Wedge

For the record, if I could be satisfied that the two people mentioned would stay the hell away, or idiots like them, I'd be pretty amenable to an open source licence.I have spoken to a number of people on the project in recent times, and I'm hearing that same answer. The problem is much as it always was: the people who have the power to make decisions are not those people. That's how it's always been; the people who have the power want to keep everything the status quo - and nothing ever improves.The issue I have is that the negativity is so draining because it's absolutely unnecessary.

Let me kick off with the point that was made in my above rant, though I think it was missed judging by my PMs. Why does the forks discussion board need rules? More specifically, why does it need the rule about 'no closed source forks'? It's trying to encourage open source, except in the same breath doing the absolute opposite of the spirit of open source.

Open means *open*. Means having freedom. Including, as defined, the freedom to close it.[1] We haven't closed the licence to make money off it, though I will note we discussed it. We closed the licence to protect our investment of time being abused by certain fuckwits that we'd had dealings with.[2]

If you as an organisation were truly open, you wouldn't need any rules. You wouldn't have to discourage closed source - the natural rhythm of the community should do that for you. The thing is, there's only one closed source fork of SMF, and that's us. There isn't likely to be any other closed source forks, partly because it's not the done thing and partly because most forks inevitably don't have the momentum to sustain them, though Wedge definitely does.

Someone actually suggested to me, in wake of this topic and the stuff that happened, that I should institute a ban of not discussing SMF here, except for bug fixes or security issues. It makes just as much sense as the idiotic ban that sm.org has, and it's just as practical, just as meaningful and I wouldn't even have to moderate it much. I could even pretty much automate it without even changing any code.[3]

But I don't feel the need to do that. I'm quite happy to allow that to be discussed here, to allow any and all kinds of discussion about SMF, despite the issues, because I don't have an axe to grind. To be brutally honest, I see it much as the same as the folks that go door to door to promote their specific brand of religion; they do it to convince themselves they're good little religious types. IOW, I see this as SMF saying 'Hey, we're open and we promote openness' without understanding what that actually means. Open means being able to take opposing views and understand them for what they are.

Let me make this extra clear.

SMF chose to make their licence open, but seemingly without wanting any of the bad consequences of it being open. They want people to be able to use it without limitation, until it is inconvenient to them. If that was the case, why the heck did you go BSD in the first place? This is the part that's a problem: we have a licence that as we see it protects our interests. It specifically protects us from douches that we have encountered, who can't be trusted to not act like douches. This is because we've dealt with them and know the consequences. We also acknowledge the consequences of open source licences - and in particular the fact that open source licences mean a certain amount of 'you can't take it back' once you've done it.

But that hypocrisy is not being recognised. Like a lot of things I've come to see from SMF, a lot of talk not backed up by the requisite action.

The old SMF licence, accompanied by the 'we think this is open source' was honest. It made sure that the team got their recognition. It made sure that people couldn't just blindly just reproduce it or fork it. It made no bones about this. Switching to BSD actually hampered SMF in a lot of ways, because it sounded like such a momentus move of openness, without any of the change of spirit that was needed. It's like making a New Year's Resolution, you actually have to do something with it.

1.	This is the second reason I hate the GPL, after its viral nature, because it's hypocritical.
2.	Don't even get me started. I still don't appreciate the way the SMF team handled the whole me vs vbgamer thing, and the way that the 'mediation' was like every other fucking thing I've encountered with them, me being presented with a list of conditions, and given the appearance of ability to negotiate while knowing full well that nothing was negotiable. I lost $250, sure. vbgamer managed to screw himself out of more customers because of his idiotic attempt to ban me, and the team lost most of what credibility they had in my eyes for not understanding that I don't like being called a liar when the person making the claim won't back it up. I still don't appreciate a team member flat out accusing me of libel either.
3.	Wedge Moderation Filters can prevent people posting if their post contains certain words.

It's not really usable for most people except someone like Cloudflare that functions as a form of proxy.

I have to admit the concept of partial page caching on the client side is interesting, but I can see all sorts of potential for abuse. In our case, there's actually almost nothing that could meaningfully be cached though unless you're talking about caching individual posts and so on.

It is a cop-out, because it means that they get pointed to, without thinking. It becomes a trite answer and nothing changes. The real question is why you actually need rules. Good men don't need rules. Today's not the day to find out why I have so many.

I acknowledge that the rules do not permit discussion of Wedge. But that doesn't mean that I like the rules, nor that I agree with them. The problem with having the rules as you defend them is that they don't permit negotiation or leeway, and allows people to hide behind them without saying what they really feel. Motoko doesn't have to, for example, actually find any real arguments to denigrate Wedge, he just has to point out the non-compliance with the rules. It's a form of passive aggression, when you get down to it. It allows SMF to pass judgement - both in itself and on behalf of its users - without having to actually admit to it.

The real question, though, is not whether the rules are wrong and/or need amendment, but do you need rules? I would direct you to your project's core values on the subject.

"We will treat others with consideration, high regard, courtesy and dignity; in a just, equitable and unbiased manner. We will demonstrate good manners, pay attention and treat others as we would like to be treated. We will be consistent, listen and be open to feedback, be careful making judgments about others, and treat people equally and equitably."

I'll admit to the good manners, for the most part. But I won't stand up and defend the project about the others.

Did you know that, for example, only a month or so ago I put Wedge in my signature - and it was removed a few days later? I'm not sure who removed it, but it was removed. That doesn't sound very courteous or unbiased to me.

In fact, over the last 3 years I've been dealing with SMF's community and ecosystem, I'd say there's a distinct lack of fairness across the board. I might even go as far as to suggest that nothing materially has changed in that time; there's a lot of changes of names, but nothing else.Depends on your definition of compromise. It is symbolic of everything that's happened since Wedge was formed, not to mention all the stuff that happened with me and vbgamer before Wedge happened - that every single time, the definition of compromise is woefully and inappropriately wielded. Compromise means reaching a mutual agreement on both sides - but we were never asked what we thought. In other words, it's what the team thought was satisfactory and we were expected to toe the line. There is no way this can be called a compromise, unless you're seeing it with the same rose tinted lenses that the team generally use for any matter that requires them to give up anything.I have never said it was. It's perfectly capable of shooting itself in the foot with anything from a shotgun to a tactical nuclear warhead without any assistance from me. Also, spare me the strawman.

The events of January 2010 that almost imploded SMF were done without any help from me. Even though I was approached beforehand by Amy and asked where I stood if such a line would be drawn, and I said my loyalty was to the project, not the people in it, I had left the team before it kicked off, nor was I one of the folks banned for linking to Jeff's blog. I had no meaningful part in the way that played out.

The fact it took 5 years to get from first starting 2.0 to final release wasn't impeded by me. I contributed some bug reports, I contributed some bug fixes. Three of those years passed before I even came along.

I could go on but you get my point. All the big mis-management issues with SMF, including the NPO by all accounts, had very little real input from me, and what input there was, was mostly ignored, even though I've called it pretty much correctly every time.I don't feel that's the case. I KNOW that's the case. It's gone beyond being a feeling and has been that way for years. But hey, what do I know?

Actually, let's turn that around. What do I know? Well, I read the years and years of history in the team boards while I was still a team member. Nothing that's happening now is anything new. The constant developer churn has been going on for years, because all the people that could possibly make a difference keep being pushed away, either because they get put upon by the rest of the team (who have a lot to say and not backing any of it up by action) and get burned out, or they just get pushed out by the attitude of the project as a whole, which is why I left (though the fact there are a lot of people who have a lot to say and aren't prepared to actually do anything about it)

But all those people inside the project don't appear to be able to see this. Pretty much everyone I've spoken to seems to be happy to deny that this is the case - except it is the case. Why is it that smCore is basically dead? Why Norv and Fustrate (and Spuds, as far as I can tell) have all disappeared?[1]

Why is it that SMF 2.1 is still in alpha, despite being only a few months younger than Wedge, but with far more people who have input into it?

The eventual success of SMF is not dependent on me. There was a time when I used to believe I could make a difference, when I could actually do something that might push SMF along. The last 2 and a half years have actually made me feel like Wedge has done more to push SMF along than SMF itself has.To make something cool. Now? My goal is to get Wedge to a point where it has enough developed that it doesn't need me. The project is getting there. Cost? I don't know. The amount of crap I put up with certainly doesn't make it feel worthwhile most of the time.Take a long, hard look at SMF. A very long hard look. Then tell me that there is enough people arriving into the SMF ecosystem to keep it going. Because from where I'm standing, that's just not happening, because of the aforementioned close knit coven that keeps pushing the good people out.I stopped having noble goals months ago, mostly because of all the BS dragged in this direction by various members of the SMF community. For months I've been working on the noble goal of the ecosystem being self supportible, because once that happens, I can safely leave. You call it quitter's guilt, I call it building a viable ecosystem. But once it's built, I can move on and do something actually worthwhile, because it feels like this isn't worthwhile any more - because it is getting devalued constantly by arguments including ones like this.

1.	And yes, I had noticed the fact that Norv was able to make a commit against the wishes of the project even after leaving. I thought that was hilarious in a way.

The only downside is that it needs to support multiple languages - and that all has to be stored in the same place. I think there should be enough room but it might be worth a few tests.

I was thinking about just providing the option for admins to specify their own message to users. That way they can make the description as detailed or as vague as they like.

It's just that it's likely to be fairly heavy on bandwidth - but it's not like we're *that* high traffic ;)

Hot on the heels of Word Count Limits - I mean, it's about 60% the same code - is Posts Per Day. Technically, it's Posts In The Last 24 Hours, but for most people the difference really won't matter much.

Same deal as before, you can tie it to any other rules you care to name, so you can limit it to certain post counts, or certain groups or even within certain boards. In fact, you could even be really bizarre and limit it so that a user can't post in a given board if they haven't made enough posts elsewhere that day. Not sure why you *would*, but you *could*.

Note that this doesn't allow you to pick which boards those posts came from, so the count of posts in the last 24 hours is total posts in the last 24 hours. It doesn't allow for moderated or deleted posts at this time, it just assumes they're to be counted as well. There's no reason why it couldn't be altered if it really needed it.

Also, it is up in the plugins area for beta testers. Same as the comments for Word Count Limits; the warning message for prevented-post is not meaningful. Maybe this will encourage me to fix it heh.