Why has it taken around 6 years to get from beta 1 to nearing RC3 today? That is a long span of time between these two versions.
Community/Translator perspective: The total community seems to be tiny compared to a few years ago, most languages have close to no support and no translators.
Team/Support perspective: A lot of people jumped off, onboarding people takes at least a couple of months… (Compare, f.e.,
2005,
2012,
2016, and
today.)
Code perspective: Because
the changes were huge (that's a given after that time), only ~21 people in total helped (top right side; that number probably only includes people with merge permission),
the total activity went down a lot, and
currently only ~6 people (including you) are working on the code. And understanding the code takes time, too.
Testing perspective: Tests are manual, only ~1 person currently has the time to thoroughly test on multiple setups (we're working on it…)
And for all of the above: Even if we "select" people to help, not everybody actually ends up helping. F.e. of the newly accepted translators (maybe 1 applicant per month on average; maybe half of them are actually able to translate appropriately and are accepted), at least 1/4 never actually begins translating because they're scared off by the amount of onboarding documentation, or hugely underestimate the amount of work, or realize that they need a pretty good understanding of SMF and its features to be able to translate it. We don't know the actual reasons, because usually they never report back, and are stripped of their permissions again after some months of inactivity.
And, to say it again, even if some say it's not a valid reason:
We're all volunteers.I personally work 8-10 hours a day, and the rest is split between eating, sleeping, shopping groceries, health/sports stuff, family, and hobbies (one of which is SMF). In a normal week, I currently have 2-8 hours I can spend on SMF.
That goes into fighting spam, translation stuff, team-internal communication, reading support threads and sometimes being able to actually provide support (especially in the german boards, which are pretty dead regarding helpers besides myself), working on better testing of SMF, reporting bugs I find, and patching some minor bugs I find (I don't really speak PHP). The more stuff piles up in front of that list, the less chance I even get to the latter parts of it in any given week.
And, intended or not, massive amounts of
rants waste our precious SMF time even more (if you expect us to read them; I'm only half through that thread, I usually only read 1 rant page daily, max). Stop complaining (not directed to you personally, MrVector!), start helping.
(It took me maybe an hour to write this post.)
Edit: Forgot spam.
