If it works for you..a rather pessimistic view of things IMHO but its not my place to say.Trust comes from many things, and well, internet is rather untrustworthy place to begin with.
I started off believing the best of people but it really doesn't work like that. All that happens is that I end up being let down. Come on, we live in a world where a city has issued an edict to its schools that certain words should be excluded from city-issued tests for fear of offending people. Like 'birthday' should be excluded because it might offend Jehovah's Witnesses. Or 'Halloween' because it might offend pagans.
but the reason I was abrupt with you is that you have this habit of telling people how wrong they are, how your solution is better and how utter bs it is to deny that.
And you're not doing that right now, of course.
The thing is, you're commenting on what you think I've said, not what I actually said, the two are often subtly different. A lot of what I do, professionally, is figuring out why something is broken for any specific definition of brokenness. It's my job to assess things, figure out how they can be improved. In so doing I offer solutions to those problems, but I don't claim that they are the best solutions to those problems, I assert solely that the solutions I offer up solve the problems at hand, nothing more.
The problem comes in when my view of the problem conflicts with the view others hold of the same problem. In the particular case that we jousted over, regarding mods + themes, your approach does have a certain worthiness to it, by giving themes total control. But I see a problem with that: it basically neuters mods from ever having any real power. It pissed me off no end that your own arrogance appeared to obfuscate that fact in your mind.
Here's the big difference: I am wrong a lot of the time. But I will stand up for what I believe in until someone can actually give me something credible to argue with. Telling me I'm wrong doesn't change my opinion. Explaining why I'm wrong, backing it up with credible arguments, then I'll admit I'm wrong. It does happen, probably more than you'd think, but it requires a certain willingness to play devil's advocate and to see the views that others have, rather than following your own too much.
Arrogance comes to mind, but maybe thats inaccurate.
It is, but it isn't. I come across as arrogant, but that's not my intention. I raised the points I did because this is something I've had to actively work with, something I've actively had to solve, and I wanted to share the benefits of what I learned. Mistakes I made, and so on, things I discovered along the way. And that does come with an air of 'this is how it is'. If you don't want the benefit of that experience, fine, but don't shoot me down for wanting to share that experience, especially if it happens to disagree with you.
I have another example of that at present, specifically regarding the plans for hooks that SMF has going forward, or at least did several months ago. I pointed out the problems that I had encountered in following the same path that they were on, explained the problems that they'd encounter if they pursued that specific path. It wasn't 'wanted', and it certainly conflicted with their plans, but I did what I felt I had to do: share the mistakes I made with them. I don't know if they plan to follow the same path or what they plan to change going forward, but as long as what I've said has been taken into account even in some small fashion, it was worth the time. In your case, though, your own arrogance and sense of self-righteousness means you can't actually listen to anyone who wants to offer you that experience, so I left you to make your own mistakes, rather than save the time of learning from those who already made them.
Still, your contributions, indirectly, to Wedge have been appreciated, all your talk about how themes must have the last word, it all translated into a very flexible structure system for adding content in. We listened to the things you had to say, and acted on them. They may not have been quite what you wanted, but we did factor it in as best we could, so that themes and plugins can co-exist pretty well, which satisfies our design goal, and should leave as much flexibility as possible with themes.
I have to say, I find it a touch ironic that you act exactly how the rest of the SMF community leaders work, especially given how you said you didn't like their attitude. You refuse to take on board what everyone else is saying and go with what you feel is right, and act with arrogance towards people who don't agree.
We may appear to act like that, but we actually don't. Hands up who remembers Clara Listensprechen? How she stormed in here demanding threaded replies and going off on one calling me a misogynist when I refused to bow to her demands? You'd probably consider that an example of that exact behaviour. Except that we did spend a lot of time discussing it after the event, when we could approach it rationally and practically and consider the implications. We went away, having listened to the comments, and considered the implications. The consequence is that we'd like to do it if we could figure out an efficient way to do it in an RDBMS that implicitly works in almost-3NF.
Posted: April 1st, 2012, 02:47 PM
Essentially this comes down to integrity. When all is said and done, I don't find any reason to quetion mine. I can't say the same about you, for example, like closing your site abruptly without telling paying customers what was going on. You want to call me out, telling me to get my house in order? You might want to get your own in order first.
