The forum, its present and its future

UnclePsychosis

Bridgehouse said:

Jimbro66 said:

I don’t get all this cross-examining of DS. He is confident he can write much better forum software, is prepared to give a lot of his own time to do it and it is for the benefit of us all. What’s not to like? Why all the negativity?

Because we are all so used to getting something for nothing on the internet these days that when we do get something genuinely for nothing (because people give their time freely to enable it) we actually seem to think it’s acceptable to criticise those freely giving.

No, it is in fact literally exactly the opposite. 

I questioned Lee's decision to do do it because in my own (somewhat expert) opinion he's taking on an absolutely mammoth, endless, (and thankless) task and that, again, in my own personal opinion, it will end up being a humongous millstone around the neck of someone who already gives far too much time for free to this place. 

It is entirely possible to question the decisions that your friends make without it being a cross-examination or criticism. Most people tend to call that "advice"... 

Emp_Fab

digitalscream said:

Emp_Fab said:

Glad to hear you've considered us if an anvil were to drop from the sky.  In the meantime, please can you consider increasing  the default 'time to automatically save drafts' setting here, if that's possible ?  If I take more than a few moments to think about something, it saves a draft, and half the time, I change my mind and decide not to post, so I end up with loads of drafts.  Plus, if you're typing on a phone, it's PITA with 'Draft saved at.....' message popping up all the time !

If I'm honest, I'm probably not going to bother with auto-saving drafts. There will be a button to do it if you want to leave an epic and come back to it later, but I don't see it as critical functionality.

I didn't mean the new forum - I meant this place, now ! :-)

randella

Jimbro66 said:

I don’t get all this cross-examining of DS. He is confident he can write much better forum software, is prepared to give a lot of his own time to do it and it is for the benefit of us all. What’s not to like? Why all the negativity?

It’s one of the funny things about the software industry, and web dev in particular. The number of times I’ve given a presentation of a new web app I’ve prototyped only to find I’m suddenly sat in a room full of web developers is amazing.

To be fair, I think people feel ownership of apps they use a lot. I’ve learned to view it in a positive way down the years. It’s not necessarily a slight on your skills. 

I’ve also learned when to ignore it and crack on. To be honest, if DS wants to do it I think it’s a good idea. Power to him. There’s no doubt he can.

Bridgehouse

UnclePsychosis said:

Bridgehouse said:

Jimbro66 said:

I don’t get all this cross-examining of DS. He is confident he can write much better forum software, is prepared to give a lot of his own time to do it and it is for the benefit of us all. What’s not to like? Why all the negativity?

Because we are all so used to getting something for nothing on the internet these days that when we do get something genuinely for nothing (because people give their time freely to enable it) we actually seem to think it’s acceptable to criticise those freely giving.

No, it is in fact literally exactly the opposite. 

I questioned Lee's decision to do do it because in my own (somewhat expert) opinion he's taking on an absolutely mammoth, endless, (and thankless) task and that, again, in my own personal opinion, it will end up being a humongous millstone around the neck of someone who already gives far too much time for free to this place. 

It is entirely possible to question the decisions that your friends make without it being a cross-examination or criticism. Most people tend to call that "advice"... 

I’m sure that’s true for you - but some other posts in this thread suggest a level of criticism not advice

fandango

UnclePsychosis said:

Bridgehouse said:

Jimbro66 said:

I don’t get all this cross-examining of DS. He is confident he can write much better forum software, is prepared to give a lot of his own time to do it and it is for the benefit of us all. What’s not to like? Why all the negativity?

Because we are all so used to getting something for nothing on the internet these days that when we do get something genuinely for nothing (because people give their time freely to enable it) we actually seem to think it’s acceptable to criticise those freely giving.

No, it is in fact literally exactly the opposite. 

I questioned Lee's decision to do do it because in my own (somewhat expert) opinion he's taking on an absolutely mammoth, endless, (and thankless) task and that, again, in my own personal opinion, it will end up being a humongous millstone around the neck of someone who already gives far too much time for free to this place. 

It is entirely possible to question the decisions that your friends make without it being a cross-examination or criticism. Most people tend to call that "advice"... 

Why don't you just let Lee get on with what he's good at, and then bask in the better site that results from his efforts?

UnclePsychosis

fandango said:

UnclePsychosis said:

Bridgehouse said:

Jimbro66 said:

I don’t get all this cross-examining of DS. He is confident he can write much better forum software, is prepared to give a lot of his own time to do it and it is for the benefit of us all. What’s not to like? Why all the negativity?

Because we are all so used to getting something for nothing on the internet these days that when we do get something genuinely for nothing (because people give their time freely to enable it) we actually seem to think it’s acceptable to criticise those freely giving.

No, it is in fact literally exactly the opposite. 

I questioned Lee's decision to do do it because in my own (somewhat expert) opinion he's taking on an absolutely mammoth, endless, (and thankless) task and that, again, in my own personal opinion, it will end up being a humongous millstone around the neck of someone who already gives far too much time for free to this place. 

It is entirely possible to question the decisions that your friends make without it being a cross-examination or criticism. Most people tend to call that "advice"... 

Why don't you just let Lee get on with what he's good at, and then bask in the better site that results from his efforts?

What a strange post. 

Chalky

fandango said:

UnclePsychosis said:

Bridgehouse said:

Jimbro66 said:

I don’t get all this cross-examining of DS. He is confident he can write much better forum software, is prepared to give a lot of his own time to do it and it is for the benefit of us all. What’s not to like? Why all the negativity?

Because we are all so used to getting something for nothing on the internet these days that when we do get something genuinely for nothing (because people give their time freely to enable it) we actually seem to think it’s acceptable to criticise those freely giving.

No, it is in fact literally exactly the opposite. 

I questioned Lee's decision to do do it because in my own (somewhat expert) opinion he's taking on an absolutely mammoth, endless, (and thankless) task and that, again, in my own personal opinion, it will end up being a humongous millstone around the neck of someone who already gives far too much time for free to this place. 

It is entirely possible to question the decisions that your friends make without it being a cross-examination or criticism. Most people tend to call that "advice"... 

Why don't you just let Lee get on with what he's good at, and then bask in the better site that results from his efforts?

I imagine because @UnclePsychosis knows what he's talking about.  The core function code development takes something like 20-30% of the final total effort of a team to deliver the complete intended result. Doing it as a one-man task increases the risk of rework further and the effort is linear.  Hence he is giving friendly advice to a friend.

Emp_Fab

I think it's quite obvious that @UnclePsychosis has the same opinion as me in that we are both concerned about the amount of work DS is taking on.  Neither of us are being critical of him - we are just concerned for his welfare.  How someone can twist that into having a go at him I don't know !

randella

Emp_Fab said:

I think it's quite obvious that @UnclePsychosis has the same opinion as me in that we are both concerned about the amount of work DS is taking on.  Neither of us are being critical of him - we are just concerned for his welfare.  How someone can twist that into having a go at him I don't know !

Fair comment - as I said before, I think people are questioning it because it’s not a trivial task.

But I suspect he’s been giving it a good five years of thought and he does do it for a living (like a few of us here), so I guess we have to assume he’s big enough and daft enough to know what he’s taking on.

It’s been a pretty reasoned discussion so far. 

jonnyburgo

WiresDreamDisasters said:

Hey up you lot. Drew here. 

I've done the old clemency song and dance before; the one that goes along the lines of me trying to convince people that they've got me wrong, or trying to counter their embitterment with humour and cheekiness, or simply trying to slip in quietly hoping nobody would notice. I'm not gonna do that again.

I'm also not going to do the back and forth responding in this thread; where we all just beat the horse to death - nay, to glue! Let's all just save the energy.

As I see it, I'm here to do a job of sorts. Which will be to help Lee get tFB onto Youtube, hopefully create content for the channel, and to help facilitate some of the plans we've been discussing in the background. Others will hopefully get involved too. I want to help build something here. Something that will really enrich the community and maybe even give it a renewed focus.

I'll keep it brief. Let's avoid the drama. Clean slate time. If some people can't handle that, well that's not on me.

Well fuck me. Welcome back baby.

fendergibson

Just had a thought, THE MOST useful change to the forum imho would be having the ability to post photos without the MASSIVE ball ache it currently entails 

Jimbro66

digitalscream said:

And, of course, if the initial project is a failure - or something comes up which means a re-think or re-design is necessary - then we also have the fallback of continuing to use Vanilla until such a time as a/the better alternative is ready.

It’s been a long thread so maybe not everyone saw this ^^ comment.

I’ve got to say that some of the friendly advice posts have looked just a little patronising. DS will, I’m sure, have thought about this long and hard and will have no doubt as to the magnitude of the task. Give the guy a break eh?

digitalscream

UnclePsychosis said:

Bridgehouse said:

Jimbro66 said:

I don’t get all this cross-examining of DS. He is confident he can write much better forum software, is prepared to give a lot of his own time to do it and it is for the benefit of us all. What’s not to like? Why all the negativity?

Because we are all so used to getting something for nothing on the internet these days that when we do get something genuinely for nothing (because people give their time freely to enable it) we actually seem to think it’s acceptable to criticise those freely giving.

No, it is in fact literally exactly the opposite. 

I questioned Lee's decision to do do it because in my own (somewhat expert) opinion he's taking on an absolutely mammoth, endless, (and thankless) task and that, again, in my own personal opinion, it will end up being a humongous millstone around the neck of someone who already gives far too much time for free to this place. 

It is entirely possible to question the decisions that your friends make without it being a cross-examination or criticism. Most people tend to call that "advice"... 

That's fair enough - however, I've been around the block a few times myself, and I've been designing the new software in my head for the last four years; pretty much since Nick and I had our first bug-fixing session. I've been the sole designer and developer on exactly two projects before - one was a skunkworks project building a learning management system for a bank, and the other building a CMS from scratch because our customers were sick of the problems inherent in Wordpress, Drupal et al - and it was a blinding success given its scope and intent.

Everybody told me exactly the same thing as you are - it's a massive task, too much for one person, and it'll be more of a maintenance ballache than could reasonably be dealt with. It wasn't at all, mainly because I wasn't forced to deal with any number of different code styles and design approaches. The initial version was much bigger than even the code we've currently got in Vanilla, and it took me a month to build it and get the first five sites online; five years later, that same code was running 217 busy sites on a single not-very-big server (about 60 of them with more than a million hits a month), another thing everyone said couldn't be done, because they'd only ever worked in teams.

People often overlook the power of a single developer with a single vision and an eye towards simplicity and efficient design...it's these things that are the first to go when a team is formed. I'm not a particularly special dev; I'm pretty sure anybody could do what I'm about to.

On top of that...as I've said before, forums are actually astoundingly simple bits of software. There's very little involved, if you think about it. At its core, it's just CRUD access for users, messages, discussions and threads. Everything else is just keeping track of what's happened (or, more simply, record counters) and what's allowed to happen (authentication, authorisation and spam control).

I'm totally aware that there's a lot of work. However, you're severely underestimating the amount of work that's gone in to keeping this forum going (understandable, because I don't usually make a song and dance about it). The constant debugging to find performance bottlenecks due to a poor understanding of the meaning of "scalability" by Vanilla's designers (I can't just add a server when the load gets high, because there's no practical way to distribute sessions across servers effectively), regular late nights rebuilding indexes and looking for new ways to clear out junk that don't take the site down, the endless job of trying to fix all the bugs that prevent us using HTTPS etc.

It's reached the point where there's more involved in keeping Vanilla running at speed with the size of our database content than there is in spending a couple of weeks of holiday building something new. Then it'll go into beta, where I'm hoping a lot of folk will help me test it, then I'll do a whole load of load-testing, and then - if it's stable - then it'll be prime time. That probably won't happen until April next year.

Basically...have faith, I'm not about to make my life harder than it already is. And get your wallet ready, 'cos you're buying the first round when it's done

dbphoto

FWIW given that this is a dictatorship where no one is forced to take part, or pay for the privilege, if I was in the position of @digitalscream I would have just kept my mouth shut and got on with making all the changes.

digitalscream

dbphoto said:

FWIW given that this is a dictatorship where no one is forced to take part, or pay for the privilege, if I was in the position of @digitalscream I would have just kept my mouth shut and got on with making all the changes.

That's not how I like to do things, though - transparency has always been my goal, since we started this place five years ago. For what it's worth, though, I'm half way on your approach: I wasn't asking permission when I started this thread

I'd like to think that the community knows me well enough by now to trust that I won't do anything to wreck the place. Sure, I had a bit of a blip last year with insomnia-related insanity, but I'm mostly sane now

UnclePsychosis

@digitalscream ;

Fair enough and it goes without saying that I wish you much success with it. Should we ever meet I'd buy you a pint anyway, get your bespoke forum working and I'll happily make it two (God knows you'll need them by then ).

Maybe now that Lee has shown he understands the point that was being made the weirdos who think offering friendly advice is some kind of monstrous act of unwarranted criticism can lay off a bit, eh?  

 

quarky

Good luck @digitalscream ;

I was reading about a "law" the other day that basically says the number of deliverables commits/day remains constant even if you add more developers. So taking charge and doing it yourself is probably a great idea at this point given your experience. If you needed help from someone with zero forum development experience, I would be happy to volunteer, but I suspect you are covered for that. It sounds like it is certainly in capable hands.

And welcome back Drew!

thumpingrug

I just want it to look pretty.  

And Im very grateful to DS for keeping this place running.  I have no coding or web development skills but if you want a beta tester to try to break things, count me in.

fandango

UnclePsychosis said:

fandango said:

UnclePsychosis said:

Bridgehouse said:

Jimbro66 said:

I don’t get all this cross-examining of DS. He is confident he can write much better forum software, is prepared to give a lot of his own time to do it and it is for the benefit of us all. What’s not to like? Why all the negativity?

Because we are all so used to getting something for nothing on the internet these days that when we do get something genuinely for nothing (because people give their time freely to enable it) we actually seem to think it’s acceptable to criticise those freely giving.

No, it is in fact literally exactly the opposite. 

I questioned Lee's decision to do do it because in my own (somewhat expert) opinion he's taking on an absolutely mammoth, endless, (and thankless) task and that, again, in my own personal opinion, it will end up being a humongous millstone around the neck of someone who already gives far too much time for free to this place. 

It is entirely possible to question the decisions that your friends make without it being a cross-examination or criticism. Most people tend to call that "advice"... 

Why don't you just let Lee get on with what he's good at, and then bask in the better site that results from his efforts?

What a strange post. 

No. No. And no again.

@UnclePsychosis - you (and one or two others) may well know what you're talking about, but from what I've read, so does Lee. And he's given it some serious thought.

If Lee says he can do it and is prepared to, who are you to say otherwise?

UnclePsychosis

fandango said:

UnclePsychosis said:

fandango said:

UnclePsychosis said:

Bridgehouse said:

Jimbro66 said:

I don’t get all this cross-examining of DS. He is confident he can write much better forum software, is prepared to give a lot of his own time to do it and it is for the benefit of us all. What’s not to like? Why all the negativity?

Because we are all so used to getting something for nothing on the internet these days that when we do get something genuinely for nothing (because people give their time freely to enable it) we actually seem to think it’s acceptable to criticise those freely giving.

No, it is in fact literally exactly the opposite. 

I questioned Lee's decision to do do it because in my own (somewhat expert) opinion he's taking on an absolutely mammoth, endless, (and thankless) task and that, again, in my own personal opinion, it will end up being a humongous millstone around the neck of someone who already gives far too much time for free to this place. 

It is entirely possible to question the decisions that your friends make without it being a cross-examination or criticism. Most people tend to call that "advice"... 

Why don't you just let Lee get on with what he's good at, and then bask in the better site that results from his efforts?

What a strange post. 

No. No. And no again.

@UnclePsychosis - you (and one or two others) may well know what you're talking about, but from what I've read, so does Lee. And he's given it some serious thought.

If Lee says he can do it and is prepared to, who are you to say otherwise?

Jesus wept.