why no help?

[permutations]

I've posted various questions in this forum and mostly have received no reply. As I work on my mod, I find the answers to these questions - painfully, and after hours of studying the source code. But these questions could have been answered quickly and easily by [Unknown], and I wonder why they weren't. It would have taken two seconds to answer, while it took me hours to find the answers on my own. Two examples:

1. Question: Why does the footer not display on pages that use SSI?

One line answer that would have saved me hours: "You must called ssi_shutdown()."

2. Comment: Apparently I need to put the Paid Subscription mod pages outside SMF because SMF denies access to these pages when guest access is turned off.

One line answer that would have saved me hours: "Just add your paid subscription mod actions to the array of allowed actions for guests in index.php."

I know these questions weren't simply missed or unnoticed because often they were part of ongoing threads. And these are not the only examples.

I've also posted 2-3 bug reports, and never even received an acknowledgement, let alone a "Thanks for pointing that out." Therefore I've stopped posting these, although I've come across a few more. Why take the time to document bugs when the SMF lead developer doesn't appreciate the time and effort it takes me to do it?

I was originally planning to share this mod, but doing so would benefit the company that has chosen to ignore my requests for help, though doing so would have cost so little. That doesn't sit well.

[dtm.exe]

The SMF Community is a very big place.  You're not the only one that's posting.  It just takes time.  Don't worry; you're questions will be answered when someone can get to them.

-Dan The Man

[tentronik]

Its FREE so why complain?
And why you personalize your critic on some1 who is affording most of his free time in this project.

And everywhere else you have to pay hard cash to get the service you get here for FREE.
And over the top the product is absolutely inteligent :-)

And to let you know mostly i need answers quick and if i dont get them, well then i search :-p
I know its sometimes a painfull experience wasting hours days on something which turns out in the end a very simple solution.

Learning is hard work!

[permutations]

The SMF Community is a very big place.  You're not the only one that's posting.  It just takes time.  Don't worry; you're questions will be answered when someone can get to them.

I'm talking about messages posted weeks ago. These messages have been ignored - no one is going to answer them.

Its FREE so why complain?

If I were asking for help in using the forum software, then I'd agree with you. I haven't paid for a charter membership, and so I'm not entitled to user support.

But I'm writing a mod - a mod for which there is high demand. My mod has these features:

- post moderation queue.
- option to request notification of *all* messages posted (not just new topics or replies to topics that have been specifically requested).
- paid subscription integration.

I'm asking for help in writing code that would benefit SMF if I contributed it - which was my original intent, though now I'm not so sure I want to go to the trouble. Packaging a mod takes time; supporting a mod takes time. No one at this company has given me any time, so why should I donate my time and efforts for their benefit?

[wgm]

There is lots of posts here not just yours, it takes quite a bit time to go through it all.

I have some topics ignored, but do I care, no.

[permutations]

I have some topics ignored, but do I care, no.

Hours of your time were burned researching technical details for a mod you were writing for SMF, when they could have been answered in 10 seconds, and you not only don't care, but you are still willing to devote the time to package, document, and support your mod for the benefit of a company that couldn't be bothered to spend 10 seconds answering a question for you?

Or you do you mean you've asked questions about SMF usage or code tweaks that would not have benefited SMF in any way, and those went unanswered?

[wgm]

First off, I do not write mods, well, may be someday.

What I've asked in the past was how was this done, since no one replied I took it as no one knew, I even bumped them up to the top, but I usually let them go as they weren't that important.

[Amacythe]

Its FREE so why complain?

very good point

but

And to let you know mostly i need answers quick and if i dont get them, well then i search :-p
I know its sometimes a painfull experience wasting hours days on something which turns out in the end a very simple solution.

Learning is hard work!

Maybe if more people would actually do the searching first, there would be less questions being asked more than once.  Each repeat question takes time to answer, and that is time which could be spent answering questions that haven't been posted before.  Those that take the time to learn, could then help others and this would also save the devs time to actually develop rather than answer questions.

If I were asking for help in using the forum software, then I'd agree with you. I haven't paid for a charter membership, and so I'm not entitled to user support.

Everyone is entitled to support, but it does take time go give that support.  Please be patient...

I'm writing a mod - a mod for which there is high demand. My mod has these features:

- post moderation queue.
- option to request notification of *all* messages posted (not just new topics or replies to topics that have been specifically requested).
- paid subscription integration.

I'm asking for help in writing code that would benefit SMF if I contributed it - which was my original intent, though now I'm not so sure I want to go to the trouble. Packaging a mod takes time; supporting a mod takes time. No one at this company has given me any time, so why should I donate my time and efforts for their benefit?

Excuse me?  You say no one has given you time, yet you're using the software that took a great deal of time to create.

Hours of your time were burned researching technical details for a mod you were writing for SMF, when they could have been answered in 10 seconds, and you not only don't care, but you are still willing to devote the time to package, document, and support your mod for the benefit of a company that couldn't be bothered to spend 10 seconds answering a question for you?

Hours of time are spent answering questions, more hours are spent coding... with 32,708 (current) posts and each taking considerably more than the ten seconds you claim (we'll use your ten seconds for this example) that's still over 90 hours [Unknown] alone has spent answering questions. (It has taken me well over five minutes to make this reply... using that number it would be closer to 2725 hours or more than 113 DAYS.)  Now, consider that he is also coding and debugging...

And here you are whining that you spent a few hours to research for a mod that now you're considering not sharing?

[dtm.exe]

permutations, why don't you help us reply to other newbie's questions so that we can get to your questions faster?

-Dan The Man

[permutations]

permutations, why don't you help us reply to other newbie's questions so that we can get to your questions faster?

I would do that and more after I finish this mod (which is a week late), if I felt there really would be any reciprocity. But I don't have a sense that my answering newbie questions would result in anything but my having less time. I don't think my questions go unanswered because [Unknown] is so busy. He certainly finds time to insult me when provoked.

It's a shame that [Unknown] is so dedicated to alienating me because this is a project that I'd like to be part of and contribute to.

[xenovanis]

Yeah, I bet that is the only reason [Unknown] is so much online here, waiting for any opportunity to insult you. Not to help other people out with forums that are down, and certainly not to do any programming for 1.1.

[[Unknown]]

I'm an arrogant person who is spending all of my time on you.  Wow, I get worse every post.  It's like the Truman Show.

-[Unknown]

[1MileCrash]

support here is f'ing awesome. If you dont like it.....then figure it out on your own. Lots of people post here, asking questions. [Unknown] has like 32,000 posts....not because he is a spammer...because he is working his arse off answering dozens of questions a day...and he isnt the only example.

Ive noticed here that older posts (that arent already answered) will get replyed to first, so just wait.

[Gargoyle]

I cannot believe I am even reading this.....

permutations you obviously have some deep rooted psycological issues that will need to be worked out before you take on the great task of sharing a MOD you created with 3 or 4 functions based of code others have built with countless hours of their time and given to you for free.

You sicken me, you and others like you are whats wrong with the world I live in today.

[permutations]

I responded here:

http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=43978.msg323035#msg323035

[rhizome]

permutations, I won't 'attack' you as personally, I don't think it's productive. And others have done enough damage

I've followed some your posts and you certainly have been contributing to SMF with some useful mods

Though when it comes to asking for support, a lot of the time of the developers/support staff is taken up with more critical/priority stuff like install issues and responding to user errors.
I may be wrong, but requests for very specific coding info will probably get replied to not so quickly as other posts considered urgent by the SMF team.

And yes, some posts don't get responded to, we've all had that on ocassions - how ever frustrating it is, hardly unexpected for free support. So even if you spend days figuring something out which could have easily been answered isn't really the point.

No one is employing you to write mods, it is up to decide how much time you want to spend on them, though you can't control how long you'll have to wait for replies to your queries. It's easy to fee unappreciated for your efforts. But no one writes mods so they can gain fame or favouritism over other members. They write them for the whole SMF community, often because they want to give something to it, and don't really expect much in return apart from seeing the software get even better.

Just because you are developing mods doesn't mean you will get higher priority over anyone else. In fact, I would see mod development as a lower priority compared with getting all members to have their boards working all the time. And I'm saying this as a member whose always after more mods!

[bloc]

Hear, hear! This is quite true.

One have to find the will to do it, and then push on. And luckily there are more people who know their way around the script than just the lead developer. He does a lot of things, but he doesn't do everything.. Besides, calling especially for him makes others wait..and thats unfortunate since there might be others that can help as well. The Mod team for example.

[permutations]

I'm not really interested in getting into one of those internet pissing matches where everyone jumps on one person and accusations fly back and forth incessantly. Frankly, I'm pretty busy right now. But I'll respond to a few points, because I think what happened here has some importance - not just your usual internet pissing match.

Maybe there is at least one individual out there (none who've posted, but maybe someone) who can see that Unknown's treatment of me was not only unfair, but damaged SMF as an open source project by alienating and shutting out a programmer who was planning to make a significant contribution.

Though when it comes to asking for support, a lot of the time of the developers/support staff is taken up with more critical/priority stuff like install issues and responding to user errors.

That wasn't the situation here. Unknown was deliberately ignoring every message I posted because he doesn't like me. He interpreted my bug reports as personal criticisms, and read things into what I was saying that simply weren't there. I'm not paranoid. When I confronted him yesterday, he said so openly. Here are two posts:

Frankly, you seem to think you're always right, and you'll argue anything if I try to tell you otherwise without considering what I said.  You can call me arrogant, but I just named my definition of arrogance.

And, I don't like arguing here, not unless I consider it very helpful.  So I'm just tired of interacting with you, because you try to argue with me, insult me, tell me I'm doing this or that to you, or else tell me what I should be doing for you, every chance you get.

I have no intention of wasting my time with people like you.

I don't agree with Unknown's characterization of me, of course. I'm just pointing out that he really was deliberately ignoring my messages. I wasn't just being impatient.

[Unknown] has always been fairly brusk and rude, but I figured that was the price I had to pay if I wanted to participate in the SMF community. But became obvious to me recently that he was deliberately ignoring all my posts. This has been going on for 2-3 weeks - virtually no answer to any message I posted except for occasional bursts of fury when I replied to my own messages to bump it and again for help.

I'm writing a three-part mod that does this:

• Custom theme with a sidebar (I saw a lot of posts asking for this), and written in such a way that most mods written for the default theme will work with it.


• Post Moderation queue (this is finished and working well)


• Paid Subscription integration (this is working enough to be live on my site, but I'm finishing up a few last pieces, hopefully today).

I'm writing these mods because I need them for my own site, but I was planning to package at least the first two parts and share them with the community here. I wasn't sure it would be practical to package up the Paid Subscriptions piece, but now that I've nearly completed it, I can see that I could have (though I won't now) published the hard part - the guts - that handle the integration and lock-down.

I posted in quite a few messages that I was working on these mods and was planning to publish them, so Unknown knew this. I know these mods are important missing pieces in SMF, and that having them would make it much more competitive with vBulletin and other high-end products. I like SMF, I like the concept of open source, and I liked that I would be able to give back to an open source project.

But as I worked on this, I became aware that Unknown was deliberately ignoring my posts. Still, that wasn't what pissed me off so much - I was still planning to publish my mods. But then, as my understanding of the SMF source code got better and better, I started to see the answers to the questions I'd posted that Unknown had ignored, and realized how simple they would have been to answer for someone like Unknown who knows the code so well. I wasn't asking hard stuff - I was asking easy stuff. Unknown knew very well that he could have, with 20 seconds of typing, saved me a week of painful research, but he sadistically chose to let me twist in the wind because he doesn't like me. That's what pissed me off, and prompted me to start this thread. To reward this kind of treatment with the gift of the code I'm writing is absurd.

This is one of the more illiterate responses to this topic, but he says one funny thing I want to respond to:

permutations you obviously have some deep rooted psycological issues that will need to be worked out before you take on the great task of sharing a MOD you created with 3 or 4 functions based of code others have built with countless hours of their time and given to you for free.

A mod with 3-4 functions that's a tweak of someone else's code?! That is hilarious.

The custom theme wasn't that hard to create. I did it mostly as a tutorial to help others. The Post Moderation mod wasn't that hard to create either, though it has some nice extras (fixing the notification feature was a non-trivial, for example), and the mod is nicely integrated with the rest of SMF.

But the Paid Subscriptions mod has been a royal pain in the butt - all the more so because Unknown withheld to-him-obvious information about the internal structure of SMF that would have saved me weeks of research. What made this mod hard wasn't the code I wrote from scratch (and there is a significant amount of it, some of it tricky), but the SMF integration - figuring out how to close the holes in SMF so people who hadn't paid couldn't register or log in, and integrating the payment process with registration. I figured it all out myself because Mr. Lead Developer enjoyed watching me struggle and wouldn't give me the time of day.

[dtm.exe]

I think that the point of this topic was made known.  permutations, your questions will be answered when we can get to them.

-Dan The Man