The future of SMF

[DJ Omnimaga]

The GitHub repo is transparent, but only to people who knows PHP. If you don't know PHP then it's kinda hard to scan through the history to figure out what part of the SMF that got fixed or if something new got implemented.

The problem is if the other user did not intend to be rude then if you reply with actual rudeness, then I can totally understand why you might receive backlash afterwards. For example, just because I am worried that SMF 2.1 is going the same route as Duke Nukem Forever and decide to voice my concern about it doesn't mean I am trying to start a fight and I might not even be aware (either due to asperger syndrome, lack of social skills or lack of experience on software development discussion) that it's seen as rude.

As for new support staff, there are two ways of hiring: Either get people to apply or promote them. Both solutions requires a group of staff to review the potential staff to see if they're worthy enough as support staff to be added.


Of course, all of this are suggestions, though, but I can totally understand some users concerns about what I mentioned above (although I do know that certain people are very impatient).

[Irisado]

Dingaling: Your main point seems to be to criticise the attitude of the Team.  I think that before you take such a position, it would be prudent of you to consider how you address people, and how this approach results in a self-fulfilling prophecy.

First you say the following:

The devs shouldn't be here complaining about users complaining, they should be doing the devving.

This comes over as a command.  Such a statement is very antagonistic and authoritarian, thus it's likely to elicit the sort of response which allows you to claim that the community is being picked on.

A better way to formulate this would have been to ask whether there's too much other stuff going on which is distracting the attention of the Developers and perhaps suggest that other team members could handle it instead to free up their time.

They sound really jealous and angry and .. tense for some reason.

This is an emotive value judgement, which again is likely to wind people up and result in hostile responses.  There was no need to say this at all.

No one wants to work with a bunch of whiners and reading about dev team internal politics and drama is a big turn off.

Again, an emotive value judgement.  You go on to criticise the way in which Kindred responded to you, yet you are using similar, if not worse, language here.  How you conduct yourself and your choice of words often strongly influences how others respond to you.  It is, therefore, unwise to make such hostile remarks if you don't wish to be treated in a negative way yourself.

Let's continue to your second post in this topic:

Devs, team members, whatever.

Whatever indicates disrespect and a misunderstanding of team structures.  This suggests an overall couldn't care less attitude on your part.  If you had wanted to be constructive with your criticism, you could have taken the time to formulate this better and to research how the Team actually works.

You represent the whole SMF organization to the newcomer and you just spat on my face and start doing semantics. Who are you to call someone "idiot"? Are you a better person? You, sir, are a neckbeard and not a gentleman. Hows that for an insult?

You accuse Kindred of being rude, and decide to be rude back.  If you feel a Team member, or anyone else here, is out of line, the report to moderator button is how to proceed.  Fighting fire with fire does not work, and it is not going to be allowed to continue, as I will come to at the end of my post.

Here's a free tip: stop calling your community "whiners". What an absolutely horrible, elitist and condescending paternalistic approach.

Yet, you used the very same word when referring to the community in your first post in this topic. You thus present yourself as being someone who does practise what he preaches.

As a final note to you, please avoid responding to any of my points.  They are purely for you to reflect on.  You may well disagree, but this this topic is not the place to express any more of these views, as you will see in my moderation note at the end of this post.

As for new support staff, there are two ways of hiring: Either get people to apply or promote them. Both solutions requires a group of staff to review the potential staff to see if they're worthy enough as support staff to be added.

We already have systems in place on the Team for recruiting new members.  The problem is that there are almost no suitable candidates who are available to join the Team at this time.  To respond to your earlier comment, as it's related to this, the lack of personnel is the major factor as to why development on 2.1 cannot be speeded up.  There simply are not enough personnel for it to go any faster.



This final comment is for everyone posting in , thinking of posting in, or reading this topic.  There will be no more allowances for insulting, flaming, flame baiting, trolling, or any other type of behaviour similar to this.  The topic is supposed to be for cordial discussion about the future development of SMF, and this is what it is going to return to.

Anyone who has issues with how someone is posting here needs to use the report to moderator button, and not to get involved in personal attacks or respond to what they perceive to be a personal attack.  The report to moderator button is there to handle these issues.  Please use it.

Any posts which are adjudged to be in breach of the standard expected will be deleted without notification and members who consistently break these etiquette rules will be warned.

I hope that makes thing clear.

Please now return to civil and cordial discussion of SMF's future development.  Thank you .

[Antes]

The GitHub repo is transparent, but only to people who knows PHP. If you don't know PHP then it's kinda hard to scan through the history to figure out what part of the SMF that got fixed or if something new got implemented.

We are using release topics to reflect what changed (not every minor detail). Also you can check PRs (merged), they are mostly for fixing specific issues and details themselves as "fixing #abc" (https://github.com/SimpleMachines/SMF2.1/pull/3466).

and if you don't want to create addition account for GitHub just to report issues, you can always use our bug board we'll gladly mirror it to github.

[青山 素子]

As a general response, please keep in mind that everyone that is attached to SMF is a volunteer. They don't get paid and do what they can in their free time. Trying to enforce deadlines and milestones against a project with few contributors and erratic schedules will cause problems. As was mentioned, it was tried before and found to be a huge failure.

Some of the curtness/rudeness comes from being asked thousands of times about schedules and having to deal with an entitled attitude from hundreds of those folks. You cannot believe how tiring it is to respond to randos demanding releases, criticizing how things are run and otherwise screaming for you to dedicate some of your project free time to them all without any intention of giving back.

If you want to make releases happen faster, look over reported bugs and find ones without test cases (a set of steps to reproduce) and add this. Look over the support boards and answer some questions that you can solve. Learn a bit of coding to try and help with superficial bugs. If you see something being done inefficiently, make a suggestion on how to improve that thing and help switch the system to your idea. Do something or anything to increase the people that are working on this project so everyone has a lighter load so more can be done. As John Heywood once wrote: many hands make light work.

Oh yeah and one more thing, for crying out loud, update these forums, they're your calling card and a potential new users cannot even register because of your antiquated verification system (ReCaptcha, there's a mod for it)! Create some confidence in your community instead of bullying them.

Yes, the internal system is antiquated. Unfortunately, it's the best we have for a multi-language forum where we don't like to depend on external services that can change with little to no notice.

The issue with reCAPTCHA is that it's been broken (in the word typing form) for some time now. It's somewhat useful as a very small hurdle, but when you have human-backed services that charge $1.00 US for 1000 valid solutions, it's pretty easy to break most OCR-style barriers. This isn't a new problem, either. It's been going on for over eight years. Yes, that article was written in 2008, and the services catering to spammers have only gotten cheaper and better. Some of the more recent changes to reCAPTCHA like behavior-based analysis and image choosing are attempts to make such services much more expensive to run.

The ideal anti-spam solution is custom question/answer sets that are specific to the forum's focus. Such a thing should keep spam posters down to a manageable amount. Unfortunately, that is mostly useful when you only have members that will share a single language. Such a solution is thus impossible here.

[Grammy]

I just sat here and read this whole thread and I guess I'm surprised. 

I mean....  SMF is a free gift.  I'm trying to think how someone would feel if they gave me a present and, as soon as I unwrapped it, I began bawling them out because it wasn't exactly as I wanted it to be.  Wow...  I'd be a jerk.

I guess I'm pretty naive.  I just think gifts are....  well, gifts. 




(Moving on elsewhere, since I talk too much.)   

[albertlast]

I don't find that github is realy transparent,
to make the issue list empty should be not target (you will never archive this)
When you look at the amount of commits https://github.com/SimpleMachines/SMF2.1/releases
than you notice that between beta 1 and beta 2 are ~700 commits and between beta 2 and now ~1400 commits

Based on this information the develop should already by beta 4.

i think the idea "a beta release need to be more stable as normale beta version" should be dead.

[青山 素子]

I don't find that github is realy transparent,

I guess it depends on what kind of transparency you want. As you go on to show, it's very transparent as to the development process.

to make the issue list empty should be not target (you will never archive this)

Honestly, the overall goal should always be to have 0 bugs. As long as you realize that this isn't a realistic goal if you want to release, you should be doing fine. I expect the developers understand this and have prioritized bugs appropriately.

When you look at the amount of commits https://github.com/SimpleMachines/SMF2.1/releases
than you notice that between beta 1 and beta 2 are ~700 commits and between beta 2 and now ~1400 commits

Based on this information the develop should already by beta 4.

Raw bug count is an awful metric for this. It ignores the type and actual amount of work covered by the commits. It's entirely possible that the more recent commits have a smaller impact than the early 700, as they are focused on specific bugs. Or they could all have similar impact. It's impossible to know without investigating the commits in detail.

i think the idea "a beta release need to be more stable as normale beta version" should be dead.

I don't recall anyone specifically stating this. It might be because it makes no sense. A beta is a beta. If you're talking about the code at any one time in the repository, that is not a beta, it's simply in-development code.

Now, actual normal releases should be more stable than a beta simply by the fact that the beta and release candidate process should have been able to reduce the number and impact of bugs.

[butchs]

As a general response, please keep in mind that everyone that is attached to SMF is a volunteer.

Some can be called rudeOteers (yet another attempt at creating a new English language word).  Alas I believe the leader of the rudeOteers has gone to greener pastures. 

[Suki]

As a general response, please keep in mind that everyone that is attached to SMF is a volunteer.

Some can be called rudeOteers (yet another attempt at creating a new English language word).  Alas I believe the leader of the rudeOteers has gone to greener pastures. 

Hate to disappoint you but I'm still around 

[Arantor]

I thought he'd left but it seems he's back, offering his "opinions".

[d3vcho]

I still think that social media would be useful in order to reach more people (users, developers who may help and who knows who else).

[Arantor]

It actually isn't as useful as you'd think given the specific nature of forums and the generic nature of Facebook etc.

[d3vcho]

It actually isn't as useful as you'd think given the specific nature of forums and the generic nature of Facebook etc.

Anyway everything is helpful. It isn't necessary to stay all the day long focused on social media, but posting a few things per week should be enough for people like me who say social media are inactive. It's my point of view.

[butchs]

I thought he'd left but it seems he's back, offering his "opinions".

I love you too!

Just when I thought it was safe the leader returns! 
 

[Arantor]

And it seems you also can't tell when I'm being extremely self deprecating and referring to the fact I'd made a return offering my "opinions"

[butchs]

You make me laugh....   

[Arantor]

I do my very best *bows*

[Bloc67]

Generally - or specifically if thats easier - whats the main issues holding back a stable 2.1?

I've looked through the issues list(135 and counting) and a lot of these seems to be more of suggestions, or bugs that haven't been confirmed?

[Antes]

Generally - or specifically if thats easier - whats the main issues holding back a stable 2.1?

I've looked through the issues list(135 and counting) and a lot of these seems to be more of suggestions, or bugs that haven't been confirmed?

I have pretty much same opinion about the list as well. The best start with issues tagged with a milestone.

[Irisado]

Generally - or specifically if thats easier - whats the main issues holding back a stable 2.1?

The utf8 upgrade issue.  A solution to this is still to be found.