Multi-site, single-signon topology

[Arantor]

I'd rather be blunt and honest than pretend everything is roses It may make me unpopular but I'd rather be unpopular than building up dreams that aren't feasible.

I understand your desire to plan for capacity, but the reality is you can't start with a single machine on a network and plan *from that point onwards* to scale to 10,000 machines. Building that kind of capacity in from the start has its own consequences in terms of growth because it makes it that much harder to respond to the actual needs of your community.

I'm not entirely clear on what features you're planning on offering the subsites. More importantly, I'm not entirely clear on whether they will need unique features per subsite - as I can see that being a very real consideration. Premium members might want/demand additional features that are actually unique to them. That alone seems to me to give real consideration to whether multiple installations are a bonus or a burden here.

The real headache here is that the multi-board mods were never designed for *massive* scaling either. They weren't designed for hundreds of sites per instance, though I suspect they'll cope reasonably well with it in practice. Would be very hard to say without actually trying it - like most things, you'd start by designing for the common case and seeing where the friction *really* is.

I'd expect the largest point of friction - and possibly the largest technical hurdle - to be the number of boards. With the kind of scale being suggested, the physical cap of 64K boards is likely to be a problem especially if subsite owners can just arbitrarily add new boards. If they can't, that's a consideration in itself but a simpler one.

All these things have complex interplays and no-one has done multisite on anything about a few instances sharing a smallish (few hundred *max*) tables. It's undiscovered country, though some guesses could be made.

You're saying 300 members each but surely that's not actually the consideration given the stated aim of single sign on? (In which case, total members is still the only consideration, not number per shard) Realistically number of boards and groups will be your pain points, not number of members.

In fact depending on the level of customisation going on for subsite owners, that may be even more of a make or break decider than anything else; board access is not designed to scale into hundreds of groups having access to a board, nor is the system really that well geared for users being in hundreds of groups (potentially members per subsite, depending on what ranks/permissions they are given)

I am beginning to wonder if actually sharding at installation level might not be the best way after all - but as ever it's all down to the exact details of what you're wanting to achieve.

It's quite possible to spin up new instances on demand. Getting it *right* is harder (and this is where people have trouble), and I'll note that people like vbgamer run smfforfree.com on relatively few installs of code but no single sign on; it's easier to have a single install of code and point it at different databases than it is to have multiple copies of the code hanging around.

Part of me says the way to do this is to have one server act as master for auth purposes, then each install acting as slave for auth purposes, this would solve the group access issues since they would be sharded to a subsite, and you could have different display names and badges per subsite without any real trouble then, but the maintenance schedule gets complicated when it comes to patch time since you'd have to patch each one individually - which is where it gets horrible.

I guess I'm floundering a bit since I can see all different ways of doing this depending on exactly what you're trying to do and without any real sense of what scale you're aiming to build - because setting up all the infrastructure to handle master/slave plus sharding at install level plus spinning up new installs plus patching is a massive amount of work, and it really is building a house to put up a coat peg at that point.

I dunno. Might help to understand the nuances of what you're trying to do rather than the broad description.

[Bruce the Shark]

wow what a heated debate.
Fantastic reading. i think i learned something today
But there are some words in a forum that are totally of limits like the
F...word
or the C...word
but never use the W...word TonyG ( wordpress )
or else hell will break loose.

[Arantor]

Indeed, the W word is something of a profanity around here Mostly because the veteran keyboard warriors here have had to fix sites mangled by things WordPress does on some level.

[Kindred]

which is nto to say that Wordpress does not have its uses. I actually do run 3 blog sites that user wordpress -- because they ARE pure blogs. My thoughts - others comments on those.

[Gwenwyfar]

Indeed, the W word is something of a profanity around here Mostly because the veteran keyboard warriors here have had to fix sites mangled by things WordPress does on some level.

I always run from any job that has anything "Wordpress" in it... but sometimes I get asked to fix something from clients I've done other things for, which usually means its more problematic to say no. And they've so far all been slow, with ******ty code, and restrictions that should never exist. Some of the problems I had to fix were just wordpress working as it should, in the end... Its one of those things I only hate more every time I see it.

Some were also taking 20-30 seconds to load, then another 10 to reload pages, not sure if because of plugins or just wordpress though.

I'd still rather make my own site when I make my blog, than ever use this thing And on top of all that from the official site you pay tons of money for this poor software, don't you? Or most people get it free somehow? (I only saw from the main site, the absurdities like paying to re-enable basic things it disables )

[TonyG]

Completely avoiding the W word... 

I'll summarize the model here to resolve some of the confusion. In one sense I feel like I'm dumping on this group. But on the other hand it seems we're working into a relatively unexplored area. It's great to see where the limits of this fine software may lie, and if this is pushing the software into a new realm, I'm happy to share the experience.

Audience, flow, and deliverables

• Please visit http://gamechat.club (herein referred to as the Company) the home page is concise and the About page has a bit more.
  The deliverable here is a communications area (herein referred to as a subsite) for any team of game players: soccer, poker, World of Warcraft, chess, you name it.
• Each team has a subsite with a forum, chat room, event calendar, and other features. At this time all of this is built around SMF.
  
• Additional features might be free or for-fee. For example, I've loaded the KnowledgeBase mod, and this will be available for free. I intend to build-in SMS notifications of events, and this will be for-fee.
• Users will click the red button on the home page. Through the magic of code, I'll do everything I can to automate the creation of a new forum, or a split forum using the mod by @dougiefresh. I'll get info from the subsite creator about who they are and what customizations they want. The list of options will grow as I'm able to each one coded and tested. For now a number of the customizations will need to be made by hand. This is why rapid scaling is important to me as I can't be burdened with instance-specific details at the risk of creating a huge backlog of new subsites.
• With a subsite in place and a subdomain allocated, team players will click the blue button on the homepage to enter their subsite - or they might just go subdomain directly to reach their SMF login. I'll work out the proper protocol for that.

Members

• Any individual member might be in multiple subsites. Individuals must be authorized into each subsite separately - a person doesn't get access to every team after being approved on one. Ideally we'd have single signon so that someone who is already registered just needs to get authorized into specific subsites.
• An individual may have different display names for different teams, like JohnW, Johnnie123, or ZekeJW. So while there can be one email address across all subsites, the display name in each profile needs to be set manually. Unfortunately I don't think the mod from @dougiefresh handles this yet.
• While there is no practical limit to the number of people you can have in a SMF we expect the number of players on any given team to be no more than about 300. Most teams are in the range of 10 to 50 players. We might artificially cap subsites at 100 and increase that for a modest fee.

MemberGroups

No one is given Administrator access. Members do not install mods or themes or do other system administration. An SMF registered member can be in these groups among a couple others:

• Moderator: Typical SMF Moderator group. This is anyone who is authorized to monitor the site. This can be a player, coach, parent, etc.
• Leader: Team coordinator, maybe a coach. This person reports site issues to us and manages membership. A Leader can be a Moderator, but not all Moderators are Leaders.
• Guardian: Parent or other supervisor of non-adult members. They have read access to everything. Some might be Moderators too, or get moved up to Leader.
• BoardMod: Has ability to modify board structure, but this is not a Moderator and does not have other Leader access.
• Player: Typical SMF Regular membergroup.
• MVP - Player with special permissions, as yet undetermined. Might be able to update the calendar or KB, but an MVP is not by default a Moderator and does not have access to the same features as Guardians or Leaders.

Boards
For some common games (possibilities of thousands) I'd like to create a default set of boards so that any new subsite for a given game can get the default as a base. This is why I was asking about templates in another thread. For games that are not already recognized, we'll get a list of boards from the original initiator and offer that as a new base for that game. Initially all board customizations after this need to be processed through a ticket request system but I'll quickly try to create a membergroup that just allows access to board maintenance. This membergroup/permission might be added to people in any of the other groups. So someone might be a Leader and a BoardMod, or a MVP and BoardMod, but not all Leaders or MVPs will be BoardMods. As an alternative here, we'll just watch the boards being created to support specific games and will try to emulate those for new teams coming on-board.

Mods and Themes
All sites will have the same mods and themes. Because of common theme/mod considerations, the initial site is feature-rich but I can only use the new Default Curve theme. New themes will be tested as time permits, and periodic site-wide updates will be performed. As possible, subsite Leaders will be given the option to enable them, and for members to use them.

Business Model
While the intent is to be non-profit for as long as possible, just covering expenses, there's no ignoring a possible for-profit model. The entire site is based on FOSS, and wherever possible we'll try to thank software authors for helping this all to happen.

Summary

• The initial opening will only allow a few teams to register, so that we can work out the kinks, get feedback from real users for course corrections, and work on code for automation.
• There are thousands of teams for thousands of games. For a worldwide audience I think it's realistic to assume the number of subsites can easily go into the hundreds very quickly. Even from people just kicking the tires.
• I don't care if we use one instance of SMF with a hundred databases, a hundred instances of SMF, or if we split a single instance into 100 subsites with a mod. But I need to be able to spin off a new subsite quickly. Obviously performance is important, as is the ability to update all sites as quickly as possible.

Thanks for your time, advice, and patience.

[Arantor]

I can't be burdened with instance-specific details at the risk of creating a huge backlog of new subsites.

And yet you want to customise it per sub-site. Can't have it both ways, surely?

Moderator: Typical SMF Moderator group. This is anyone who is authorized to monitor the site. This can be a player, coach, parent, etc.

The typical SMF moderator group applies only to boards and the user explicitly has to be set as a board moderator for those. I suspect this is not actually what you want to do and instead would use permissions to achieve it.


Whatever you do you are going to run into SMF limitations.

The subforums mod route will run into limitations on the number of groups a user can be in and with respect to board access.

The unique instance per subsite route will run into problems in terms of management because you will not be able to meaningfully deploy straight off the bat. There's going to be issues relating to creation of permissions and groups in the new installs and making sure people are in the right groups, and you will be best served having a separate installation from all the others which acts as the authentication master server and does not assign *any* permissions, but purely for user authentication, and then delegate authorisation of permissions to sub-sites, but even that has headaches.

The other huge problem with individual subsite installations is maintenance, any changes you implement (including SMF standard patches) need to be rolled out to each subsite, which is not easy to do in an automated fashion particularly easily.

Then of course there is the single code instance with multiple databases. This is doable but really not easy and is pretty much guaranteeing you will have to build most of this by hand because none of the code exists to do this, especially depending on whether you're planning on trying to harmonise some stuff or completely segregate. There's a complete spectrum of what could be done, and none of it seems immediately jumping out to be a single best answer


The other huge headache is, as suspected, that you potentially have a MASSIVE workload before you even open the doors, assuming you build it to specification before deployment.

I personally wouldn't do that. I would deploy a few teams' sites individually by hand, figure out the kinks in the organisational structure, prove the concept works, then worry about implementation of something bigger scale once you know the structure actually works - because it would truly suck to implement something on the scale described only to find that it has major structural flaws from an organisational standpoint.

[Hj Ahmad Rasyid Hj Ismail]

Use a single smf installation with PortaMX and the subforums extension.

I really don't understand all the technical details and arguments in or out BUT i think you can definitely try to use this combination for a test.

[TonyG]

@ahrasis, I looked at PortaMX. Perhaps due to language issues or inadequate documentation, it doesn't look to me like that mod does anywhere near what I need. If you can point to some docs that are more complete (and grammatically sound) then I'll take another look. Thanks for the suggestion.

@Arantor- the only good news here is that you're completely on the same page now as far as the requirements and scope. I have no problem with writing code, though I wouldn't be writing this kind of server integration in PHP. I'd create another environment that queries the various databases and updates files to do what's required. But as you said, while I'm confident in skills to do this, the task is daunting and the underlying tools here don't seem like a good fit to bully into this application - an accounting application might be easier to fit into SMF, as you well know. 

I've made a commitment to just one group to provide the environment described. I will honor that with a single manually-maintained instance of SMF, the way we all do it here, but I need to back off from the larger offering. That might be a temporary or permanent retreat, I need to think about the options for a while. That's OK, as a business owner I have a number of other projects to pursue anyway.

I think a Lot of good information has been conveyed in this thread. Thanks to those who have participated.

[RolandK]

Why shouldn't a portal mod be used for SMF? The portal function is not incorporated in SMF, that is why.
No such portal mods were compatible when switching from SMF 1 to 2, and no mods what so ever are supposed to be compatible with the coming SMF 2.1.

@Tony-G: Your setup sounds fine to me, wordpress as cms and a separate forum (without bridge). SMF could do everything for you, if you code it yourself, though(!) The post saying "wordpress" is like the F-word around here says it all, IMHO. You are asking on the wrong place, if it is not something purely SMF related.

[Arantor]

because everything must be serious all the time and I can't make a tongue in cheek comment.

[Hj Ahmad Rasyid Hj Ismail]

Why shouldn't a portal mod be used for SMF? The portal function is not incorporated in SMF, that is why.
No such portal mods were compatible when switching from SMF 1 to 2, and no mods what so ever are supposed to be compatible with the coming SMF 2.1.

The portal in SMF is built for SMF. Wordpress is not built for SMF or readily to merge with SMF.
Few portal mod like PortaMX is basically ready for SMF2.1.

[RolandK]

The portal in SMF is built for SMF.

There is no official support for these external third party projects. As Tony-G rightly observed, if a mod developer abandons a project, there won't be any updates and your site may be exposed to security risks. If you'd upgrade to more recent versions of SMF, this could break your homepage. And at the current time, SMF mods are very likely to break your site or no longer work when updating, which is one major drawback of this forum software. This happens even when changing the forum theme, what shows how bad of an idea it is, to install any mods on SMF.


Edit: @ smf team: advertise your forum software with features it really provides, instead of claiming "you can do whatever you want in SMF". SMF simply is not anything else than a forum software.

[Arantor]

if a mod developer abandons a project, there won't be any updates and your site may be exposed to security risks

This is true for *any* plugin on any platform. SMF isn't special in that regard.

Except by adding two platforms into the mix, you have double the trouble unless you're running vanilla versions of both without a bridge. Two platforms, plus a slew of add-ons for both (and please note how many add-ons for WordPress have caused vulnerabilities that have made it into tech news websites because of the risk they have caused - http://www.theregister.co.uk/Tag/wordpress for example) and that's just creating a much larger surface area for attack.

And at the current time, SMF mods are very likely to break your site or no longer work when updating

This has consistently been my experience with WP for years. Different symptoms of breakage, mind, but nevertheless broken. In fact this has been my experience with other forum software, too.

SMF simply is not anything else than a forum software.

Out of the box, WP is a blog with very limited support for static pages. Not really suited to the project at hand. And since there's already a massive amount of custom code already required, it's hardly much more to be added.

[RolandK]

if a mod developer abandons a project, there won't be any updates and your site may be exposed to security risks

This is true for *any* plugin on any platform. SMF isn't special in that regard.

This is why, if SMF doesn't support something on its own, the SMF team shouldn't advertise such plugins on their forum. Or at least, don't criticize other systems for issues with plugins, that are not included by default and are not required for the usage.

And at the current time, SMF mods are very likely to break your site or no longer work when updating

This has consistently been my experience with WP for years.

One more reason to use software for what it is designed for. Especially, if the developers don't follow good practices with their plugin system, with their updates and tend to isolate their software instead of enjoying the advantages of collaboration with other systems.

Out of the box, WP is a blog with very limited support for static pages.

What makes you say, the support for static pages is very limited. Pages can be created without any third party plugins in wordpress. There is a comfortable editor which allows you to switch between visual and text (html) input, you can add javascript, css, images, tables etc. and decide what pages should show up in you desired order on the menu of your homepage. Easy. Secure. Makes it popular, I guess.
May there be a multiple of queries for displaying a page compared to other softwares, that is not what editors and users care about in the first place.

There is no need to ever create a post and use the blog feature in wordpress, just stay with creating your dozen of pages and you have a classical homepage layout. What does the average user need in addition to what wordpress offers, from a CMS, if I may ask?

[Hj Ahmad Rasyid Hj Ismail]

RolandK I think you are making things up as I don't recall and cannot find TonyG statement on this:

As Tony-G rightly observed, if a mod developer abandons a project, there won't be any updates and your site may be exposed to security risks. If you'd upgrade to more recent versions of SMF, this could break your homepage. And at the current time, SMF mods are very likely to break your site or no longer work when updating, which is one major drawback of this forum software. This happens even when changing the forum theme, what shows how bad of an idea it is, to install any mods on SMF.

He summarized his need without Wordpress here: http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=531541.msg3776114#msg3776114.

And that is why I repeat Kindred suggestion as I am in the same opinion as well.

Whether he want to learn more about that is his own choice. I won't be bothering.

[Arantor]

Or at least, don't criticize other systems for issues with plugins, that are not included by default and are not required for the usage.

Where do we stand on the necessity of caching plugins for WordPress then? Because for any site with non-trivial load, caching plugins become pretty much necessary because of WP's design, and this has been an issue for the 6 years since I first started using WP.

Though you'll notice, we actually weren't. We were suggesting that based on our experience, SMF plus portal would be a better solution all in all than WP+SMF. Our experience is that for most people that use SMF, they don't need two systems with two patching schedules etc. when a single system with an addon will actually meet their needs better, and that's what we're going off.

That's all we're saying: in our experience, SMF + portal will cover the functionality most people seem to want from WP to the point where WP is not really needed any more for them. Sure, there will be edge cases, but our experience is that it isn't nearly as common as you might think.

Especially, if the developers don't follow good practices with their plugin system, with their updates and tend to isolate their software instead of enjoying the advantages of collaboration with other systems.

Do not even go there. I have been advocating for YEARS to move away from the current situation. I have put more hours into trying to get away from this situation than people could believe. To the point of even redesigning and rebuilding the plugin manager from scratch to begin to do something about this. But too many people keep telling me that 'we need the flexibility' of the current system.

However, every comment you make about 'developers not following good practices' does actually apply to WP. They isolate, don't enjoy the advantages of collaboration etc. Though the advantages of collaboration in this case are very limited; WP is now trapped by its legacy design where it literally cannot make architectural shifts, not even at a glacial pace, without breaking more and more plugins.

There is a comfortable editor which allows you to switch between visual and text (html) input, you can add javascript, css, images, tables etc. and decide what pages should show up in you desired order on the menu of your homepage. Easy. Secure. Makes it popular, I guess.

Yes, and the visual editor has a habit of choking on anything more than basic HTML - and has been this way for years.

Yes, it's easy. No, it's not secure, well, that depends on your definition of secure. My definition of secure is that it is not secure. But then again I'm the sort of person who gets called in to clean up malware and also to investigate claims of hacking (including when Avast got hacked), so my definitions of secure are quite different from most peoples'.

There is no need to ever create a post and use the blog feature in wordpres

Complete fabrication. If you look in WP's guts, every single thing is a post in the blog. It's just displayed differently. This includes things like drafts of posts, too.

What does the average user need in addition to what wordpress offers, from a CMS, if I may ask?

Pretty much that's all they need. However... and here's the crux of the problem: you're looking at WP in isolation and praising it for its values on its own. Sure, on its own, it's fine. I even run stuff on WP, it's not unheard of.

However, the minute you bring other systems into the mix, like SMF, you have a number of problems.

Every system assumes it's the only thing on the site. SMF generally plays nicely with other systems, but WP doesn't. I don't entirely blame it for being so, but there are things its devs could do more nicely to play with other systems. Things SMF already does, has done for years and does even better in the dev version, in fact.

But anyway, if you want a front page and some content, plus a forum, your advocation effectively mires people into two patching schedules, two themes, inconsistent user experience (which is more off putting than most people consider) and that's even before you start talking about having add-ons (which all require their own patching schedule, and most people will have plugins on both). So, which would be better: two systems, two themes, inconsistent user experience, plus additional systems for maintenance - or one system, one theme, consistent user experience and fewer additional systems for maintenance?

Don't get me wrong, WP has its place and my comments on its nature are more playful and facetious than outright condemnation. But hammering WP + SMF into one environment rarely works well and more of the issues in our experience come from having to work around WP's limitations than working around SMF's.

[TonyG]

Wow. 

I did say early on that WP has nothing to do with the original request. I really regret ever mentioning it and wish all of the rhetoric on this topic could have been made elsewhere rather than on top of this thread.

I've resolved that SMF simply can't do what I'm asking. So much for "it can do anything you want". As developers we know we really can do anything we want of course. But for this project and so many others the huge amount of time it would take to make it happen precludes the effort. So from my perspective this inquiry is closed, though I will keep coming back for the entertaining banter.

As to security issues, it's been made quite clear that there is no vetting of the mods provided for download through the SMF package manager. So how is SMF any different from WP or Drupal or any other environment? I'd suggest that security issues are found and recognized elsewhere, moreso than in SMF, for a few reasons. First, you folks discourage loading a bunch of mods because you say too many mods lead to issues. So if you don't load a lot of mods of course you're not going to get a lot of issues. Second, with Drupal and Joomla and WordPress and other packages being used in a majority of sites, and SMF not even a blip on the CMS radar, it shouldn't be a surprise that we see reports of issues elsewhere and not with SMF. I've seen reviews that there are a lot more mods for SMF than for some other packages but if we compare the number of mods and themes that and are compatible and functional for this current platform (v2.x) compared with others, I'd guess that other platforms have a much larger share of currently supported addons. Or to be more clear- if only a few people are maintaining addons for this platform, of course we're not going to see any new security issues. Is that good? I don't think so.

Further, related, with all due and sincere appreciation for the help here, and all due respect for the skills of those here, I've come to some more disappointing conclusions. The Not Invented Here mindset, coupled with some very terse and downright off-putting responses elsewhere in this group, have convinced me that SMF is where it is in this industry in large part due to the passionate folks who support it. To clarify with a related example, for the last 30 years I've been involved in another industry where the biggest fans of the products are the worst enemies. They insist that their platform can and should be used to the exclusion of others, and I see the exact same suffocating fandom here. It's OK to know you're the best but when the rest of the world is using other tools and you don't play well with them, then it doesn't matter if you're the best or not because the ecosystem simply won't grow. That's where SMF is as well as my other industry. And then people embrace the self-engrandizing notion that they're quite comfortable being the industry's best kept secret and that it's good to be the underdog as long as you're the best. I think that's just delusional. So with my thinking along these lines, and after having used SMF exclusively for the last 10 years, not only am I finding this software inadequate for immediate (granted completely New) desires, but I'm compelled to look elsewhere (like phpBB) for software that has a broader and less isolationist user/developer base. Note that I'm not looking so much for quality but for a community that's a little less self-absorbed and isolationist.

In summary, and to try to end on a constructive note: I like SMF and will continue to use it as possible. But I also need to look elsewhere because I see SMF as being historically a great package, while other packages are more interested in looking forward. I've seen way too many responses in this forum about how some reported issue can't or shouldn't happen. Well, we can't possibly be reporting things that can't happen, so the fact is that issues ARE happening. So I hope that this community can do a little better about simply addressing what IS, avoiding posturing about how great the software is in the process. (I have to thank @Arantor for being a consistent voice of reason here, jumping in on a few threads with helpful answers where the threads could easily have gone in a weird direction.) And rather than regarding any other software name as being "dirty words", I really hope folks here can learn to play nice with the rest of the world. Isolationism is self-defeating. Be team players. Recognize the faults of others but don't put yourselves on a pedestal in the process. You don't need to tell us how great the software is in this forum (preaching to the choir so to speak) - if it's really that good then do some grassroots marketing, get people to use it like they do for Drupal, WP, etc, and the quality of SMF will make itself known through sheer numbers of installed sites.

And now ... I need to go get some real work done. 
Thanks for your time.

[Arantor]

I would note with a touch of irony that it is this mentality that actually *encourages* us to be isolationist rather than the result of something else. Bashing us over the head for our weaknesses doesn't encourage them to fix them, it makes us defensive from the off.

I would point out that WP's community is actually just as prone (and in fact way more prone) to all these issues except no-one points out their issues because "it's WordPress" as though everyone is expected to bend over backwards for them. They're only big now. I expect something else will come along and replace them in due course. They are continually running into their own limitations.

For me, I can make SMF do anything in a short amount of time - I guarantee I can have an SMF powered blog+forum faster than I could ever have WP+SMF with any sort of bridge and a consistent theme. But I'm atypical. Hell, I can have SMF blog+forum with a converted WP theme before I'd meaningfully have WP+SMF working nicely together (and before anyone goes wut, been there, done it, got the t-shirt)

The statement about 'you can do anything in SMF' is true - but I refute the implication that you could build what you're trying to build in <insert any other platform> without a colossal amount of code. In all honesty, the WP part of the problem is still going to be part of the problem WHATEVER platform you decide to use because whatever you add to the party, you end up having to deal with the issues of bridging to WP. This is why I was trying to erase it from the equation - because it IS part of the equation. The only way it wouldn't have been part of the equation is if there were absolutely no connection whatsoever.

I have to be honest, having seen post after post like this (about how we suck) continues to eat away at what motivation I ever had to work on this project. It's also in no small part why I quit the dev team - because I was possibly one of the few forces that could have changed any of this and I didn't have the strength to keep chipping away at the issues that you're getting at, most of which I've known for years and was working on doing something about (though NIH is a real thing and it's not always a bad thing; just because something is established does not mean it is *good*, cf. PHP, Windows, and sometimes one has to be contrarian to get a better result than sticking with what is merely good enough). I have had multi-page arguments about 2 or 3 words in the UI in the past. Yes, SERIOUSLY. You think this community is insular and isolated, you have no idea. You've seen a fraction of it. People have complained about my attitude because I refused to accept "this is how we've always done it" as the sole justification for a feature being how it is (rather than it having any merits to support its continued support)

And if I'm really honest, half the reason I stick around here is because I already invested thousands of hours of my life into this, and it'd be a shame to waste that investment. You don't waste good.

[Suki]

I just want to say that I find it somehow sad that you can label an entire community based on some overly vocal persons.

Speaking as both a normal user and an SMF dev, I do not consider myself an isolationist, quite the contrary.  I never ever praised SMF over any other software either.

I've said this plenty of other times but, hey, I'll say it again: I'm the first person to recognize SMF is far from perfect, thats why I have a dev role here. And nope, I'm not a/on a minority, I'm just not as vocal as some folks here but then again, being really vocal about something doesn't make it more important

I also believe in free will, if you believe SMF isn't suitable for whatever you want to do, thats is fine, go ahead and find or build whatever suits your needs best. Thats what I did.