MyBB Community Forums

Quote:If Mybb wants to move our activity away from MyBB.com onto other services that's fine. I'll watch twitter for updates, be a fan at Facebook and report bugs at Github. Sounds great. I guess I have no reason to be here anymore so good bye everyone.

You have to understand that Facebook and Twitter are crucial to reaching out to potential users, and keeping in touch with our current ones. If you look at the type of things we're tweeting none of that is going to take away activity from the forum. Have we made a statement that we're planning to replace the blog with Facebook? That the developers will stop posting on the forums and will only Tweet new information? We're trying to reach out to more people, not change how we're communicating with them.

This is going to be my one and only post here, as most of the users’ concerns have been answered, and I just wanted to clear some of the fog.

GitHub is an essential part of MyBB. It allows us to concentrate on development without the need to maintain software on our own servers. It allows others to interact and assist us with this development (Pulse does not show authors of pull requests) and it does this through an industry-standard collaboration network. While things may be messy at the moment, which we are looking to clean up, it isn’t rocket science to fork, amend and pull request – and many people have done so (and some from their very first experience of Git).

By using Facebook, Twitter, Wordpress.com and GitHub it allows us to reach users that, previously, we may have never come into contact with. It also allows us to communicate with our existing user base when this forum is unavailable – for whatever reason – and that can only be a good thing. We can continue work if things fall over (which have happened in the past).

This forum – this community – is the cornerstone of our entire group and something we strive to improve. Pirata has spent months working on a new mods system. Nathan has integrated GitHub Issues so users who aren’t familiar with this service can still report problems. Our Support Team responds to hundreds (if not thousands) of requests every week – a legacy set by Matt Rogowski, maintained by our excellent team in their own time and, I believe, rivalled by none.

The MyBB team also spends hours discussing features, bugs and issues, ranging from members to merchandise and branding opportunities, whenever we aren’t doing our usual tasks, so, to say that this site is dead – and to have over 200 replies in the thread discussing it – is far from reality. The death of MyBB is greatly exaggerated. In truth, our single aim of providing the best free forum software is always at the front of our thinking and every member of the team strives to deliver this – no matter how long it takes.

If anyone has any widespread concerns or questions we’d be happy to setup an open Q&A session.

And, Tomm comes in dropping the hammer down .

You do bring something up thought that I think has been discussed a few times but never happened. Some live chat events whether it be through irc or raidcall it would be nice to have an open live chat with the staff and community everyone once in awhile (weekly, monthly, etc).

The below are my personal opinions, and are not necessarily shared by other members of the MyBB team. They're my opinions of someone who has not been actively involved for a while, and sits on the sidelines while managing the servers. They're likely to anger a few people, and for that I apologize.

labrocca Wrote:I agree. There are bugs I could fix myself and then just have the team approve changes. The way things work now is cumbersome.

I for one would welcome this.

I believe the development model for MyBB should be much more closely aligned to any other open source project on GitHub. I don't believe MyBB needs all of these tools for code reviews, external issue tracking systems, a separate quality assurance team, or some of the insane suggestions I've seen floated in the past few years.

Why the f.uck (apparently we have a filter setup that changes that to eggplant... cool) does an open source project have job postings? There should be a bunch of core contributors (these would mainly be the people making merge/no-merge decisions on contributions, and providing general architectural advice and direction). People should be invited based on their contributions, not interviewed like a job.

labrocca Wrote:Github is a mistake imho. All your doing is transferring your traffic and activity to another site. What might be easier may not be the best solution for the project.

I don't mind this. In fact, I encourage it. GitHub promotes a better environment for collaboration on building software than trying to build software using a forum.

labrocca Wrote:http://community.mybb.com/showteam.php There is suppose to be a "Public Relations Team" which imho has not been effective. I'm unsure if it's something related to their mission statement or simply lack of vision and effectiveness.

To this day, I've never actually understood why an open source bit of software needs a team like that. I mean no disrespect to them, but it just seems pointless.

labrocca Wrote:I miss it when Chris B. was around to really push the project and create clear direction for us. We owe a lot to him and since his absence I feel the project has been languishing.

Thanks.

I'll be honest, my lack of participation is caused by three factors. One of which you can probably gauge from above (frustration on the process, political bullshit, and overhead), and b) I don't have the time to spend on this project c) I don't spend a lot of my time with PHP anymore (or programming - I'm more of an operations guy).

labrocca Wrote:Still not sure why this isn't developed more:
http://community.mybb.com/misc.php?action=help

That, the calendar, and a bunch of other things need to go. If there is demand for them, they should introduced as plugins that are developed as a separate project, with a separate team (those who want such features), that can give the features the attention they deserve.

[edit] While we're at it, lets lose the "RSS Syndication" page, and the "Archive Mode". These have had their day. I could keep making this list bigger, but we need to start somewhere.

There is still a lot of innovations that can be made to discussion forum software, but there's also a lot of s.hit we need to leave behind - the crippling concepts of a markdown language called "BB code", and the clunky user interfaces that don't focus on surfacing great content and discussion, which should be the forefront of any forum software.

(2013-09-12, 01:10 PM)Chris Boulton Wrote: [ -> ]I'll be honest, my lack of participation is caused by three factors. One of which you can probably gauge from above (frustration on the process, political bullshit, and overhead)

Don't you have the authority to stop this mess going around you and straighten things a bit ?

Thanks sincerely for commenting, Tomm and Chris. Some really insightful stuff, and very little to disagree with.

Just want to echo the above sentiments of thanks to both Tom and Chris for their comments. Chris' especially is an eye opener.

(2013-09-12, 01:10 PM)Chris Boulton Wrote: [ -> ]Why the f.uck (apparently we have a filter setup that changes that to eggplant... cool) does an open source project have job postings? There should be a bunch of core contributors (these would mainly be the people making merge/no-merge decisions on contributions, and providing general architectural advice and direction). People should be invited based on their contributions, not interviewed like a job.

Resonates with me so much.

I hear a lot of "We're only volunteers, so we can only do so much", but the process to actually help (Attempting to learn git got me plenty of yelling at from staffers) or join the team is extremely tedious.

Wait, Chris is back? Welcome back mate!

(2013-09-12, 01:10 PM)Chris Boulton Wrote: [ -> ]The below are my personal opinions, and are not necessarily shared by other members of the MyBB team. They're my opinions of someone who has not been actively involved for a while, and sits on the sidelines while managing the servers. They're likely to anger a few people, and for that I apologize.

labrocca Wrote:I agree. There are bugs I could fix myself and then just have the team approve changes. The way things work now is cumbersome.

I for one would welcome this.

I believe the development model for MyBB should be much more closely aligned to any other open source project on GitHub. I don't believe MyBB needs all of these tools for code reviews, external issue tracking systems, a separate quality assurance team, or some of the insane suggestions I've seen floated in the past few years.

Why the f.uck (apparently we have a filter setup that changes that to eggplant... cool) does an open source project have job postings? There should be a bunch of core contributors (these would mainly be the people making merge/no-merge decisions on contributions, and providing general architectural advice and direction). People should be invited based on their contributions, not interviewed like a job.

Github is a social collaboration platform, yes. At the present I'm not seeing a whole lot of social collaboration. The team collaborates, but that's not the point.

(2013-09-12, 01:10 PM)Chris Boulton Wrote: [ -> ]

labrocca Wrote:Github is a mistake imho. All your doing is transferring your traffic and activity to another site. What might be easier may not be the best solution for the project.

I don't mind this. In fact, I encourage it. GitHub promotes a better environment for collaboration on building software than trying to build software using a forum.

What's the forum here for, exactly? Some say it's a demo of the software. Others say it's for support. I personally come here to see what's happening with MyBB. That's just what I do.

(2013-09-12, 01:10 PM)Chris Boulton Wrote: [ -> ]

labrocca Wrote:http://community.mybb.com/showteam.php There is suppose to be a "Public Relations Team" which imho has not been effective. I'm unsure if it's something related to their mission statement or simply lack of vision and effectiveness.

To this day, I've never actually understood why an open source bit of software needs a team like that. I mean no disrespect to them, but it just seems pointless.

The PR team haven't made a lot of sense to me either. They haven't done anything even remotely related to PR in the time I have been here, at least not that I have seen.

(2013-09-12, 01:10 PM)Chris Boulton Wrote: [ -> ]

labrocca Wrote:I miss it when Chris B. was around to really push the project and create clear direction for us. We owe a lot to him and since his absence I feel the project has been languishing.

Thanks.

I'll be honest, my lack of participation is caused by three factors. One of which you can probably gauge from above (frustration on the process, political bullshit, and overhead), and b) I don't have the time to spend on this project c) I don't spend a lot of my time with PHP anymore (or programming - I'm more of an operations guy).

And as someone that is quickly going down the same path, I can sympathise with this.

(2013-09-12, 01:10 PM)Chris Boulton Wrote: [ -> ]

labrocca Wrote:Still not sure why this isn't developed more:
http://community.mybb.com/misc.php?action=help

That, the calendar, and a bunch of other things need to go. If there is demand for them, they should introduced as plugins that are developed as a separate project, with a separate team (those who want such features), that can give the features the attention they deserve.

[edit] While we're at it, lets lose the "RSS Syndication" page, and the "Archive Mode". These have had their day. I could keep making this list bigger, but we need to start somewhere.

There is still a lot of innovations that can be made to discussion forum software, but there's also a lot of s.hit we need to leave behind - the crippling concepts of a markdown language called "BB code", and the clunky user interfaces that don't focus on surfacing great content and discussion, which should be the forefront of any forum software.

Chris, BBCode is a markup language. So is AsbyCode and Whirlcode.

That said, I can see where you're coming from. Things need to change around here. There needs to be a team for guideance, at the moment it's a group of 4 members choosing where the project goes and that's just not good for aesthetics of an open source software. Open source is that, Open source.

Nice to read those comments from Tom and Chris - thanks for posting them. I'm ecstatic that Chris agrees with the majority that needless core features like Calender need to go. I was incredibly surprised that anyone argued a case for that useless addition to remain.

I also agree that joining the team needs to be much less formal and tedious. This community has some excellent users that have flourished in this thread (brad, Euan, Tecca - I can go on) that clearly have unconditional passion for this project; let them help this team of volunteers who can "only do so much".

I'm surprised at the attention made to Github. People complain about slow development time but also complain about a system that the developers want in place for them to work more efficiently and quickly. Let it go. Github is absolutely fine.

It's pretty simple to figure out why this community is dampening (enough to make this 22 page thread), and it's due to the lack of buzz around MyBB at the moment. If people were active on Xenforo, you would remember how slow and seemingly depressing it was at the lowest points of the lawsuit. They feared the software they used and loved so much was heading into a pit of destruction and the community itself suffered. Fast-track to now where the law suit is over and the development of Xenforo is flourishing and you'll witness just how positive and active that community is.

So the problem isn't the community members like some have suggested, it's just getting that buzz back into this project. How do you get that? Read this thread and revise the wonderful ideas that members have posted here. Since this is open source and "regular" members have some great ideas for the software, let them have their opinions heard. The staff need to communicate these seemingly endless PRIVATE discussions to the public and let us get involved. Clearly there is some divide at the moment and that's not healthy. MyBB does need to modernise but there needs to be a compromise.

Also, for those who have issues with this thread, I've yet to see anyone be particular rude to the developers or staff. We respect those endlessly of course, but opinions need to be heard and if they're projected maturely then there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.