1.1. Beta 4 wow

[Grudge]

Chris is correct. Infact had we given out a predicted date 6 months ago we'd already be off by a month or two - so go figure

Developing on a "volenteer" project is completely different to a real company. Real life gets in the way at times, and it's best not to give people false hope of when things will be done by.

[Deaks]

Developing on a "volenteer" project is completely different to a real company. Real life gets in the way at times, and it's best not to give people false hope of when things will be done by.

No offence ... I disagree with that...as I am volunteer webmaster for a college, also I am a volunteer actor, its all to do with how you manage your time... nothing to do with being a volunteer, if you set aside a specific amount of time to  do something and take account for personal life etc then it shouldnt effect you. Darn and I thought all that stuff they taught me about ime management was rubbish.

[Chris Cromer]

We all volunteer in our spare time, but just because you have plenty of spare time to devote to something doesn't mean everyone has that same ammount of spare time to devote to something. You have to realize it isn't all in how you manage your time, because simply not everyone has some time to manage in the first place.

Heck my time is pretty limited myself since I have plenty of stuff I have to split my time between.

1) Do maintanance on agigames.com.
2) Help people make and play AGI games.
3) Working on a new wiki concerning AGI games, so alot of info to fill in.
4) Working on a windows help file for AGI Studio.
5) Keep the templates uptodate and work better so people can create better games.
6) Compile interpreters for the programming/compiler challenged so they can play the games on newer os's and different os's than the games where intended for.
7) My message board system which involves programming, debugging, support, etc.
8 ) Administrating a gaming/os/programming forum.
9) Other little pet projects/learning experiences to keep me uptodate with technology.
10) Supporting SMF.

Please note this list is not in order of priority.

And pretty soon I will be adding working at Best Buy to this list.

I am sure I am not the only one in the team who has a busy life. You have to realize we do have other things besides SMF in our life, so setting a deadline just isn't possible because we all have other things to work on and take care of besides SMF.

[Deaks]

but you have missed the point, my list is longer than that,

1) Maintain my room (my folks are fussy b's)
2)Maintain thelastbreathe (still  not compoleted)
3) Maintain and upgrade Poems by Bryan Deakin
4) Maintain teh forum
5) Help out on any other sites.
6) Do a pyschic  development diploma
7) Do Mediumship and Runes Readings.
ATM study in depth the shakrasand how to open and close
9) finish my book
10) Plan and write a report on why i need £1500
11) Design and compile a college website
12) look for a hosting company that will do a custom plan (NOW thats hard)
13) Find out the new beauty products and  plan a small network for the college.
14) Search for my Serbian family (now thanks to Ivan I know where to look)
15) Try and keep my doctor happy and try and go outside for a walk
(Now thats just my free time and weekends that is also my main volunteer stuff)

Yet I manage it all as I have did a time plan, I shall do so much on this, this and this, aswell as make time to go out meet friends go to college to catch up on gossip, aswell as helping out my gran.  You ever though about multi tasking.  And as I said

if you set aside a specific amount of time to  do something and take account for personal life etc then it shouldnt effect you.

Everyone has a busy life, would be great if we could get paid to lie in our beds and get paid big bucks.  All I said was being volunteer doesnt validate anything.

[Chris Cromer]

It's not about who's list is longer... it's about how much time the stuff on the list takes up.

I do manage it all, but my time that I can devote to each isn't very great. No matter how well you manage time your have to realize there are only 24 hours in a day and nothing can change that fact. How long something takes to do is going to affect everything on your list. I mean 8 hours a day gone from a job as example. That leaves 16 hours. Now subtract around 10 hours for a decent nights rest. That leaves you about 6 hours to devote to your projects. Now programming is something that takes alot of time, it's not something you can just do in the blink of an eye and meet a deadline especially when it's not your job and your volunteering. Heck I wouldn't want a rushed copy if software to meet a deadline, there would be millions of bugs and problems which would mean tons more releases and upgrades for people all the time. It's better for them to get everything done without having to worry about a deadline that way people get a stable product. Oh and they don't spend all of their time coding either, they also do support because they know the code better than anyone else.

You are holding all volunteer work in the same light. You have to remember volunteering takes different ammounts of time depending on what your volunteering for. Just because you have plenty of time with the stuff you volunteer for, doesn't mean that every type of volunteer work will leave you with plenty of time. I mean I could volunteer to help a guy put a banner in the header of his forum. That would take like 10 minutes. Or I could volunteer to work on the pm system in SMF which could take days, weeks, or even months.

[Deaks]

i know its not to do with who list is bigger but you still dont seem grasp the fact that its all to do with time management,  If you manage your time correctly you can get everything done to a suitable standard, also prioritising but i barely do that so im not going on a tnagent bout that.

[Chris Cromer]

Time management is fine and dandy... but as I said there are only 24 hours in a day, no ammount of managing can change that. And if you have multiple deadlines and multiple things to do. Your going to miss the deadline causing those people to be upset and angry who where expecting it. And considering that SMF is a volunteer project, it's not going to be the highest thing on people's priority list, real life comes first, work, school, business, chores, bills, etc.

You don't seem to understand the concept of volunteer work. It's something you do with your SPARE time. The ammount of spare time a person has is always changing based on things that happen in their lives, and everyone has a different ammount of spare time than someone else, making it impossible to set and keep deadline on a fully volunteer project like this.

I could unerstand if this where our job to support and work on SMF, then it's priority would be very high and a deadline could be set and kept since we would all be working to get our paychecks. But that's just it this isn't our job, this is volunteer work in spare time, so naturally a deadline isn't feasable.

And are you even taking into consideration the time it takes to develop software? I don't expect you to understand if you don't know about developing software but it isn't something that's fast and easy, it takes time to do it and to do it right. Not to mention it's hard to guage software development time because bugs pop up, things sometimes don't work, and time to test it thouroughly.

Setting deadlines in the world of volunteer software is bad, a good portion of the time those deadlines won't be met, and people will be mad and upset posting rants about "Why isn't it out already since you said it should be out by now?".

Having a deadline in work, school, etc is fine and dandy, it's important and high priority so your going to try to meet that deadline since your future and paycheck rely on it. But volunteer work is low priority compared to those other things, so having a deadline is a bad thing since it most likely won't be met.

[Deaks]

thats why you say in post something like "At the moment the expected release date is such and such but do you the technical nature of this we may need to alter the deadline to meet the set standards, If the product is not released on this date then please be patient as it takes time"  and I dont think it would be a good thing to say sure illdo that to your boss it will be ready by 2007, even if you dont want to admit it you still have a deadline.

[Joshua Dickerson]

Even if there were a deadline for a release, it wouldn't be released. Why would SMF want to hold itself to that in public? It would cause a backlash when things aren't released on time. Development might have its own deadline, but thats for them and their own purposes.

[Grudge]

Also, I disagree whole heartily with your comments on a volunteer project being akin to a real one. Bear in mind that my real life job is a project manager I'm used to managing time at work – but in a volunteer project such as this it's completely different. Now, were SMF a four week long camp in the summer then yes, please can put aside time to do it. As it is now I'm away on work during the week, and that leaves me with just weekends to code. If something comes up on a weekend, like heading to Nottingham for someone's birthday – then I lose that week of coding. I can't speak for others but I tend to let my personal life go with the flow, and certainly don't have things planned months in advance.

As a result of things like this adding a feature can easily get delayed by several weeks – if not longer. We have three developers here contributing to SMF, and I'm sure they are all in a similar situation – things come up and they can't do anything for a few weeks. Had we of given a release date at 1.1 Beta 1 for the final we'd have guessed July or August – and it's now already September. All we would have achieved is to disappoint anyone who may have planned for its release – and are likely to find ourselves with a bunch of annoyed users. Best not raise expectations if you ask me. Note this is similar to our policy with features. We don't tell people what we plan to put in the next release as it just leads to disappointment if we don't get time. I said once that Post Moderation would make it into 1.1 and its just been impossible for me to find the time to get it in – so it hasn't and won't make it.

Besides, a user could make an educated guess when final will be out by the fact this current and last beta probably won't make it public, RC's tend to last about 6-8 weeks each, and there probably be two of them

[Padfoot]

It is frustrating sometimes when we have no idea how long before the marvellous 1.1 becomes a final public releases.....

BUT...

It is an extremely minor issue.....we should, and i think the vast majority are, grateful that there people in the world who do devote their spare time (however much it is and however it is managed) to producing a truly superb FREE forum, that is every bit a match for vb, IPB, phpBB etc....

If you were paying for the product then maybe, only maybe, could you have an expectation to be kept informed of release dates etc....as SMF is free people have to accept that it may not be developed as speedily as paid for products.
And i would rather have it that way....at least it seems that the people behind SMF do their best to release versions that are as stable as possible, rather than just chucking any old crap out to satisfy the impatient amongst us.

Be grateful for what we have.

[Joshua Dickerson]

Even most paid software doesn't have a public deadline and if they did, it would be a very loose one. Take Microsoft Vista as case in point.

[Deaks]

Even most paid software doesn't have a public deadline and if they did, it would be a very loose one. Take Microsoft Vista as case in point.

I thought they said october 2006 in there press release

[Joshua Dickerson]

Vista was supposed to have been out years ago. Remember, its gone through at least 3 name changes. They have received a huge backlash for not sticking to their deadlines. Not even close.

[Deaks]

microsoft has been through more than its share of hassle, they be used to it by now

[Joshua Dickerson]

The point wasn't about their software. It was about setting deadlines.

[godboko]

Don't start setting up deadlines, that's just a bad idea in software development, weather it be forums, web site framework, or an OS, its just a bad idea. I understand WHY Microsoft "sets" deadlines, but I think overall its stupid, though they meet there deadlines in general on there business products, minus OS'. But I would rather get another good OS with new exciting features, then get a rushed worthless peace of ******. As an IT consultant and web developer, I love the XP line, and the Server 2003 line, they are powerful stable and flexible. Yes they have vulnerabilities, but Apple and Linux would have more if they where more popular. But that's neither here nor there.

I think you all are offering a great forum software, I don't like the template system personally, but I like cleaner template systems that have no php code in them, but that's my only complaint, everything else is so easy to do its a small price to pay.

Keep up the good work, and don't worry about deadlines you might upset a few people but other wise all deadlines will do is upset everyone else.

[TarantinoArchives]

yeah ****** deadlines, i mean, i product (no matter what) needs to be delivered working. that's the only thing that counts.

keep up the great work guys, this is the most incredible message board software ever (although i just saw that the YaBB guys are working pretty hard on new stuff :-)

[Isaac]

I completely agree with what Chris and Grudge just posted.  SMF has made it thus far without deadlines, so there's no need to start having them now, especially since it will almost always result in disappointment, angry users, and more.

[Xarcell]

Kinda getting of topic, but a study shows the average computer nerd spends 90 hours a week on PC "working". Or 90 hours including any jobs/schooling...

So programming nerds tend to work a crap load of more hours and have a busier schedule with more personal projects and ambitions than the average worker.

Another study showed nerds/gamers also tend to spend more time outdoors than the average blue collar couch potato.

Hate to use the word nerd, but that's what we are. Wish I bookmarked the links so I could post them.

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I'm glad you don't post dates on relases. Missed dates can really really bring down the morale of the community. I've seen it happen before. But from my experince, SMF is the most active developing software company I've been around. Thier fast, trust me...

You guys are even more active than most non-volunteer software companies.

Kudos to you.

-Xarcell