Adding membergroups as board moderators

[Oldiesmann]

If we were at the RC stage (or even late in the beta stages), I'd agree with you about not breaking stuff, but we're in the alpha stage. We can afford to possibly break stuff, and this really improves the usefulness of SMF - especially on larger forums.

[emanuele]

The point is always the same: we are not even in beta because no one is working on what would be needed to finish and release a beta (and yes, I'm not working on that because I have no theming skills whatsoever, and I repeated that several times), but in the last months several people submitted several features.

Well, do you want features?
Let's add them.
Do you want to release something?
Get someone to work on what is needed.

I have my pets too and I would love to see them in 2.1, but I refrained from adding anything too big (yes, I expanded the admin search to all the admin pages and that required a bi of reorganization, but it is a feature improvement, and I merged the banEdit rework, but it's a re-work and cleanup, nothing new) in the hope to be able to release something in the "close" future (and for those that may read this, to me "close" means not before the end of the year for an RC at that level and I'm being optimist here).

But, as I said don't know where: do you want to release what we have now as beta?
It's not up to the par to be a beta IMHO, but if you think it's okay go ahead, to me it's perfectly fine.

[Oldiesmann]

The point is always the same: we are not even in beta because no one is working on what would be needed to finish and release a beta (and yes, I'm not working on that because I have no theming skills whatsoever, and I repeated that several times), but in the last months several people submitted several features.

Well, do you want features?
Let's add them.
Do you want to release something?
Get someone to work on what is needed.

I have my pets too and I would love to see them in 2.1, but I refrained from adding anything too big (yes, I expanded the admin search to all the admin pages and that required a bi of reorganization, but it is a feature improvement, and I merged the banEdit rework, but it's a re-work and cleanup, nothing new) in the hope to be able to release something in the "close" future (and for those that may read this, to me "close" means not before the end of the year for an RC at that level and I'm being optimist here).

But, as I said don't know where: do you want to release what we have now as beta?
It's not up to the par to be a beta IMHO, but if you think it's okay go ahead, to me it's perfectly fine.

I never said or even suggested that we should release the current version as a beta. I have no idea what even needs to be done before a beta release at this point (but if it's theme-related, I can't help there either). I do realize that we'll never get anywhere if we ignore existing issues and spend all our time adding new features instead. That being said, we also can't keep pushing features back to 2.2 just because it's not what needs to be done for beta and/or we don't want to break something. What's more important here - possibly breaking something before the beta (and beta periods are designed to find and fix bugs/broken features), or adding a major feature which greatly improves the usability and user-friendliness of SMF?

[IchBin™]

What's more important, adding more code to the base so that it takes longer to get the SMF2.1 final, or to leave it alone and add it for the next version? This argument has been said many, many times by many people on the team. This is why you guys need a lead dev.

[Arantor]

What's more important, adding more code to the base so that it takes longer to get the SMF2.1 final, or to leave it alone and add it for the next version?

What's more important, doing something or doing nothing while hoping someone else will do it? This is the real problem at hand.


Here's the thing, this has been done. It's implemented. It's on Github. Include it already and move on with the next thing. Arguing about whether you're going to add something already working and considered 'quite important' just kills what little motivation there is left to do anything.

[IchBin™]

Not if you're putting these features in a repo for 2.2. Doesn't kill motivation if you know it's going to be in the next release. But to continue to pile into the list of things that everyone thinks SMF2.1 needs is just going to extend the process. History proves that already.

[Arantor]

I'd agree with you, if this wasn't already implemented and presumably working. As it stands, you have a feature that works, is considered quite important. The actual implementation looks - at a glance - like it should do the job.

The problem with your assertion is that history doesn't actually back you up. Yes, there are features in 1.1/2.0/2.1 that not everyone needs. That's the nature of the beast, and yes, continuing to pile in features can be problematic - if there's no-one interested, willing and capable of reviewing those features and accepting the pull requests into the trunk.

It isn't about the ever-moving goalposts, it's about the lack of people willing and capable of getting the ball into the goal. And it is this sort of argument that pushes those people away. History DOES prove that.

[IchBin™]

The history of SMF2 proves it. How much crap kept getting added, and how many goal posts were moved? It too far longer to get SMF2 stable because of this. Sure there was other stuff, but a big part of the reason it took SMF2 so long was because of all the crap that kept getting added. Even in the RC's. I'm not denying that part of what you're saying is true. The fact of the matter is, it was already agreed upon what was going to be in the next release. And now here they are doing it again as they have always done in the past. Either way, no skin of my back. This will just push it out even further until they find someone capable and willing to stick to a plan and finish the next release.

[Chalky]

I know that my lack of coding skills and knowledge of the inner workings of SMF is such that I feel I have no right to even be posting here, but it is in the public board and I'm an SMF user, so what the hell... I have to say I agree with Arantor.  This isn't somebody saying "hey I've got a cool idea for a feature for 2.1", this is somebody saying "here's the code - it's done, it works, it's ready for action".  Why not include it in 2.1?  It would certainly save a helluva lot of time arguing about it, and nobody really knows what the future holds for 2.2 or how many new funky features it's going to need just to keep it current.  This feature is here, now and there's time to get it in there before the beta release.  I say go for it.

[Arantor]

I was going to post a rebuttal to the whole 'feature frozen' thing, citing when things were mentioned as such, when it was declared as such and how many years after it took to getting released - and of course, total turnover of dev team, multiple times, had absolutely nothing to do with it, but then I realised even by my standards it was petty.

What amuses me is that this is a team member making this suggestion. Were it a community member, I would not be even remotely surprised, but a team member. This from the same team that has multiple members who have told me that dev team members are not special compared to any other team members. If that's so, any team member contribution is equivalent to a dev team member doing so... and thus there is even less argument that actually stands up to this not being included.