MyBB 1.9 Development

[Matt]

I think $25,000 is a solid offer considering they have no income from MyBB to begin with so it is not like they are selling at a loss. 

Have you decided if you are going to fork MyBB yet?

$25k + $50k-100k sounds good enough for a fork, so what is $25k a solid offer for, the brand?

If MyBB ever gets sold it would most likely be forked in a matter of days, not years.

Obviously the MyBB name is what holds the most value. Anyone can fork MyBB but will they grow or get enough exposure as MyBB? well Labrocca probably could because of the size of his forum but most other people? nahh. 

The MyBB name is very well known and people will come back to MyBB if it gets back on track.

The thing I still don't really understand and nobody's explained that I've seen, is that if there are people keen to work on a fork and want MyBB to "get back on track", then what is stopping people submitting PRs on Github? Write the same code you would write for a fork and submit it. Why are people raring to go on a fork but aren't touching what we have now? What's the difference? What am I missing here? What it basically sounds like is you want complete control of the project and want to buy the name out to get a headstart in terms of exposure?

If all people want is some responsive CSS on the existing table-based HTML, there have been several themes that do this available for years. What 1.9 is doing is implementing a modern theme and templating system that doesn't have it roots in code from 2006. When some people say "I only want a responsive theme and that's it", should we then ignore the people who, for years, have also wanted a more advanced template system, hence Twig?

These days, Chris pays the bills but that's about as far as his involvement has been in a long time, the rest of the decisions are made collectively by the team, and we've always been open to people joining.

[sarisisop]

If all people want is some responsive CSS on the existing table-based HTML, there have been several themes that do this available for years.

For me I have tried a couple of themes but they just don't look right or are not maintained, a basic official 1.8 that I could customize would suit me fine.

I don't want and probably won't use 1.9, my users are happy with 1.8 but it's just not responsive and that is the only complaint I get from my users. 

I have made changes to the layout and colour scheme, but coding it to be responsive is not something I could take on without a walk through tutorial.

As for why people don't contribute but want to take it over so to speak, my guess would be "A new broom sweeps clean" so to speak.

There was and still are some passionate admins using the software, but there is no denying MyBB forum is not as active as it used to be. This says people are either no longer using it or sometimes the answers given are not of much help.

But I'm just a user of the software and trying to give my opinion as such.

[xerotic]

The thing I still don't really understand and nobody's explained that I've seen, is that if there are people keen to work on a fork and want MyBB to "get back on track", then what is stopping people submitting PRs on Github? Write the same code you would write for a fork and submit it. Why are people raring to go on a fork but aren't touching what we have now? What's the difference? What am I missing here?

You're missing the motivation. We're all people with busy lives. The MyBB project exists because a group of volunteers maintain it. That could mean fast maintenance and feature updates, but in this case it doesn't.

Some of the people who have extended MyBB and want to further extend MyBB have invested considerable time/money to take their board to places stock MyBB simply can't go. How do you motivate these board owners to dump all of their investment into the project?

In an ideal world we would have a slew of volunteers working endlessly to update the free MyBB project and keep it up to date and fresh to compete with other forum software. Problem is, this isn't an ideal world.

[Matt]

The thing I still don't really understand and nobody's explained that I've seen, is that if there are people keen to work on a fork and want MyBB to "get back on track", then what is stopping people submitting PRs on Github? Write the same code you would write for a fork and submit it. Why are people raring to go on a fork but aren't touching what we have now? What's the difference? What am I missing here?

You're missing the motivation. We're all people with busy lives. The MyBB project exists because a group of volunteers maintain it. That could mean fast maintenance and feature updates, but in this case it doesn't.

Some of the people who have extended MyBB and want to further extend MyBB have invested considerable time/money to take their board to places stock MyBB simply can't go. How do you motivate these board owners to dump all of their investment into the project?

In an ideal world we would have a slew of volunteers working endlessly to update the free MyBB project and keep it up to date and fresh to compete with other forum software. Problem is, this isn't an ideal world.

Oh I agree with the motivation 100%, we've had that problem for at least 10 years. I remember when 1.4 released there was such a buzz around here, and it hasn't been the same for years.

The problem remains though that it's not simple to change that. To start paying people $45,000+ salaries to work on commercial software full time needs the money to do that. Aside from the fact MyBB's ethos has always been to remain free, it's not feasible to charge money for a procedural codebase with table-based HTML rendered with eval() in 2021. Existing users happy with MyBB might not care about that, but new users who are happy to spend money on software will. I work with XenForo on a daily basis and sheer depth of functionality and customisability, and general structure of the software, is on another planet. Plus, the vast majority of developers moved on from the way MyBB is coded a decade ago.

And a fork still doesn't make a lot of sense to me because the same energy could be put into the current version, and if there aren't the funds to work on it full time, you'll still be doing it around a full time job anyway, so that problem doesn't go anywhere.

I get the feeling that at a certain point, individual boards might end up needing to be maintained separately. I know that HF is hugely customised and I can totally get why you wouldn't want something like Twig to have to upgrade to, or think it's not necessary for you so don't see a need for it in the software. But if a purely responsive theme is the only requirement, that shouldn't mean the software as a whole, used by thousands of others, should miss out on things like a new template system, just because some people don't want or need it. That's why 1.9 will be using Twig, because a lot of people have requested more advanced templating, and the only way to push the software on to be anywhere near other software is to bring it up to more modern standards, not leaving it stuck with pre-2010 techniques and methodologies.

[Ashley1]

The open forum is probably not the best place to be advancing offers to the owner. I really doubt he would sell his ownership for only $25K, a decades old brand. He could have probably done that a long time ago if he were interested in the money, anybody would buy it for that price.

Who knows what motivates the owner, maybe he even gives his ownership away, to the right person / company he thinks may move the software forward.

In any case, people will start contributing again when conditions become right. The community just needs to be patient. There are only 2 options, MyBB will continue dying a slow death, or a new management attitude will prevail and things will turn around.

[User 2877]

I do think alerts is an important feature too and currently there is no up to date and supported alert system for MyBB but I don't think that would be too hard for you to implement considering you already have a very good working system on your forum that you could just implement into MyBB out of the box.

Something like that would work well as a paid add-on. There is actually more to do for web socket alerts. Systems like MyAlerts are not efficient and it doesn't send a Push Notification. To do that you must use Web Sockets and run that on the server or use a 3rd party service. In any case that's a more complicated matter.

But it's stuff like that suggestion which has prevented the MyBB team from the focus of mission #1 and that's a responsive theme.

I have considered a fork but I'd rather buy the actual MyBB brand. What I don't want to do is split this already small community. Even if we don't always agree at least we are in this together.

The thing I still don't really understand and nobody's explained that I've seen, is that if there are people keen to work on a fork and want MyBB to "get back on track", then what is stopping people submitting PRs on Github? Write the same code you would write for a fork and submit it.

It's a free project, no money in the work. I also personally don't agree with the current project roadmap.

If all people want is some responsive CSS on the existing table-based HTML, there have been several themes that do this available for years.

You need an official standard to work from. Otherwise updates are a problem and also plugins need deeper adjustments. What made 1x versions so great was the plugin system which worked well with templates. Also, the team has strung us along for a very long time with an update coming with a responsive theme.

I'm willing to bet that if you took the 5 best responsive themes available now and had a community vote on which one to implement that would be reasonable enough to most people. Currently though there are a couple dozen options and let's say you choose to go with one. Now you have to rely on that designer keeping it updated.

For me I have tried a couple of themes but they just don't look right or are not maintained, a basic official 1.8 that I could customize would suit me fine.

That's exactly my point. Not sure why Matt doesn't understand that. To convert the entire MyBB template system into responsive is a fair amount of work.

The problem remains though that it's not simple to change that. To start paying people $45,000+ salaries to work on commercial software full time needs the money to do that.

That's why Chris should sell me MyBB. I could do it immediately. I'd be happy to find the right people and pay them to at least get a new version out. You really only gotta pay people full time for maybe 6 months then it's just updates and maintenance (part-time). Just like MyBB 1.x series the community needs a BASE to work from. We just don't have it anymore.

And a fork still doesn't make a lot of sense to me because the same energy could be put into the current version

Energy costs money. Putting effort into current version is a zero-sum game. You'd give and get nothing in return but maybe a thank you.

That's why 1.9 will be using Twig, because a lot of people have requested more advanced templating, and the only way to push the software on to be anywhere near other software is to bring it up to more modern standards, not leaving it stuck with pre-2010 techniques and methodologies.

Maybe. I'm on the fence about the Twig implementation. If deemed necessary then so be it. But it's not the only things MyBB is changing in 1.9x.

The open forum is probably not the best place to be advancing offers to the owner.

Chris is tough to contact. But depending on the support I get in the open forum by the community I may try harder to get ahold of him.

I really doubt he would sell his ownership for only $25K, a decades old brand. He could have probably done that a long time ago if he were interested in the money, anybody would buy it for that price.

Maybe. I offer $25k only because it's a respectable amount not that it's the true value of MyBB. Chris doesn't appear interested in monetizing MyBB. Not sure he's interested in MyBB at all. He seems to have moved on with his life. But if he has some mental thing about his legacy and previous work then I would hope he knows I'd be the right guy to run this place. I am positive that even for $100k Chris wouldn't sell this project to anyone but the right people. But who knows, I think we're all just guessing at this point because the guy is absent. When was his last post?

https://community.mybb.com/user-1.html Last visit was 13 months ago. Disgustingly his last post was in 2014. That seems about the right time this project felt leaderless. Just makes me super sad we've been abandoned and he doesn't even have the respect for the community to at least pass this place onto people who care. It's a strawberry shame is what it is.

I want to fork or own this project but if I'm going to put $100k into MyBB I prefer to do it from the actual base. From a business perspective it's my best shot at recouping any investment. I fear a fork wouldn't monetize well. I don't see eye-to-eye with the whole team. I really don't know if I'd get them to jump ship. A fork is a risky move that has to be considered carefully and correctly timed.

[Matt]

You make a lot of good points and I can't really disagree. I'm not going to put words into Chris' mouth or speak on his behalf as that's not my place, I have a ton of respect for Chris for paying the bills, much like I have a ton of respect for yourself Jesse, and you've known me a long time MyBB-wise. I may never have run my own forum or been super active myself over the last several years, but I do still care about the project, otherwise I wouldn't still have my name in orange here. I've been a part of this community in some way for over 12 years, I'm as saddened by how different things are now compared to the "golden age" as much as anyone, I genuinely do get it, and I don't want division here any more than anyone else does.

In terms of the general direction of things, it's obviously shifted a lot over the years.

We were originally going to rewrite 2.0 in Yii/Laravel, and we could debate the necessity of that all day, but ultimately we realised we just couldn't take that sort of thing on. So we pivoted and switched to upgrading bits of 1.x in stages. Most people don't care about the underlying PHP code, but do care about things like themes and templates, so we decided to focus on that.

A brand new theme with modern HTML would make developing themes a lot easier; styling tables can be a pain, whereas CSS flex and grid could allow for much more advanced layouts so much easier. The usage of Twig would provide the ability for conditional logic in templates without a plugin, which I know so many people want. By modernising the theming and styling system, the idea was to improve one of the largest pain points we knew a lot of users had, and make further upgrades later.

If we had decided that 1.9 was going to be a responsive version of the current theme, and delay the modern theme and Twig to 1.10 or something, then it would not only mean that the work done for 1.9 would be stripped out before too long, but also that theme and plugin authors would have to update their resources twice. At the time, replacing this core functionality made sense for a 1.9 release. Basically the point I'm trying to make is that there was a pragmatic decision making process from a project management perspective on what to focus on, and there was some logic behind it. Clearly it just hasn't panned out as we'd have all hoped.

I know the responsive themes that are available aren't a long term solution, and you know what, if we knew several years ago that in 2021 our plan for 1.9 wouldn't be finished yet, we probably would have done a responsive version of the existing theme as a stop-gap. But then 1.8 itself was supposed to be a stop-gap, and so was 1.6. I don't think any of us anticipated being in this sort of position.

In terms of money and paying people, I was struggling for work trying to freelance last year, and if I was offered 6 months of salary-level pay to work on MyBB I'd have absolutely bitten your hand off! That offer may have been around, I wasn't really active here at the time and I'm employed full time now, but if there was money on the table for people then I'm sure it would attract the right people.

I don't know if there's much more I can add, I've only had an outside role myself for a while now and I can't do much more than I am as I barely have time for my own side projects, but I've still wanted to try and reply to this thread if I can, because I like I said, after my own history with MyBB I care as much as everybody else.

[dragonexpert]

I've used MyBB for a long time as well and written a fair share of plugins for it. The main reason I haven't really contributed anything to the main repository in a long time is a combination of two main factors. One factor is having the time to do so. I work full time and go to college so my free time is more limited. At this point I'd rather create plugins due to having a lot more freedom on coding.

The other major factor is the codebase itself is just so outdated. Part of this is due to what the Team is having be the supported PHP version. The code is still written for the PHP 5 series. That has been dead for a long time. I remember back when that used to be a problem for certain plugins, but that hardly seems to be an issue compared to before. PHP 7 has typed arguments which MyBB could definitely be using to get rid of a lot of sanity checks. With how behind the codebase is, I'd honestly rather build from scratch a forum software that is written for PHP 7 and doesn't contain errors in PHP 8 for those who like to use the most up to date version.

[martec]

There are some strange things in this whole conversation.
Wasn't the theme conversion practically ready?
Wasn't it just missing rebase with mybb 1.8 to launch the alpha version of 1.9?
I know you were looking to put myalerts and a new editor on 1.9, but it can be done later, right?

The only problem I see is that we have no news of the progress of the rebase that is being done locally.

[Furious]

I do think alerts is an important feature too and currently there is no up to date and supported alert system for MyBB but I don't think that would be too hard for you to implement considering you already have a very good working system on your forum that you could just implement into MyBB out of the box.

Something like that would work well as a paid add-on.  There is actually more to do for web socket alerts. Systems like MyAlerts are not efficient and it doesn't send a Push Notification.  To do that you must use Web Sockets and run that on the server or use a 3rd party service. In any case that's a more complicated matter.

But it's stuff like that suggestion which has prevented the MyBB team from the focus of mission #1 and that's a responsive theme.

I have considered a fork but I'd rather buy the actual MyBB brand.  What I don't want to do is split this already small community.  Even if we don't always agree at least we are in this together.

If it is made a paid add on then so be it as long as it is not a ridiculous price to where nobody will buy it because you still will have to remember the roots of MyBB as a free software, but keep in mind there would need to be some kind of verification system put into place for support of plugins because what is going to end up happening is someone will buy and put it on a leak kind of forum for free. 

But at this point I believe it is already in the 1.9 build and if they can get 1.9 out anytime soon I am willing to give it a try.

Yes MyBB only needs a responsive theme and then updates over time to modernize it, but if 1.9 is almost finished I guess they might as well just get it done but if it doesn't get done anytime soon then that is a different story.