like I should have and my team wasn't paying attention to it either.  Runic has been kind enough to offer his assistance to help out which I greatly appreciate and will take him up on.

I'd also like to note that I am in full swing in my spare time on my breaks and lunches at work, as well as between my very limited free time at home to rewrite the customization site to be more user friendly, allow the community to help out with approvals, add loads of new features to help mod authors and the community, and to streamline the approval process.  As you can imagine, rewriting something of that nature from scratch, and adding in tons of features is no easy task, and is only delayed further and further by my team's lack of attentiveness to their duties.  I have been, and will continue to address this with them and if that means finding another team for them where they will better fit in, so be it (even if that is the gray team).

[~DS~]

Excellent post. I'm sure that it will be ignored as well.

The #1 and #2 were ignored.

[青山 素子]

Thank you for the honest and well-thought answer, SlammedDime.

The #1 and #2 were ignored.

Well, SD isn't really in a position to speak on those.

[~DS~]

If I were to donate on becoming a Charter member to support development....wil that work? I have seen people donating to become a Charter lately but does it really help push the development of SMF...more quickly? I doubt it. 

[青山 素子]

As the developers are not paid, donations will not directly help. They will assist with keeping the servers housed and manage other bills, however.

[Kindred]

I will address #1 and 2

yes, in my opinion, there will be an RC4. I will not give any schedule at all due to a variety of constraints, but RC3 was released specifically to deal with some outstanding security issues (hence the release stright to public without charter pre-release). IMO, RC4 is probably necessary.

We are always looking at people for the development team (as well as every other team). However, the main thing we judge on is contributions here on simplemachines.org. Although there may be many qualified developers out there, many of them don't contribute often or clearly and hence are probably overlooked. And, as SlammedDime said...   making a single mod does not make someone qualified to be a customization team member, let alone a developer.

I have been in contact with a few people regarding developer roles...   If you really think that you are qualified and want to contribute, PM me. Any such interest will always have to be confirmed by the team and the team lead, however.

[Joshua Dickerson]

Wanna-be developers should be helping tackle open bugs

[Arantor]

Care to go through and actually look at the three pages' worth of comments I added to Bug Reports like clearing out the ones that aren't really bugs, plus the ones I reported complete with fixes?

[Joshua Dickerson]

Care to go through and actually look at the three pages' worth of comments I added to Bug Reports like clearing out the ones that aren't really bugs, plus the ones I reported complete with fixes?

What are you getting at?

[Arantor]

I spent about 3 hours going through the bug reports board. There are currently 12 pages of reports, of which at least 2 pages can be gotten rid of as bogus or fixed.

Of the others, they should be added on the tracker, marked with fix if appropriate since I know there's at least 2 bugs there that aren't on the tracker that are valid bugs that I was even nice enough to provide a fix for.

Except that despite spelling it out what was needed, NO-ONE seemed to care except for about 4 threads that were actually moved.

[Norv]

Arantor: at least myself, Oldiesmann, Kays, SleePy are people doing Bug Reports reviews constantly, sometimes I also do large amounts of them (from time to time). If it was only about myself, I would never say this, but there are others working on it so please think again before disconsidering people's work. We are all volunteers here, as I am certain you remember, and believe it or not, do our best.
As far as I am concerned, I know what is needed, and I am reviewing several per day, and not only 4 threads. I intend to do more when I have the time and proper work place. (RL still gets in the way a bit).
I know very well that there is room for improvement, and I am working on it.

Thank you for your concern and efforts. However, I must say that in my experience, when people feel they do too much, "no one else does", and the entire world is upon their shoulders, then this usually means they did indeed too much and may need to take a break. Thank you for your understanding.

[Arantor]

I didn't think I did too much. I did 3 pages out of 12, several days ago.

Some of the reports I bumped are months old. I'm sorry but that doesn't suggest to me that anyone is proactively looking at that board.

For example: http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=345326.0

The last comment but one was in December, it was fixed in February - I know because it was fixed before RC3 came out. (I even supplied the patch back in December)

Another example: http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=332428.0

I provided a possible fix 4 months ago for this.

Another example: http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=371103.0

Logged 16th March, no replies or comments. 3 weeks later I even find you a patch.


So before telling me that I shouldn't disconsider work, please take stock of the situation. The board has been mostly dormant for weeks or more. Even if one per day were confirmed/not confirmed and dealt with, it would look like development hasn't totally stagnated.

I even wonder why I offered to help on the dev team, since it's obviously under control.

[kat]

Norv...


I know you're keen to get this place running smoothly, again. (Aren't a lot of us?)


I think you MAY be taking constructive criticism as criticism for the sake of it, a bit, though. (Understandably, perhaps)


Arantor makes some valid points, from where I'm sitting.


It may come across as him having a go, for the sake of it, but I truly don't feel that he is...




Or, are you, Arantor?