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Base theme by DesignModo & ported to Powered by Vanilla by Chris Ireland, modified by the "theFB" team.
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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"...
Offset "(Emp) - a little heavy on the hyperbole."
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.
Offset "(Emp) - a little heavy on the hyperbole."
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.
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?
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
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
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?
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!
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.
@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?