(2013-09-07, 07:05 PM)StefanT Wrote: [ -> ]Removing team members while having no suitable applications (especially for development/SQA) isn't going to help. 
This thread may never have started if there was only 2 developers on the forum team page.
(2013-09-07, 07:29 PM)MYSQLi Wrote: [ -> ] (2013-09-07, 07:05 PM)StefanT Wrote: [ -> ]Removing team members while having no suitable applications (especially for development/SQA) isn't going to help.
This thread may never have started if there was only 2 developers on the forum team page.
But that would be ridiculous unless you're going to be paying their salary. We have a developer for the Merge System, a graphics designer, a lead designer, two lead developers for 1.6, 5 developers working on 1.8 over the last year. They all do this in their spare time. One developer is in the USA on holiday, another is getting married this weekend. What if they were the two developers you speak of? MyBB isn't dead but that's how you kill a project.
Quote:I think that just taking a bulleted list of suggestions back "to the team" and discussing them privately there is just indicative of problems. There's no effort made to work with the community. It constantly feels like the only meaningful opinions to MyBB are from its own developers and no one else.
English being my second language, I think I failed to get my point across here. I will take any suggestions/ideas from here back to the team BUT keep the community involved with updates to say what is going on.
I obviously cannot speak for the team. There needs to be discussions about what can be implemented, what complications there could be etc.
I do agree there needs to be a lot more communication between the team and the community in general about dev progress, and highlighting theme authors, plugins authors etc.
I personally will be kick starting that asap. The newsletter I *think* is something we can get started if I take responsibility of. Again pending team approval.
Quote: Along with a full time job and a 13 month infant, I have other real life priorities, so I will NOT be apologizing for the amount of time I spend on the forums.
Why are you still on the team then? You don't have to apologize but the right thing to do is step aside so someone more active can be involved. You've made one thread and have less than 20 posts all year. You sould be giving up the position imho on your own.
Quote:Honestly, I didn't realize that MyBB's active development team was basically two people at this point, so it shifts my perspective on things a lot. But this was never communicated to anyone here. There is never any communication with anyone here. So we have no context to form our opinions in.
Yes it's hard to figure out what's going on behind-the-scenes because I think there is too much going on behind the scenes. And a lack of community communication is definitely happening.
Quote:As an aside, I didn't pick MyBB because it was free. And I'm sure as hell Labrocca didn't. The freeness of the project is a bonus (though it's also a hindrance, since it robs the community of having a strong voice with which to push for change). I would actually prefer that MyBB was a paid product, though I'm obviously in the minority.
The open-source free aspest was one part but I'd easily have paid $25-40 per site license for this software. I would prefer that MyBB had a paid support solution which I think would work very well given their model. Charge an annual free for fast tech support and troubleshooting.
Quote:So why is all these inactive people on the mybb staff team?
I wonder the same thing.
Quote:Removing team members while having no suitable applications (especially for development/SQA) isn't going to help.
Sure it would. Members would see the open position and apply. If you got a guy on a job who doesn't show up every week you don't just ignore that. You gotta let him go and hire someone new. But as long as you don't fire the guy people don't know a position is open. This falls back into that lack of transparency and communication with the community imho.
Quote:This thread may never have started if there was only 2 developers on the forum team page.
It would probably be a thread instead about getting active developers.
If anything comes out of this thread is that the community feels ignored and we'd like to not only be involved more but have the team involved with us as well. There shouldn't be this disconnected feeling we're getting.
Could there be more communication from our side, sure. But there are simple ways to see what is happening on the development side and see how active a project or team members are. A simple review of the Github repo would give you all that information. It's open source so it's a two way street. Please don't feel like this is a cop-out, it's the simple truth. The bugs and issues and such are all public. The primary feature list was shared previously. We have an open suggestion forum where we openly discuss those suggestions. The code is open to pull requests so you don't even need to be "on the team" to contribute to the code or styling or translations.
As there is not set in stone maximum number of developers, the activity level of a contributor is not a key driver of who stays on the team after a probationary period. If someone is qualified and without any controversial history here wants to apply they are free to. Honestly there are legal issues involved with being on the team and its easier to let someone worthwhile stay on and contribute when they can if they need to step back some. I am one of those people at this time. Real life has left me with little time to even respond to this thread, let alone manage all my other responsibilities outside MyBB.
I will submit some kind of official application in the next few days. What you guys want to do with it is up to you from there.
This thread got kinda heated but I think it helped to clear the air.
@pavemen: I understand that there's the Github repo and that's excellent. I actually started using Github not long ago and like it. But the majority of MyBBs end users will not know there's a repo, let alone know what Github even is. A point that was brought up earlier was newsletters; sending these to people that subscribe would let them know how development is going. Github is very geared towards developers and isn't something that a lot of users know about.
If you were to send out a survey (in a newsletter) asking how many people were developers, you'd likely receive a response that indicated less than 10%~. This is the problem that has been stated throughout the topic -- there's not enough communication from the team to the end users going out. Most of us didn't even know that there were only two active developers working on MyBB.
And please, don't take this topic as "we hate you guys, you suck," but as something that's saying "we love MyBB, but we haven't been seeing any progress." And that's the big part of what this topic has been about. Communication. Telling your users that everything's fine and to check the Gitbub repo is counterproductive in your stance. It literally hinders the progress you're trying to make.
This is where the community team comes in. They send the surveys, they write up the newsletters. They make sure that the community is actually seeing the progress that is being made. Because whether or not progress is really being made, transparency about it is key. The community team should also make sure they're seen around the forum and addressing the problems such as the ones we've been discussing thus far. Props to Jitendra for doing that, despite how busy he is.
I also remember Brad stating that updates should be more regular; this keeps people interested because they see that changes are being made. And as I stated earlier, the majority of MyBBs userbase will not be developers. With Github, all they see is that things are changing, not exactly what is being changed. An easier method, if they're the more devout type, they can check the blog or newsletters to see more details on what's been changed.
From the regular following of other Open Source projects that I follow, I notice that they do a lot of small changes and not just major updates. Psychology comes into mind when I talk about this. I won't go into detail about that, because most of us probably know a little bit about what I'm saying here, but I thought I'd mention it.
The appearance of a little activity is better than the appearance of none at all.
Get the word out, get your community team to find developers willing to help out on a currently great project. Just don't say everything's fine. Because even if it is, you haven't shown us that it is.
(2013-09-08, 04:50 AM)brad-t Wrote: [ -> ]I will submit some kind of official application in the next few days. What you guys want to do with it is up to you from there.
As did I... I haven't been around too much lately, but I intend to be here now that I know the site does actually have some sort of a future.
(2013-09-08, 04:50 AM)brad-t Wrote: [ -> ]I will submit some kind of official application in the next few days. What you guys want to do with it is up to you from there.
This thread got kinda heated but I think it helped to clear the air.
Good Luck Brad. Hope you are added to the team. You would be a great addition to the team.
Honestly, I just wish you'd post some kind of news on the blog more often. Even if it's just a tour of the new mods site (which in itself has been on the brink of arriving since before 1.8 even...) or something. The current situation really doesn't reflect too well for first time visitors IMO. if I were looking at starting a forum for the first time ever and came to the MyBB site to find about it, I'd likely turn around and go to Woltlab, Vanilla o even phpBB. All have better layouts and content.
PS: Didn't you apply at least once before Brad?