Wedge

forumsearch0r · « Reply #30, on September 6th, 2013, 04:49 AM »

I'm not entirely sure if I should feel happy about this. Probably less, though.

NonSecwitter · « Reply #31, on September 6th, 2013, 02:25 PM »

Quote from Arantor on September 6th, 2013, 04:47 AM

Also, telling someone who is considered to be depressed to just snap out of it is actually making it worse, along with all the comments about how I should essentially just man up.

Truth to that.

Whatever you decide to do, I wish you the best.

I hope this whole conversation helped relieve a lot of pent up anger or frustration for @Nao and @Arantor so they can both go on there way with a lighter mood ;)

Oracle

Apologies for not responding earlier guys, ive had some dramas of my own. Rather than comment on each point raised ive narrowed the whole argument down to this. > Bearing in mind I'm not taking sides in this.

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Control versus contribution
Ironically, had Nao outlined to me on day one that this is how he wanted to work, I could probably have made that work. It was always stated that we were equals and yet we never really acted as equals.

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I think the reason it worked flawlessly over the first couple of years is that (1) we still thought we had time to release Wedge so we just set aside a lot of the uneasy discussions we might have wanted to have, and (2) we were both involved at the same level, and neither of us had yet to experience a breakdown or anything related. Life happens.

Nao stated both of you were involved @ the same level which to me is the core of Petes argument, what I cant understand is how you Nao, assumed and retained control of the overall project when Pete claimed he only went AWOL for a few days and the rest of the time he was preoccupied with sorting out a flood of error messages etc. > Still on board so to speak?

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Two people may be a crowd when it comes to a decision, but saying that one has to take the lead is not right. One took the lead in the absence of decision and just carried on with what he wanted to do despite the opposition.

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And was that a bad thing to do...? Realistically, I mean..?

Well apparently so as you didnt alert Pete to your actions beforehand as you agreed you would? This culminated in the eventual separation of your partnership as he always felt he was being shortchanged and his worthiness as a so called equal deteriorated.

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On where we came from, and maybe where we're going

Nao always made it clear that he wanted to push towards what Noisen is, essentially a form of localised social network

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Technically, for those who don't know of the story... My idea of my contributions to Wedge was to integrate into it every single thing I'd developed on SMF for myself, i.e. Aeva Media and Noisen features. AeMe was easy, it was just a mod, but I never really got around to overhauling it, and that's a mistake I made. Noisen was more complicated. I made a huge (800KB..?) patch file of all differences between vanilla SMF and Noisen, and then proceeded to apply all of these features, one by one, to Wedge. It turned out, halfway into it, that many features couldn't be integrated as such, either because the codebase had already become too different, or because the code became unneeded because of internal improvements, or simply because it was a lot to do. The most important thing to me was integrating the privacy system, and I think I did all of it over the years... I mean, it was mainly about adding some code to all MySQL queries involving the topic table, but it was still a bitch. Over the years, I moved away from my desire to adapt Noisen into Wedge, but I still have plans to use Wedge over there, because Wedge rocks, and I'm willing to lose all of the Noisen features I didn't integrate into it, at least for a time.

Surely the pair of you agreed on overall aspirations for the project ie Naos desire on Noisen etc and Petes inkling to introduce new features for Wedge? And was a written agreement reached for the so called partnership it seems not...which is somewhat outrageous given you guys have never met personally and were continents apart..Standard procedure for any merger I would have thought. Maybe it was deemed unnecessary @ the time but you would have known the project was going to span @ least 3 or so years so yeah should have been set in stone. Lesson learnt there I guess.

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The saddest part is that even when I disentangle myself, baring myself in a way I just do NOT do normally, being more honest with myself than I have been for a very long time, too many people still don't get it.

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I get it... And I'm okay that you're leaving. Simply, I don't think you're leaving for the right reason.

Beg to differ Nao I believe the forgoing is the reason why and I hope Im not treading on anyones toes, but from what I gather his predicament @ the time was legit. All said and done now but lesson learnt for anyone out there getting into partnerships of any kind, the need for formalization is paramount.

Open lines of communication appear also to have fallen short of ideal!

markham

At 63 I am probably the oldest member here and as I was brought up in the pre-politically correct age, I'm going to call it as I see it; if I unintentionally ruffle a few feathers, then so be it.

Firstly, both Nao and Pete should be thanked not only for their tireless work on the Wedge project but for being so forthright and open with each other and with us. Pete's a self-confessed introvert - though you wouldn't know it from his prolific postings - and I suspect it took him a lot of courage to expose his true inner feelings in a semi-public forum; Nao is more garrulous. Both have proven track records as software developers, certainly for SMF type software and both are perfectionists - Nao is well-known for trimming every redundant byte from JS scripts, for example, and his Mahjong game is simply beautiful.

There appears to be some criticism of Pete's fewer code commits whilst Nao commits more frequently. It seems to me that this simply a difference in style: Pete, being more introverted, keeps his code 'close to his chest' whilst he hones and perfects it; it's a matter of pride to him that code he commits works as flawlessly as possible. Nao is more of a 'write-commit-test-edit-recommit' person. Neither of their personal work flows is better or worse than the other, they're just different approaches. But was it really necessary for Pete to feel that he was being treated like some errant schoolboy whose homework was being marked by his teacher and thereby undermine his self-esteem to the point where he feels he can no longer work on the project?

One issue that has cropped-up very recently is that of restricting the customization of Wedge's look and feel. Nao has designed some very attractive themes but - and here I agree with Pete - the only major difference between two sites running Wedge may be the colours employed and that would be a Big Mistake, in my view. It could well be, for example, that a Forum owner doesn't want the standard sidebar to appear in "Message View" and only on the "Board View" ('Home' Page) - that would certainly be my personal preference FWIW.

Given Pete's knowledge, experience and amount of thought he has put into Wedge, as well as his suggestions for making it better, I find it a very sad state of affairs that he feels he can no longer contribute to the project. I truly hope that he and Nao can come to some understanding which would allow Pete to continue participating in an advisory role - if nothing else. And if he does, Nao, I also hope you will listen to him and pay heed to his advice!

As for the gentleman who suggested that Pete should "snap out of it" and "man up", I have nothing but contempt for those remarks and I suggest that you, sir, show some humility and compassion for your fellow man.

Finally, @Arantor: Pete, thank you for your kind words, encouragement and advice last year when I was developing the Slideshow. I still have hopes that you will incorporate it as a Wedge Plug-In!

Nao · « Reply #34, on September 13th, 2013, 10:39 AM »

Guess I'll have to reply this, at some point...

Quote from Arantor on September 6th, 2013, 02:20 AM

Pick a CLA, if the terms aren't unpleasant, I'll sign it. E.g. the Apache CLA will be fine.

Sure, why not. But as the Apache CLA only applies to future contributions, I suppose you'll have to pre-date it..?

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The reality is that I'm just not the same as you, and as I've said before I can't live up to your standards.

But my standards are mine, and only apply to myself. What you should say is, you can't live with the idea that I'm modifying your code. Except that sometimes I have to (oversights, bugs...), and other times... Well, it's just cosmetic. What should you be proud of? How you indent your code, or how it does something awesome or innovative..?

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If you remove themes, 1) it absolutely prevents themers adding their own language strings

Hmm, not really..?
Although I have yet to figure this one out, I had in mind something really, really simple...
/wedge/
/wedge/sources/
/wedge/skins/my_skin/
/wedge/languages/my_skin/
You just upload multiple folders to your site.
The skins folder contains your CSS and PHP stuff, and in your PHP code, you can simply declare a loadLanguage()...
It may not be super-practical, but it's no more unusable than the SMF way, I'd say.
And, knowing myself-- I'll probably even add a setting allowing for skins to load some language files automatically on every page. I already have a <language> setting IIRC (determining what languages the skin accounts for in the CSS files), so I'll just have to add a new one like <loadLanguage>, or something. As long as it's in beta, I can still change that kind of thing, and update all skin files manually...

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and 2) it absolutely prevents replacing templates on a large scale. Sure, there are some nods made in the other direction with <we:cat> and <we:title> but a themer simply isn't going to be able to go to town and really change up the look.

If it's absolutely needed, then they'll tell me what I should change into a macro.
If it's not, then it's unlikely they'll simply update all template files for the sake of updating all template files.

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I see from the changelog you've made some more strides, but let me ask you this. You've seen Crossing Overland, with the menu down the side, with the other stuff that's in the theme. The ONLY thing managed by the sources code is the extra subtitle on the menu, everything else is in a custom theme.

Can that be recreated with just skins?

Can't see why not..?

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Answer: no because the JavaScript would have to be reworked to make the menu work differently.

And here, I can't see what JS is needed exactly to make it work. I don't see any JS at hand here...
And even then-- <script include="mycustomskin">, and you're done... (??)
If someone needs an object method to be rewritable, I can declare it outside the scope, so that it can be redefined/overloaded/prototyped.

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That's the point I was getting at: killing off themes and pushing it to skins means a designer can only change the markup they're given, they can't really go to town with new markup which is a considerable hit on flexibility.

Macros
Custom JS
Custom PHP
Custom CSS
Final HTML raw replacement
Dunno what can be done with themes, that skins could not do.
Of course, it's another way of handling things. And it needs documenting. That's where skins are weak. There's a basic documentation in Warm/skin.xml (the only thing I actually really worked on documenting, unlike Wess!), but it could be better, I suppose. I'll improve it as questions come and go.

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We did some good stuff. And I'd love to see some good stuff from this project in the future because you don't need me. You never needed me, not really.

I needed your expertise on many domains that I'm very weak at (database, security, UI, JS, and so on -- and yes, I got a bit better at UI, and I quickly realized I wasn't as bad at JS as I feared), and quite simply, I needed your enthusiasm. Two people is better than one. Oh, just a simple example... These days, Milady and I try to jog at least once a week, sometimes twice a week. We started slow with 12mn rounds, and now we're at 30mn rounds. We're still bad at this, but we're still doing it, because what matters is that we try. Milady told me today, after our jogging session, that she enjoyed running with me, because she did 45mn sessions many years ago, and stopped after a year because she was fucking bored. I told her, "you need me because you feel better when you're so tired and you see that I'm in an even worse shape; and you need me because you want to encourage me to keep you with you when you're feeling better." She agreed with that entirely. Sometimes, being two just means that when someone is not at their best, they can count on someone else to fill up their job, and when they're at their best, they're happy that someone is encouraging them.

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You have the power to take Wedge in any direction you choose now, whatever works for where you want to take it, and for those who will undoubtedly follow you.

Sure. Removing themes would be a bold move, one in the likes of your own past bold moves, so I guess it's like the name change-- a way to make it clear it's "mine" from now on. However, all I want, at this point, is to finish the dozen or so features I want to finish (better privacy settings, better UI for blogs, etc.), and then release it to the world. I think that's what's going to make it clear that it's mine: I've always been willing to release it, because I am confident people will love it, as flawed as it is. ;)

Anyway!

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I'm free to go away and think about what I want to say, and how to say it. I've read this post half a dozen times this evening before I replied to it.

Ah, well, I tend to reply as I'm reading. I didn't read this post until now (I did read your previous long post entirely before replying, but that's more an exception), because I will usually be discouraged to reply after I've read. "Too many things to say, will take me hours to reply..."
So, I guess my posts tend to be seen as hot-headed, more spontaneous, unlike yours. Figures.

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Firstly, accept the notion that you're going in a direction where you're loading stuff only on demand. In my world, primarily a CMS, I don't need a censor all the time. Inside the forum, perhaps, but not more generally. So I can hive it off somewhere else. And then only load it when I actually need it.

Okay, so, the censor code... It's less than 5KB, including all of the fancy scramble stuff. Or just 1.2KB for the core function. I don't see autoloading it as being very helpful for performance...? Heck, at worst I could simply have it in a Subs-Censor.php file, and loadSource it from within Subs-BBC if needed...

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Keeping the files a bit smaller, then, is a major difference. Especially when you typically already consume 10MB per page load just in general approach.

But it certainly doesn't make a project more manageable... Functions should be categorized by themes, not by size. I'd rather maintain a 100KB file for some Aeva feature, than have to deal with ten 10KB files with the same code, because every time I want to make a more global change, I have to search all of these files for relevant code, when in a single file, I can just do a quick search... Things like that.
Look, the best example is skin CSS... Originally, I only had suffixes. Got plenty of files for each browser or action or whatever. Then I added @if support. Suddenly I removed most of those extra files, because it was much easier to maintain similarly themed CSS in the same file, rather than in multiple index.ie6.css-whatever files. Made my life easier...

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This last year we've both had stuff going on that has made it hard to focus. I'm sorry I wasn't more forthcoming either, because this might have ended a little differently otherwise.

We both have blame to share.

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Eh, I don't know that they'll love it. They'll deal with it, simple as that.

Better than waiting until 2015 or 2016 for a release you'd finally deem suitable.
Having a release out means that we can start considering things like whether to keep maintaining it. If it's a success (generating buzz, even negative buzz), then great. If it's a failure, then we stop, simple as that.

Okay, this post is so long, I'm gonna have to finish it another day, because... Because! I'm really tired.

Posted: September 13th, 2013, 12:12 AM

Quote from Arantor on September 6th, 2013, 02:20 AM

Firstly, there is evidence to suggest that themers don't like having to deal with specific CSS variations for a given system due to preparsers - like XenForo discovered - but I think Wess is strong enough that it'll overcome the issues.

Dunno. I guess I can be convinced to switch to an all-bracket version of Wess by default (in index files etc), if people feel better about not having to deal with indentation, but I think it'd be a loss. One of the main advantages, though, would be the fact that Notepad2 would be better at providing syntax highlighting for it... :P

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I was against the idea for reasons I'd explained multiple times, including earlier in this post. I'm skeptical of the claim that you can do 'pretty much everything skin-less themes could do' because there are an awful lot of things that just aren't covered in that.

Well, for now it's not removed; but I just have one thing to add: in the three years we worked on Wedge, none of us ever tried to make a non-default theme, even just to 'see' if it would work... I made so many changes to the internals, I'm not sure it'd work at all; it might be fixable and everything, but because my focus has been on making sure anyone can make a very minimal pseudo-theme (a skin) with just color changes or whatever with only a text editor and a FTP client (no admin manipulation, no database handling or anything), I'm hoping that once they get the feel of it, they'll want to add more features, which they can do while remaining in the same environment, as opposed to having to go through theme handling, which is more complicated, and more importantly, forces you to update your templates as Wedge or SMF is being updated.
(If the theme system is removed, I'll probably be even more aggressive in splitting important templates into more functions and macros.)

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See, that's the problem... I don't like face to face meetings. I much, much prefer online communication. I'm rather inept socially in person,

I don't have the feeling that Louis had a problem with that, since he invited you for a long road trip together, one year after meeting you...

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because my brain thinks faster than my mouth and I trip up on words so much.

And as a French speaking English like a Spanish cow (French expression :P), you don't think I would trip up on words as much as you do..? :P

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Heck, I'm not even on Skype.

Me neither, but I was willing to be for you...

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That said, I think it might be nice to let this stuff go, and in a while when it's all settled and we're doing what we're doing, to just meet up, shoot the breeze. Not as would-be/wannabe/former partners in crime, but two geeks that are just friends, you know?

Well, it never was about Wedge anyway. It was about putting a real person in front of the online contact whom I've been talking to for all these years. What did SMF call that..? A meeting of the minds...

Anyway, I might be coming back to London within the next few months; nothing set in stone, but my girlfriend discussed the possibility of staying at her brother's over there, as he's expecting a new kid soon.

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Seriously though, there has been a mass defection to Facebook and Google+ over the last few years. All the forum packages are in decline, I've even heard from phpBB and MyBB folks that are seeing a decline in users for this very reason.

It's not about the number of users (you realize we'd have been thrilled to even have 1% of SMF's current user base, don't you..?), it's about filling a void, and making life better for at least one person. A success story, if you will, case by case, one at a time. I may have sold thousands of copies of my game, but what really pushed me to continue working on it at the time was these little stories where people were telling me they were successfully using KMJ as a tool for their physiotherapy. It happened several times, I have no idea why. I even once had an hospital ask me for a group order of copies for their reeducation unit; I told them they didn't have to buy them, of course.
That was a factor for me, more than the salary that came out of it.

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For a lot of discussions, a group or page on Facebook will be enough, especially in response to something like a band or similar because they'll already have a presence on FB and don't really need to open up a forum for anything else.

Absolutely... And it's also much easier to set up than a forum, but once your community outgrows the facilities offered by Facebook, it happens from time to time that you'll want to go serious with it. In fact, to me, Facebook didn't replace forums... It simply replaced mailing lists (partly), and free hosted forums that sucked so much. You know, these slow websites that were filled with spam and messages from people asking 'when are you going to use a real forum anyway...?', things like that.

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I can register on a forum and be effectively anonymous should I choose. It's not a single overarching thing where my family, my friends, my professional acquaintances and whatnot all get smushed together unlike Facebook.

Absolutely, that's one of the important points. There are some forums where I'm registered, where I wouldn't want to tell people my real name.
Not that you CAN'T hide your identity on FB. One of my best friends has 'Yeo Wren' as his FB account, and that's actually his nickname. He never gave away his real name on FB, even though he's very active on it, and all of his RL friends are linked to his account. It's not that he's hiding his name... He just doesn't like revealing himself to anyone he doesn't know.
That's why I still have in my to-do list this item that says, lemme find it, "per-item privacy in profiles, e.g. real name". That means applying the usual privacy flag (contacts, members...) to individual entries in your profile area. For instance, you could put your real name in it, but only have it available for your conatcts. Or your e-mail address, etc.

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Getting back on track though, more and more requests on sm.org are about bridging to WP or using it alongside an existing site, rather than it being the site as a whole.

Oh, that... Pete, I've always, always been against board index as the homepage for a forum. You'll remember I did rewrite the homepage early in the Wedge timespan, and even allowed for the ability to push a blog homepage as the main homepage of the forum. That is, to me, it's ALREADY a CMS per-se, although it's not really advertised as such.
(Possibly because I don't think saying "CMS" is gonna help make Wedge popular. If you'll look at cmsmatrix.org, they have over 1200 CMS systems listed... And they're almost all dead. To most people, CMS = what?! (and to them, WordPress is just a blog platform, only web developers/designers would really think of calling it a CMS); to a minority of them, CMS = WordPress (.net and Web Designer Magazine readerships :lol:); and to some of them, CMS = Drupal/Joomla/ExpressionEngine/SilverStripe/whatever CMS had a relative amount of popularity at one point or another. Doing a great CMS won't really help, as there are so many CMSes around already. What is going to help, though, is getting at least ONE great/popular website to use Wedge, and then popularize it by actually keeping using it. Again: one by one...

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As for people coming back to forums, I've been saying since 2011 that there's going to be a shift back towards forums as people start to reclaim their privacy. While I didn't predict PRISM, since 2011 I was speculating 2014 as the time when forums would reclaim some of the lost ground. While the PRISM stuff has died down a touch now, there is a swing back towards forums. I'm just expecting it more en masse next year.

I didn't even know what PRISM was... I googled it, and was surprised by the amount of detail... So, that's what the Snowden story was about, uh..? Interesting. The media in France, I don't remember them talking about that at all... They only covered Snowden's escape, and I followed that a bit because it reminded of that amusing movie I saw a few months ago, Terminal.

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Oh, I've never doubted that the software needs to exist. I'm just challenging the notion that it has to be the primary focus of the software.

Again and again: to me, it's a CMS all right, but CMS meaning "community management system", not "content management system". SMF, to me, like other good forum systems, excel in making users feel that they can set up a real identity on a website, and manage everything from one place. Call it a social network or whatever you like, but to me, it's just what the Web is about... Tim Berners-Lee himself said that the Web had always been about connecting people. Facebook didn't invent it, SMF didn't invent it.

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I'm asserting the notion that a piece of software that allows you to run a website should allow for a forum but not be a forum with some other stuff integrated in to it.

You can very much work on hiding forum contents from a website, for sure, and still have the forum power your user management.
Well, if anything, there are already plenty SMF forums that do exactly that. It's not new -- it's just not really advertised, is all.
Bloc is focused on doing that with Protendo, too. Noisen.com has done that from day one, of course -- I'm not really hiding the forum, but if you tell someone your blog's address, they don't really have a reason to go outside of it, so...

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The point where I suggested it, I forget where it was but it was on this site, and you were very hostile to the idea of having a CMS with 'the best forum plugin' and would much rather have the forum as the core and content stuff around it. At least, that's how it seemed, and after that I just dropped the idea.

What I was against, as I remember it (and I'm old, so my memory is fuzzy), was that you suggested stripping the forum entirely from the software, and adding it back as a plugin of sorts. The idea was already floating in the air for SMF 3.0, and I hated that. I hated the idea that a CMS would have to be ashamed of its origins so much, when it should be proud that it skyrocketed in popularity, even if it typecast(ed?) it a bit.

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A blog is a very different beast from a forum. A forum is essentially a democratic concept, where anyone in the community can have a say and speak their mind, whereas a blog only allows for the privileged few to speak their mind and let everyone else comment. True, a forum board can be used as a blog, and that becomes mostly a matter of permissions and UI juggling, but it's a very different beast to market and to work with as a whole.

Just look at noisen.com, it's come naturally really... Most of the users are just forum users. Most of the most active users have their own blog, where they can do whatever the fuck they want, without my intervention. A few less active users have a blog, but they usually drop it after a few months of inactivity; whether it's because they're intimidated by user comments or simply because they're not really talkative or just wanted to 'try out' the platform, I don't know, and I don't care... I just provide the tools, and I'm happy that a few people (including me up to 2010) are or have been using it. Even a dead blog is something to be proud of; I know that everytime I go back to nao.noisen.com, I have this 'wow!' factor when it comes to the contents of it, same can be said of cynagames.com though, KMJ is not dead, it's still played by hundreds of thousands in the world, that's just the way it is. It will possibly even outlast me, as a retro game of sorts... :lol:

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Messages are what a forum is *made* of. It's not what a forum is *about*. There are other components to a community, where messages don't necessarily make a huge difference. I look at the site I use to discuss development; the shoutbox has nearly 400,000 entries, while the forum has barely 3,000 posts, mostly which just summarise and formalise what the shoutbox had in it at the time.

And that's just great for them. That still makes it a forum... They just don't use the messages table as much as their equivalent thoughts table, I'd say... ;)

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The main reason I didn't want to run a release at this stage was simply because of how much stuff I felt was unfinished - not 'waiting for perfect'. The permissions stuff is still a mess.

It will be fixed over time.

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The media area still needs a serious (IMHO) overhaul,

It will be fixed over time.

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and to me that seemed like it needed to be done before 1.0 but I didn't know what to do with it. I just knew I didn't like it.

I understand that you woudn't like it. Heck, I'd be lying if I said I liked it. But the reality isn't that. The reality is, there are dozen of people who would be thrilled to use Wedge right now, and adopt it, even if it's not ready yet.

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It was a good idea in a lot of ways, but I'm sure it would have failed for the reason above, we would have tried to keep things in step enough to be able to reuse each other's work and we would both have been hamstrung by it in time.

I'm pretty sure I'd have been the 'weaker one' in that relationship, i.e. adopting more of your changes than you'd adopt mine, because I'd really, really strive to keep repos in sync as much as possible, and globally, even though I may have sent 'mixed signals' myself, I'm really happy with most of the changes you made. Even if they destabilize me, overall I know that they're for the better, and they're good for Wedge, for its future popularity. Software reviewers are gonna like the visuals, but they'll be absolutely thrilled by the admin area, I think.

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It would have gone one of two ways, either it would have meant a complete separation much as we're at now, or it would have ended up diverging and converging after a while and a ton of work to bring them back under one roof (which would invariably have lead to a lot of rewrites)

Well, I wouldn't see any of us as doing that merge; maybe by someone else if both of our projects had collapsed, but that may simply have been seen as a 'fork from multiple sources', I don't know...
The idea was simply to find a solution to the issue where we were drifting apart, and to allow you to focus on your other software projects, while giving me free reign to make decisions when you wouldn't be available for advice, that's pretty much it...

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Oh, I know that. At least, I think I know that. But my self esteem doesn't really care *why* it's being pulled apart, simply that the end result is a B-minus grade.

I can't help you here, I'm afraid...

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I couldn't really find a better analogy, and I did want to make some kind of a meta reference, knowing one of the largest topics in the private board. It made me smile a little to make a private reference.

Hmm, I don't think I caught that one... :^^;:

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Oh, it required team work, but I didn't entirely feel like I was doing good at being in a team.

Neither of us are really team material; we're most likely 'alpha devs', meaning we should both be lead dev, which is why we shared that credit, and it worked... For many years; and to me, that's already quite a feat. FWIW.

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But therein lies the problem. Committing something subpar was wrong

Nope...

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and trying to commit perfection meant I committed nothing while trying to make it perfect. My best just isn't the same level as yours, ultimately.

Have you ever seen how many times I rewrote so many parts of my code...? Just this week-- Zoomedia. I not only added hardware acceleration (which was way harder than I expected, because the real bottleneck in performance was not due to the software resizing, but rather to the constant layout reflow inside the popup, even if it just had a single image in it...), but I had to rewrite many things to make it work again, because it had become an unmovable stone, perfected to death over the months. It was as short as you could hope for, and yet I left this feat aside and decided to give priority to making it work. As a result, my final big commit didn't even mention the large increase in size -- something in the likes of 300+ bytes, rather it focused on the fact that it worked better, ah ah...
Maybe it was a homage to you, I don't know... :P

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To a point. Certainly when working alone I don't have the feelings of inadequacy. I can just enjoy working on code for its own sake and it doesn't matter if I don't commit it, and it doesn't matter if I don't finish it and it doesn't matter if I abandon it.

To me, committing has a special feeling: it's like I can leave that part of me aside, and focus on new things. As long as I don't commit, I have tons of ugly, dirty code lying around, and sometimes it just feels great to just revert that code, instead of keeping work on it, because some pieces of code need time to prove their worth, and when they don't, I just tell them good bye.

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Let me show you something. This wasn't public knowledge. Some months ago I made a mod of some of the anti spam stuff in Wedge and released it to sm.org.

Went to see it, and indeed, there it was in all its glory... Because it's available for anyone to download, yes it's public knowledge. Not popular knowledge, but it's there. There's a mod out there at sm.org that publicly accuses me of wrongdoings.
I'm above that, but... Well, I prefer when people who have something serious to tell you, do it in front of me, rather than vent on the side.
If you already had a problem with me back in April, then you should have told me, because there's no reason I wouldn't have worked on this on my side, or at least talked you into understanding what I'm doing has never been against you, rather I was just trying to contribute.

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Interestingly the commit log from 21/4 (r2066) does actually mention that I was AWOL and had been for a day or so at least... This would have been in the middle of the thousands of lines of warning system rewrite that as I tried to tell people was close to giving me a breakdown all on its own.

Anyone would have a breakdown over such a comprehensive rewrite, really...!
Why do you think I never took it upon myself to do a complete overhaul of AeMe... :P

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That comment wasn't actually directed at you, but everyone else who seems to say that I should just man up and accept that this is how it should be.

Well... I know it won't do me any favours as I've been doing my best to stay as neutral as possible in this, and to be understanding of your position and the difficulties you experienced in the last three years; but to be brutally honest Pete, yet, a part of me also screams 'man up!', and considers you a bit of a drama queen. We got together because we were both branded drama queens by the SMF team after all, and they weren't completely wrong. I've just learnt to be more philosophical about these things in the last year or so. I haven't been in a flame war for something like two years. The trick is losing interest. Looking back, I think it was a drug, coming as much from a sense of disbelief at the injustices around me (for some reason, any injustice around *me* seemed to be even worse), as a simple need for attention. As hard as it is to admit it, I did many things out of a need for attention, because of low self-esteem and a need to prove myself that I was a worthy guy, not by self-confidence, but by looking back and thinking, "okay, I made a few nice things". I'm sure today's youth are the same.

But then I just slowly drifted into the world of the adults (mostly due to real life) -- where nothing ever happens because you fear you have more to lose than to earn. I just played the Passion game with myself for so long... I can still be angry at injustice, but the difference is that now I realize I can't do much about these. Last time I saw one, I started a fork. Look where I am, three years later... The only thing that remains of the initial spark is the passion for building something so incredible. The anger, itself, is completely dead. Not that I love the SMF team or anything-- I just don't feel anything when I think of these stories, I see these things as childish. Childish that I played into the game of joining the SMF dev team, and especially childish that they themselves played with me and were frightened of losing control over me. Seriously-- this is free software we're talking about. Nobody should ever give a shit about having 'power' over something. What matters is what they bring to the project, not the aura they get out of it. Being happy with what you did in the past, is better for your karma than some irrational idea of being important. So, yes, everyone was being childish at that point, and I should have seen that. It wouldn't even have stopped me from starting Wedge, actually. Just... In a different state of mind, I guess.

Oh well, I'm seriously drifting off-topic. Sorry, I was typing as I thought it up.

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It is slightly ironic that Wedge itself was founded on the notion that we shouldn't just accept how things are being on the wrong end of a team relationship that wasn't working, but that's what I'm being asked to accept 'for the good of the project'.

I just think, you should embrace our differences. I can accept that you'd leave the project over not being able to accept my quirks, such as these compulsive modifications on your code. But I don't think you should feel betrayed by me, or anything. You should accept that I'm different. I accept that you're different, and I accept that it doesn't work for you, in the end. Just don't turn this into drama. Nobody died here. The worst that happened, is that some things you wrote very passionately are going to be left aside for the time being, maybe forever, but you can always come back and keep contributing to it. It's your decision, in the end, whether you contribute or not. I decided I'd get the 'final cut' on the software because most successful project have a single decision-taking leader, but that doesn't mean I don't acknowledge how crucial you've been to the project, and its future success. And it's going to stay that way-- anyone, especially me, would be outraged to see your name removed from the Wedge credits, even 10 years after your last contribution. I learned a lot in your company (I also missed out on a lot of opportunities to learn more from you, but... I'm just not up to the task). You've shaped Wedge in your own way, and that's good. Well, what can I add to that..? Not much. My post is already so long, and I can't expect anyone to read it entirely. If anything, I'm hoping you don't reply more than one-liners to it... :^^;:

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The last few days have been very interesting. There are people that believe I should go and be lead developer for SMF in the hopes of rescuing it but I don't really see that working for much the same reasons, and I feel bad about working on my own project in light of the comments made here, but I still love the idea of doing different things with the forum and CMS concept. I guess I'll just have to bend over and accept something in the end :(

I see you're also trying to contribute to Elk, at least trying to convince them to adopt some of your Wedge changes. I just have to say-- make up your mind already! :P

PS: I wanted to use the word "short of...", but I couldn't find any place. Any suggestions where I could have put it, short of here..? Oh, good, I managed to use it, yay!

Arantor · « Reply #36, on September 13th, 2013, 06:12 PM »

Quote from Nao on September 13th, 2013, 10:39 AM

Guess I'll have to reply this, at some point...

Sure, why not. But as the Apache CLA only applies to future contributions, I suppose you'll have to pre-date it..?

I'm not sure it does only apply to future contributions. SM are not so stupid that they extracted two CLAs from me that would only apply going forward.

Quote from Nao on September 13th, 2013, 10:39 AM

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The reality is that I'm just not the same as you, and as I've said before I can't live up to your standards.
But my standards are mine, and only apply to myself. What you should say is, you can't live with the idea that I'm modifying your code. Except that sometimes I have to (oversights, bugs...), and other times... Well, it's just cosmetic. What should you be proud of? How you indent your code, or how it does something awesome or innovative..?

It'd be nice to be actually proud of anything. I'm not particularly proud of what I've done for Wedge because all I see are how I could improve it.

I also realise you do not see the schism in your statement. Your standards are yours, yes, right up until you apply them all over the Wedge codebase. The frequent need to minimise everything, even down to stripping multiline if statements down to inlined ternary expressions because it's shorter, even if it is less readable. I got to the point where I just couldn't be bothered trying to argue any more because it wasn't worth the effort, because you wouldn't listen.

Even the things I did argue about, like the point of putting 'public' in front of functions in classes... in both Class-CSS.php and Class-Skeleton.php, the absence is quite notable, and yet when I raised it your principle objection is that it would save you a little typing since the technical objections raised could easily have gone either way.

Then there's the whole way we did coding in general. You pulled my commits apart and rewrote them to suit your standards. I deliberately did not do the same for your commits; I fixed bugs as I noticed them, but with a lot of the stuff you added, I wasn't always sure what was intentional behaviour and what wasn't. Hard to know if something's a bug or not when you're not sure what it's supposed to do.

Quote from Nao on September 13th, 2013, 10:39 AM

The skins folder contains your CSS and PHP stuff, and in your PHP code, you can simply declare a loadLanguage()...
It may not be super-practical, but it's no more unusable than the SMF way, I'd say.

Yes, because making themers have to jump through hoops is so much easier than them just adding a file called ThemeStrings.language.php to their theme/languages folder.

Quote from Nao on September 13th, 2013, 10:39 AM

And, knowing myself-- I'll probably even add a setting allowing for skins to load some language files automatically on every page. I already have a <language> setting IIRC (determining what languages the skin accounts for in the CSS files), so I'll just have to add a new one like <loadLanguage>, or something. As long as it's in beta, I can still change that kind of thing, and update all skin files manually...

And with that attitude you're never going to get out of beta. I saw, for example, that among the latest commits were an overhaul of Zoomedia... you're not even in beta and you're already rewriting something that most people have only seen a few times for something that I'd argue really isn't necessary - and given that you've said you're trying for a public release, I'd wonder why you're not spending time on the things that actually matter.

At this stage the question to ask: Is it free of known bugs? Does it do everything it needs to do? If the answer to both of these questions is yes, it's not something that needs to be touched until after a beta phase has begun when you let optimisation kick in.

Quote from Nao on September 13th, 2013, 10:39 AM

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and 2) it absolutely prevents replacing templates on a large scale. Sure, there are some nods made in the other direction with <we:cat> and <we:title> but a themer simply isn't going to be able to go to town and really change up the look.
If it's absolutely needed, then they'll tell me what I should change into a macro.
If it's not, then it's unlikely they'll simply update all template files for the sake of updating all template files.

Why not spend a little time looking around at what the theme community actually do to get an idea?

Most themes don't touch markup at all because of mod compatibility. Those that do change the following, in approximately the order of frequency: the menu, the board index, the message index, the display.

Most themes don't go through all that, and only a few themes ever go beyond that (e.g. Dragooon's mobile theme) but that's more than can be done with skins right now. So basically you end up in the position where you need to make a decision about making the entire board index a macro of sorts.

If you look back, the reasons I suggested <we:cat> and <we:title> originally were entirely out of experience of modders interacting with themers against themes that were changing. I wasn't just thinking out hypotheticals there, I was working from bitter experience. It's really hard to improve upon things when all you can see is the vacuum you're working in - go out there and see what everyone else is doing and then figure out how to improve on it.

Quote from Nao on September 13th, 2013, 10:39 AM

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I see from the changelog you've made some more strides, but let me ask you this. You've seen Crossing Overland, with the menu down the side, with the other stuff that's in the theme. The ONLY thing managed by the sources code is the extra subtitle on the menu, everything else is in a custom theme.

Can that be recreated with just skins?
Can't see why not..?

Because I'm not sure you looked hard enough, though I realise I didn't explain it very well either.

The front page has the sidebar, as do the blog posts. But the minute you drop back to the forum or the trips pages, or indeed anything not actually in the blog posts, there's no sidebar. Now tell me how you'd do that in a skin.

Quote from Nao on September 13th, 2013, 10:39 AM

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Answer: no because the JavaScript would have to be reworked to make the menu work differently.
And here, I can't see what JS is needed exactly to make it work. I don't see any JS at hand here...
And even then-- <script include="mycustomskin">, and you're done... (??)
If someone needs an object method to be rewritable, I can declare it outside the scope, so that it can be redefined/overloaded/prototyped.

This is because I didn't reuse the full menus from that theme. The theme, in case you weren't aware, is a premium theme for WordPress that I ported. And the theme has a whole thing for submenus - check it out at http://www.elegantthemes.com/preview/Memoir/

The point I was trying to make but clearly didn't spell out blatantly enough is that it's not about rewriting the menu as such, it's being able to totally ignore the current menu JS code and implement something else should the user choose to do so. And do it per theme.

Quote from Nao on September 13th, 2013, 10:39 AM

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That's the point I was getting at: killing off themes and pushing it to skins means a designer can only change the markup they're given, they can't really go to town with new markup which is a considerable hit on flexibility.
Macros
Custom JS
Custom PHP
Custom CSS
Final HTML raw replacement
Dunno what can be done with themes, that skins could not do.
Of course, it's another way of handling things. And it needs documenting. That's where skins are weak. There's a basic documentation in Warm/skin.xml (the only thing I actually really worked on documenting, unlike Wess!), but it could be better, I suppose. I'll improve it as questions come and go.

-sigh- Can a skin change quite literally any part of the main markup? I don't mean through buffer find/replace, because that's so fragile it's unreal (bear in mind I've done quite possibly more extreme things in this department than most people realise, like replacing icons on the board index using it)

Quote from Nao on September 13th, 2013, 10:39 AM

I needed your expertise on many domains that I'm very weak at (database, security, UI, JS, and so on -- and yes, I got a bit better at UI, and I quickly realized I wasn't as bad at JS as I feared), and quite simply, I needed your enthusiasm. Two people is better than one. Oh, just a simple example... These days, Milady and I try to jog at least once a week, sometimes twice a week. We started slow with 12mn rounds, and now we're at 30mn rounds. We're still bad at this, but we're still doing it, because what matters is that we try. Milady told me today, after our jogging session, that she enjoyed running with me, because she did 45mn sessions many years ago, and stopped after a year because she was fucking bored. I told her, "you need me because you feel better when you're so tired and you see that I'm in an even worse shape; and you need me because you want to encourage me to keep you with you when you're feeling better." She agreed with that entirely. Sometimes, being two just means that when someone is not at their best, they can count on someone else to fill up their job, and when they're at their best, they're happy that someone is encouraging them.

It's true enough, however it's also true that you don't really need me. The parts where I had other stuff going on, you kept developing just as you always had.

The thing is, you're a lot better at JS and UI in general than I am. So that leaves database and security then, and most of that stuff is already in place anyway.

Quote from Nao on September 13th, 2013, 10:39 AM

Sure. Removing themes would be a bold move, one in the likes of your own past bold moves, so I guess it's like the name change-- a way to make it clear it's "mine" from now on. However, all I want, at this point, is to finish the dozen or so features I want to finish (better privacy settings, better UI for blogs, etc.), and then release it to the world. I think that's what's going to make it clear that it's mine: I've always been willing to release it, because I am confident people will love it, as flawed as it is. ;)

So now you've finished the (second? third?) rewrite of Zoomedia, you'll be able to get right on those?

Quote from Nao on September 13th, 2013, 10:39 AM

Ah, well, I tend to reply as I'm reading. I didn't read this post until now (I did read your previous long post entirely before replying, but that's more an exception), because I will usually be discouraged to reply after I've read. "Too many things to say, will take me hours to reply..."
So, I guess my posts tend to be seen as hot-headed, more spontaneous, unlike yours. Figures.

You can always tell when my posts are hot-headed and impetuous. But when it's important like this I try to give it a little time before I reply so that I've thought about it. The first draft of this reply was far more angry.

Quote from Nao on September 13th, 2013, 10:39 AM

Okay, so, the censor code... It's less than 5KB, including all of the fancy scramble stuff. Or just 1.2KB for the core function. I don't see autoloading it as being very helpful for performance...? Heck, at worst I could simply have it in a Subs-Censor.php file, and loadSource it from within Subs-BBC if needed...

And still you miss my point. But maybe that's my fault for giving you a very specific, and sub-par, example.

I don't use the censor nearly as much as Wedge does, but that's because I'm less about being a forum. Now consider that I also don't use the bbc parser as much. Imagine NOT loading Subs-BBC.php every page load, because you don't need it every page load.

That's 55KB of code you don't actually need every page load. Still think this is a minor pointless petty detail?

SMF 2.1 has a token system that sits above session checking for admin actions. Another 7KB from the page load as standard (it was in Security.php)

Another example is the ban system in Wedge... bans are not evaluated every page load but on a new session and every x minutes (5 IIRC), so replace all the ban stuff in Security.php - is_not_banned() - with a tiny function that just does the session check and then only loads the rest of the ban stuff if it's actually needed. That's probably another 15KB of code that you save when you don't need it.

Right now, Wedge takes ~10MB of memory to build a page. My stripped down SMF 2.1 currently runs in the 4MB range for page building, and while it doesn't have a template system as powerful as Wedge's, when I've added Twig to it, it'll probably still consume less memory.

Quote from Nao on September 13th, 2013, 10:39 AM

But it certainly doesn't make a project more manageable... Functions should be categorized by themes, not by size. I'd rather maintain a 100KB file for some Aeva feature, than have to deal with ten 10KB files with the same code, because every time I want to make a more global change, I have to search all of these files for relevant code, when in a single file, I can just do a quick search... Things like that.

Seriously, that's what you're trying to argue with?

You and I both did search and replace across a hundred files at a time. What's the difference between that and doing it on a smaller scale?

I'd rather have something that is only-debatably less manageable and is measurably faster out of it. There are all kinds of things that I don't even remember where they are; if I have to do a project-wide find to find a function definition, I'd argue there's something quite wrong there.

Right now if I want to find something I know immediately where to look, e.g. Pyra_Suggest_Member is the suggest handler for members... and guess what, if I see the class mentioned, I know exactly where to look: Pyra/Suggest/Member.php. And since I'm keeping functionality together in a logical fashion I don't even have to worry about there being stuff lurking around that doesn't need to be around. I don't have to wade through multi-thousand line files trying to find things.

Quote from Nao on September 13th, 2013, 10:39 AM

Look, the best example is skin CSS... Originally, I only had suffixes. Got plenty of files for each browser or action or whatever. Then I added @if support. Suddenly I removed most of those extra files, because it was much easier to maintain similarly themed CSS in the same file, rather than in multiple index.ie6.css-whatever files. Made my life easier...

So you're grouping things by function and having conditional items for that function in the file? Christ, that sounds logical. It's funny how that's almost exactly what I'm suggesting.

You have CSS files for the admin area, for the editor, for the zooming component and other stuff, which is not substantially different in a semantic sense to what I'm talking about. And you load the bits you need as you need them and the result is a smaller CSS file.

Now replace 'CSS files' with 'classes' and the result is a smaller footprint of code that runs faster because you're loading and parsing less each page load.

Quote from Nao on September 13th, 2013, 10:39 AM

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Eh, I don't know that they'll love it. They'll deal with it, simple as that.
Better than waiting until 2015 or 2016 for a release you'd finally deem suitable.

I'm not the one who constantly rewrote things in a quest for making it ever smaller. I took things I didn't like and I rewrote them. The only things I wasn't really satisfied with were the things that got rewritten time and time again, and the things that weren't done yet but that needed improving - like the ban system, the warning system etc.

I'd argue in front of anyone who cares to read the commit log that I'm not the one with a problem with quality.

Quote from Nao on September 13th, 2013, 10:39 AM

Quote from Arantor on September 6th, 2013, 02:20 AM
Firstly, there is evidence to suggest that themers don't like having to deal with specific CSS variations for a given system due to preparsers - like XenForo discovered - but I think Wess is strong enough that it'll overcome the issues.
Dunno. I guess I can be convinced to switch to an all-bracket version of Wess by default (in index files etc), if people feel better about not having to deal with indentation, but I think it'd be a loss. One of the main advantages, though, would be the fact that Notepad2 would be better at providing syntax highlighting for it... :P

That isn't what I meant.

XenForo has its own preparser. It's not as hardcore as Wess, not by a long way, but it is still a preparser and people don't like having to learn something that isn't CSS to make use of it, unless it's a given standard like LESS.

On the other hand, XenForo's admin panel for editing style properties blows almost anything else I've seen out of the water. A pretty interface for all this stuff - the only thing that beats it is IPB's visual editor.

Quote from Nao on September 13th, 2013, 10:39 AM

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I was against the idea for reasons I'd explained multiple times, including earlier in this post. I'm skeptical of the claim that you can do 'pretty much everything skin-less themes could do' because there are an awful lot of things that just aren't covered in that.
Well, for now it's not removed; but I just have one thing to add: in the three years we worked on Wedge, none of us ever tried to make a non-default theme, even just to 'see' if it would work... I made so many changes to the internals, I'm not sure it'd work at all; it might be fixable and everything, but because my focus has been on making sure anyone can make a very minimal pseudo-theme (a skin) with just color changes or whatever with only a text editor and a FTP client (no admin manipulation, no database handling or anything), I'm hoping that once they get the feel of it, they'll want to add more features, which they can do while remaining in the same environment, as opposed to having to go through theme handling, which is more complicated, and more importantly, forces you to update your templates as Wedge or SMF is being updated.
(If the theme system is removed, I'll probably be even more aggressive in splitting important templates into more functions and macros.)

Hmm, I've seen what other platforms do and I'm really not sure I agree with your take on it.

Quote from Nao on September 13th, 2013, 10:39 AM

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See, that's the problem... I don't like face to face meetings. I much, much prefer online communication. I'm rather inept socially in person,
I don't have the feeling that Louis had a problem with that, since he invited you for a long road trip together, one year after meeting you...

Other than the fact that we've known each other 5 years and talk every day via a realtime chat system.

Quote from Nao on September 13th, 2013, 10:39 AM

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because my brain thinks faster than my mouth and I trip up on words so much.
And as a French speaking English like a Spanish cow (French expression :P), you don't think I would trip up on words as much as you do..? :P

You're allowed to trip up on English because it's not your native language. The fact I can't speak my own native language properly should be telling. It'd be like you tripping up on French in regular conversation.

Quote from Nao on September 13th, 2013, 10:39 AM

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That said, I think it might be nice to let this stuff go, and in a while when it's all settled and we're doing what we're doing, to just meet up, shoot the breeze. Not as would-be/wannabe/former partners in crime, but two geeks that are just friends, you know?
Well, it never was about Wedge anyway. It was about putting a real person in front of the online contact whom I've been talking to for all these years. What did SMF call that..? A meeting of the minds...

The problem is I know only too well what happened at MOTM - much coding was done. It would end up being a coding session and I'm not sure that would work for us.

Quote from Nao on September 13th, 2013, 10:39 AM

Anyway, I might be coming back to London within the next few months; nothing set in stone, but my girlfriend discussed the possibility of staying at her brother's over there, as he's expecting a new kid soon.

That might work.

Quote from Nao on September 13th, 2013, 10:39 AM

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Seriously though, there has been a mass defection to Facebook and Google+ over the last few years. All the forum packages are in decline, I've even heard from phpBB and MyBB folks that are seeing a decline in users for this very reason.
It's not about the number of users (you realize we'd have been thrilled to even have 1% of SMF's current user base, don't you..?), it's about filling a void, and making life better for at least one person. A success story, if you will, case by case, one at a time. I may have sold thousands of copies of my game, but what really pushed me to continue working on it at the time was these little stories where people were telling me they were successfully using KMJ as a tool for their physiotherapy. It happened several times, I have no idea why. I even once had an hospital ask me for a group order of copies for their reeducation unit; I told them they didn't have to buy them, of course.
That was a factor for me, more than the salary that came out of it.

It's a funny old world... I discovered that SMF and phpBB are working together of sorts these days in an attempt to try to bolster the forum market, amongst other things.

Yes, it would be nice to enhance the world one person at a time but I stopped feeling like Wedge was going to do that.

Quote from Nao on September 13th, 2013, 10:39 AM

Absolutely... And it's also much easier to set up than a forum, but once your community outgrows the facilities offered by Facebook, it happens from time to time that you'll want to go serious with it. In fact, to me, Facebook didn't replace forums... It simply replaced mailing lists (partly), and free hosted forums that sucked so much. You know, these slow websites that were filled with spam and messages from people asking 'when are you going to use a real forum anyway...?', things like that.

To a point, sure. To a point it has supplanted that. But that means that by and large only established forums are the ones that are using forum software. Very few sites are starting and have any real modicum of success with pure forums. Taking it out of the forum context is the only real way to make it work.

Quote from Nao on September 13th, 2013, 10:39 AM

Absolutely, that's one of the important points. There are some forums where I'm registered, where I wouldn't want to tell people my real name.
Not that you CAN'T hide your identity on FB. One of my best friends has 'Yeo Wren' as his FB account, and that's actually his nickname. He never gave away his real name on FB, even though he's very active on it, and all of his RL friends are linked to his account. It's not that he's hiding his name... He just doesn't like revealing himself to anyone he doesn't know.
That's why I still have in my to-do list this item that says, lemme find it, "per-item privacy in profiles, e.g. real name". That means applying the usual privacy flag (contacts, members...) to individual entries in your profile area. For instance, you could put your real name in it, but only have it available for your conatcts. Or your e-mail address, etc.

The only problem is when FB finally catches up with you, as it seems to be doing to people I know who hide their identity online. G+ has, of course, long been more forthright about this.

Quote from Nao on September 13th, 2013, 10:39 AM

Oh, that... Pete, I've always, always been against board index as the homepage for a forum. You'll remember I did rewrite the homepage early in the Wedge timespan, and even allowed for the ability to push a blog homepage as the main homepage of the forum. That is, to me, it's ALREADY a CMS per-se, although it's not really advertised as such.

And admins aren't going to notice or care. That might as well not be a feature.

Seriously, admins today do NOT do direct DB edits or raw PHP unless they have to, simply because the world has moved on. Most websites today are not run by people who are fit for the title of webmaster.

For example, amusing story this week - amusing if you're a developer, perhaps - the single largest SMF site had a malfunction this week when its operator decided that there was a chunk of code in a file that 'I'm not using any more', until it was removed at which point large amounts of the site fell over because the function was still being called.

That's the sort of people who run websites, people who need to be protected from their own ignorance wherever possible.

Quote from Nao on September 13th, 2013, 10:39 AM

(Possibly because I don't think saying "CMS" is gonna help make Wedge popular. If you'll look at cmsmatrix.org, they have over 1200 CMS systems listed... And they're almost all dead. To most people, CMS = what?! (and to them, WordPress is just a blog platform, only web developers/designers would really think of calling it a CMS); to a minority of them, CMS = WordPress (.net and Web Designer Magazine readerships :lol:); and to some of them, CMS = Drupal/Joomla/ExpressionEngine/SilverStripe/whatever CMS had a relative amount of popularity at one point or another. Doing a great CMS won't really help, as there are so many CMSes around already. What is going to help, though, is getting at least ONE great/popular website to use Wedge, and then popularize it by actually keeping using it. Again: one by one...

No, WordPress is no longer a blog platform in the public perception. It's long been understood that it's a CMS, even if it isn't a very good one at that.

The reality is that you and I disagree on this and in the next few years we'll see who was right.

Quote from Nao on September 13th, 2013, 10:39 AM

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As for people coming back to forums, I've been saying since 2011 that there's going to be a shift back towards forums as people start to reclaim their privacy. While I didn't predict PRISM, since 2011 I was speculating 2014 as the time when forums would reclaim some of the lost ground. While the PRISM stuff has died down a touch now, there is a swing back towards forums. I'm just expecting it more en masse next year.
I didn't even know what PRISM was... I googled it, and was surprised by the amount of detail... So, that's what the Snowden story was about, uh..? Interesting. The media in France, I don't remember them talking about that at all... They only covered Snowden's escape, and I followed that a bit because it reminded of that amusing movie I saw a few months ago, Terminal.

Yeah, it's one hell of a mess.

Quote from Nao on September 13th, 2013, 10:39 AM

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Oh, I've never doubted that the software needs to exist. I'm just challenging the notion that it has to be the primary focus of the software.
Again and again: to me, it's a CMS all right, but CMS meaning "community management system", not "content management system". SMF, to me, like other good forum systems, excel in making users feel that they can set up a real identity on a website, and manage everything from one place. Call it a social network or whatever you like, but to me, it's just what the Web is about... Tim Berners-Lee himself said that the Web had always been about connecting people. Facebook didn't invent it, SMF didn't invent it.

-sigh- And still you miss my point. I give up trying to argue this with you.

Quote from Nao on September 13th, 2013, 10:39 AM

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Messages are what a forum is *made* of. It's not what a forum is *about*. There are other components to a community, where messages don't necessarily make a huge difference. I look at the site I use to discuss development; the shoutbox has nearly 400,000 entries, while the forum has barely 3,000 posts, mostly which just summarise and formalise what the shoutbox had in it at the time.
And that's just great for them. That still makes it a forum... They just don't use the messages table as much as their equivalent thoughts table, I'd say... ;)

It's a forum in name and organisation because it's using a forum platform. I could just as easily switch the forum out and push everything to a wiki and the site would rock along just fine because the real meat is the realtime chat. The forum is just one method of organising more formal write-ups of what was already discussed.

Quote from Nao on September 13th, 2013, 10:39 AM

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The main reason I didn't want to run a release at this stage was simply because of how much stuff I felt was unfinished - not 'waiting for perfect'. The permissions stuff is still a mess.
It will be fixed over time.
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The media area still needs a serious (IMHO) overhaul,
It will be fixed over time.

Very, very best of luck to you with that. I've been through the gauntlet of overhauling permissions and when it came to SimpleDesk 2.0 I just declared I wasn't even going to bother trying to write an importer from 1.0's permissions.

Hell, even SMF 2.0's permissions importer from 1.x makes a bit of a mess of it.

Quote from Nao on September 13th, 2013, 10:39 AM

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and to me that seemed like it needed to be done before 1.0 but I didn't know what to do with it. I just knew I didn't like it.
I understand that you woudn't like it. Heck, I'd be lying if I said I liked it. But the reality isn't that. The reality is, there are dozen of people who would be thrilled to use Wedge right now, and adopt it, even if it's not ready yet.

So release it then.

Quote from Nao on September 13th, 2013, 10:39 AM

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It was a good idea in a lot of ways, but I'm sure it would have failed for the reason above, we would have tried to keep things in step enough to be able to reuse each other's work and we would both have been hamstrung by it in time.
I'm pretty sure I'd have been the 'weaker one' in that relationship, i.e. adopting more of your changes than you'd adopt mine, because I'd really, really strive to keep repos in sync as much as possible, and globally, even though I may have sent 'mixed signals' myself, I'm really happy with most of the changes you made. Even if they destabilize me, overall I know that they're for the better, and they're good for Wedge, for its future popularity. Software reviewers are gonna like the visuals, but they'll be absolutely thrilled by the admin area, I think.

Oh, I guarantee you would not have tried to keep in step. For example right now I'm looking at templating systems, and probably going to go with Twig, because I want admins to be able to edit templates from the admin panel, and minimise the risk of them screwing things up in the process.

That and the autoloading stuff would probably in themselves require too many changes to keep in step. (For example last week I rewrote all the semantics of the scheduled tasks system to make each task its own class, which incidentally solves a problem that Wedge has at present as far as I remember in that a scheduled task added from a plugin never gets to load a language file to indicate its name and description)

Quote from Nao on September 13th, 2013, 10:39 AM

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It would have gone one of two ways, either it would have meant a complete separation much as we're at now, or it would have ended up diverging and converging after a while and a ton of work to bring them back under one roof (which would invariably have lead to a lot of rewrites)
Well, I wouldn't see any of us as doing that merge; maybe by someone else if both of our projects had collapsed, but that may simply have been seen as a 'fork from multiple sources', I don't know...
The idea was simply to find a solution to the issue where we were drifting apart, and to allow you to focus on your other software projects, while giving me free reign to make decisions when you wouldn't be available for advice, that's pretty much it...

Which is where we're at. You're doing what you're doing without needing to wait for my advice (which I consistently have the feeling of it not being listened to anyway), I'm doing what I'm doing and they're two different directions.

The only downside as I see it is that I'm not using the more modern Wedge codebase, and need to redo a bunch of stuff (like the conversion to UTF-8 only) before I can start really going to town on what I want to do.

Quote from Nao on September 13th, 2013, 10:39 AM

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and trying to commit perfection meant I committed nothing while trying to make it perfect. My best just isn't the same level as yours, ultimately.
Have you ever seen how many times I rewrote so many parts of my code...?

Sure I did. The point is that that wasn't the signals you were giving out. You expected every commit of mine to be a higher standard than yours and you rewrote them to suit yourself.

Quote from Nao on September 13th, 2013, 10:39 AM

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Let me show you something. This wasn't public knowledge. Some months ago I made a mod of some of the anti spam stuff in Wedge and released it to sm.org.
Went to see it, and indeed, there it was in all its glory... Because it's available for anyone to download, yes it's public knowledge. Not popular knowledge, but it's there. There's a mod out there at sm.org that publicly accuses me of wrongdoings.

That's one of the things. It's out there, but most people never saw it - including the Customization Team because they would have said something about it.

Quote from Nao on September 13th, 2013, 10:39 AM

I'm above that, but... Well, I prefer when people who have something serious to tell you, do it in front of me, rather than vent on the side.
If you already had a problem with me back in April, then you should have told me, because there's no reason I wouldn't have worked on this on my side, or at least talked you into understanding what I'm doing has never been against you, rather I was just trying to contribute.

-sigh- For the umpteenth time, I tried to raise this stuff before. Some of it going back a year or more. And none of it got taken on board.

Quote from Nao on September 13th, 2013, 10:39 AM

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Interestingly the commit log from 21/4 (r2066) does actually mention that I was AWOL and had been for a day or so at least... This would have been in the middle of the thousands of lines of warning system rewrite that as I tried to tell people was close to giving me a breakdown all on its own.
Anyone would have a breakdown over such a comprehensive rewrite, really...!
Why do you think I never took it upon myself to do a complete overhaul of AeMe... :P

Oh I understood but when I talked about doing an overhaul, you were pretty adamant that you should be the one to do it, and pretty much every time I've raised issues with Aeva's code, you've never been exactly encouraging about me running with it - the only time you ever were was with the admin panel, and to be honest that's not an overhaul, that would have had to be a total rewrite.

Quote from Nao on September 13th, 2013, 10:39 AM

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That comment wasn't actually directed at you, but everyone else who seems to say that I should just man up and accept that this is how it should be.
Well... I know it won't do me any favours as I've been doing my best to stay as neutral as possible in this, and to be understanding of your position and the difficulties you experienced in the last three years; but to be brutally honest Pete, yet, a part of me also screams 'man up!', and considers you a bit of a drama queen.

That's fine, it's a valid opinion. It's also not entirely inaccurate. However the doctor I've been to see kind of disagreed and I've been referred onwards (no date yet >_< Love the NHS for that)

Quote from Nao on September 13th, 2013, 10:39 AM

We got together because we were both branded drama queens by the SMF team after all, and they weren't completely wrong. I've just learnt to be more philosophical about these things in the last year or so. I haven't been in a flame war for something like two years. The trick is losing interest. Looking back, I think it was a drug, coming as much from a sense of disbelief at the injustices around me (for some reason, any injustice around *me* seemed to be even worse), as a simple need for attention. As hard as it is to admit it, I did many things out of a need for attention, because of low self-esteem and a need to prove myself that I was a worthy guy, not by self-confidence, but by looking back and thinking, "okay, I made a few nice things". I'm sure today's youth are the same.

I don't disagree... and one of the comments of the time - about preserving the SMF legacy - is also just as true today as it was back then. The project is on the verge of collapse, to the point where several senior figures were very enthusiastic about the idea of my contributing code. Unfortunately, a certain person publicly called another person a lying two-faced cow, and I realised how much they were running around stabbing each other in the back.

Quote from Nao on September 13th, 2013, 10:39 AM

Being happy with what you did in the past, is better for your karma than some irrational idea of being important. So, yes, everyone was being childish at that point, and I should have seen that. It wouldn't even have stopped me from starting Wedge, actually. Just... In a different state of mind, I guess.

Unfortunately in my world I just see things I could have done better. I rarely spend time thinking about what I've achieved, it's always what I could have done better. I've been that way most of my life.

Quote from Nao on September 13th, 2013, 10:39 AM

I just think, you should embrace our differences. I can accept that you'd leave the project over not being able to accept my quirks, such as these compulsive modifications on your code. But I don't think you should feel betrayed by me, or anything.

If that's what message you've gotten from this debate, then there really is nothing I can do about it.

Compulsive modifications are part of the story. Repeatedly not being listened to is another.

Quote from Nao on September 13th, 2013, 10:39 AM

You should accept that I'm different. I accept that you're different, and I accept that it doesn't work for you, in the end. Just don't turn this into drama.

Seriously the real drama is the drama everyone's making out of this. I shouldn't have come back to try and defend my point of view because that's causing more drama.

The bottom line is that I don't feel I have much of a place here. When I do contribute, it gets modified beyond what's actually needed. That's a problem for me, but it's not insurmountable on its own.

The problem is then tied to the fact that, repeatedly, people don't listen to me. It's actually hard enough for me to put forward my ideas as it is; my ideas are one of the few things I get passionate about enough to overrule my general tendency to avoid conflict. My ideas, essentially, are one of the few things I will talk most about because it's more important to share ideas than to sit back and just wait for the inevitable.

To be overruled on such matters with what seems like a trite reason, that actually hurts.

Example: I don't think certain stats should be recorded. You disagree, citing your dislike of WordPress' lack of stats gathering. As a compromise you suggest that the stats should be admin only, mitigating certain points of my argument. I wasn't happy, but you went off and did it anyway, despite my issues with it. It's as though most of what I had to say just wasn't relevant.

Quote from Nao on September 13th, 2013, 10:39 AM

but you can always come back and keep contributing to it. It's your decision, in the end, whether you contribute or not.

Here's the thing, you made it quite clear that a return on my part would be on your terms, not mine. That's not a situation I'm prepared to compromise on.

Quote from Nao on September 13th, 2013, 10:39 AM

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The last few days have been very interesting. There are people that believe I should go and be lead developer for SMF in the hopes of rescuing it but I don't really see that working for much the same reasons, and I feel bad about working on my own project in light of the comments made here, but I still love the idea of doing different things with the forum and CMS concept. I guess I'll just have to bend over and accept something in the end :(
I see you're also trying to contribute to Elk, at least trying to convince them to adopt some of your Wedge changes. I just have to say-- make up your mind already! :P

They're ideas. I like my ideas. I'm already using them in Pyrapage. I see no reason why I shouldn't share my ideas with anyone who wants to listen, which the Elk guys do seem to want to do. Antechinus is, well, Antechinus, and requires a bit less subtlety.

Quote from Nao on September 13th, 2013, 10:57 AM

Well, as I said... I think Pete teaming up with me is for the best, but it's tiring to go through so many periods during which I don't know what he's planning to do, so I'm sticking to my 'decision' of being the sole 'decision'-taker. (Which, ironically, was my first decision after Pete resigned from taking decisions alongside me... :^^;:)

Since I apparently have to declare my plans to you: I'm not going to contribute to Wedge or SMF. I may share ideas with Elkarte. I am primarily working on C# and Unity and exploring my CMS ideas in my spare time with a project based on SMF 2.1 called Pyrapage.

Quote from Nao on September 13th, 2013, 10:39 AM

But that shouldn't stop him from being passionate about Wedge itself and wanting to contribute more.

After everything that's been said, why does it surprise you that I don't want to contribute any more?

Quote from Nao on September 13th, 2013, 10:39 AM

As for listening to him -- I'm the first to admit I'm not a very good listener. But not because I don't want to listen... It's mostly down to the fact that I get distracted easily. There's listening (= hearing something and processing it), and listening (= determining what's best based on several conflict advices). I'm not very good at the former, but I think I'm fair in saying I'm okay with the latter.

From my perspective, the latter tends to end up being listening to the difference advices and then going with what you were going to do anyway. That is, generally, what it has seemed like.

Quote from Nao on September 13th, 2013, 10:39 AM

Well, it's a forum, so if someone wants to contribute, they can... I've seen so many forums that were ban-trigger-happy with people who shared ideas that weren't shared by the majority... It's usually an early sign of forum decay. I'm sure Pete can deal with this critic by himself. ;)

I believe I did just that.

I won't deny, I've been a little happier in recent days where the only person I'm really answerable to is myself. Where I don't have to argue things, where I can just run with my instinct and not feel like I need to defend every decision I make, and then usually multiple times when people didn't get it the first time.

You said you didn't want drama out of this. That's an easy request to grant. I just need to post the reply and lock the topic and disappear. If I'm not here arguing, I don't generate any drama. The only problem then is the people who don't seem to understand what I've been saying but that's kind of the problem anyway, that people aren't reading what I'm writing...

Nao · « Reply #37, on September 13th, 2013, 10:48 PM »

Quote from Arantor on September 13th, 2013, 06:12 PM

I'm not sure it does only apply to future contributions. SM are not so stupid that they extracted two CLAs from me that would only apply going forward.

Yeah, probably.
http://www.apache.org/licenses/icla.txt
"You accept and agree to the following terms and conditions for Your
present and future Contributions submitted to the Foundation."
Well, 'present' probably implies 'past', since one is unlikely to be contributing something right at the instant of signing the CLA, but...

So... You're welcome to do it, then ;)

Quote from Nao on September 13th, 2013, 10:39 AM

Yes, because making themers have to jump through hoops is so much easier than them just adding a file called ThemeStrings.language.php to their theme/languages folder.

Okay, I could just as well add language files support to the skin folder... It's not very important, really. This is the kind of thing that can be improved as I go.

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And with that attitude you're never going to get out of beta.

Hmm, because we went out of beta in the last three years...? I mean, you're the one who said last month to someone that Wedge wasn't gonna be out any soon, right..? I didn't see why you were being so obtuse about that. I keep saying we should go beta... But, whatever.

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I saw, for example, that among the latest commits were an overhaul of Zoomedia... you're not even in beta and you're already rewriting something that most people have only seen a few times for something that I'd argue really isn't necessary - and given that you've said you're trying for a public release, I'd wonder why you're not spending time on the things that actually matter.

It looks much better now. It's impressive. It's what I do.
I'm not doing any more money than you off this, and thankfully, I still get to choose what I work on...

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At this stage the question to ask: Is it free of known bugs?

Probably not. But I didn't follow these reports. Will fix as I go.

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The front page has the sidebar, as do the blog posts. But the minute you drop back to the forum or the trips pages, or indeed anything not actually in the blog posts, there's no sidebar. Now tell me how you'd do that in a skin.

Yes, by selecting (with my upcoming action/area selector, as discussed yesterday) areas where you don't want the sidebar (e.g. the forum), and giving it an empty sidebar macro. Problem solved.

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So now you've finished the (second? third?) rewrite of Zoomedia, you'll be able to get right on those?

That's up to me to decide.
I think I'll give it a couple of months to recover from my RL blows, and from your leaving as well. Then I'll get serious about feature freeze. Going for late '13 or early '14 is still gonna be earlier than your prediction. Just be patient. In a few months time, you'll either have forgotten about Wedge entirely, or you'll be back to complain that I didn't release.

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You can always tell when my posts are hot-headed and impetuous. But when it's important like this I try to give it a little time before I reply so that I've thought about it. The first draft of this reply was far more angry.

Good to know..?

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Right now, Wedge takes ~10MB of memory to build a page. My stripped down SMF 2.1 currently runs in the 4MB range for page building, and while it doesn't have a template system as powerful as Wedge's, when I've added Twig to it, it'll probably still consume less memory.

Sure, Twig is something cool that doesn't require re-learning something for people who know PHP, and doesn't take away any flexibility, and doesn't require a server installation, i.e. something that can't be done on shared hosting or by people who don't know anything about server management... The very people you're targeting (unlike me). Anyway... It's really, really not worth fighting about. People will be free to try Wedge out. If they find it's slower than your solution, they'll use yours (or another). No problem.
You're a server performance freak, I'm a client performance freak. Told you-- we've always been complementary, haven't we..? I'm all about saving bandwidth, you're all about saving CPU cycles. These two can sometimes be compatible, but not always. Not these days, apparently...

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You and I both did search and replace across a hundred files at a time. What's the difference between that and doing it on a smaller scale?

Because not everyone knows about grepWin or other mass s&r tools, not everyone wants to deal with these..?

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I'd argue in front of anyone who cares to read the commit log that I'm not the one with a problem with quality.

The problem has always been very simple to spell out, actually: I thought of you as an innovator who knows better than anyone else, and was always afraid to commit sub-par stuff that you would criticize for being poorly thought out, because of this or that obscure setting in PHP or MySQL that makes the whole thing 12% slower than if I'd done it this way. And you thought of me as someone who judges your commits, too, and silently requires you not to commit sub-par stuff.
So, basically, we were afraid of each other. Nice.
No wonder we both stuck to our known strengths... :P

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The problem is I know only too well what happened at MOTM - much coding was done. It would end up being a coding session and I'm not sure that would work for us.

Well, I don't do that. I could discuss code, but I wouldn't code with someone else. I like being alone to code. Add bugs, test, find bugs, fix bugs. That's a very private thing. I can discuss these things, but it's awkward to do them in front of someone...

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Quote from Nao on September 13th, 2013, 10:39 AM
Anyway, I might be coming back to London within the next few months; nothing set in stone, but my girlfriend discussed the possibility of staying at her brother's over there, as he's expecting a new kid soon.
That might work.

'kay.

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It's a funny old world... I discovered that SMF and phpBB are working together of sorts these days in an attempt to try to bolster the forum market, amongst other things.

Haven't heard about that.

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Yes, it would be nice to enhance the world one person at a time but I stopped feeling like Wedge was going to do that.

'kay, sure, we'll see.

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To a point, sure. To a point it has supplanted that. But that means that by and large only established forums are the ones that are using forum software. Very few sites are starting and have any real modicum of success with pure forums. Taking it out of the forum context is the only real way to make it work.

Doesn't mean they HAVE to use a CMS in the first place, just means they need to find the right angle first.

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And admins aren't going to notice or care. That might as well not be a feature.

'kay.

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Seriously, admins today do NOT do direct DB edits or raw PHP unless they have to, simply because the world has moved on. Most websites today are not run by people who are fit for the title of webmaster.

You seem to despise them... And yet, they're the people you want to help by adding new easier features.

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For example, amusing story this week - amusing if you're a developer, perhaps - the single largest SMF site had a malfunction this week when its operator decided that there was a chunk of code in a file that 'I'm not using any more', until it was removed at which point large amounts of the site fell over because the function was still being called.

Sounds like someone's gonna make some money in exchange for their help...

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That's the sort of people who run websites, people who need to be protected from their own ignorance wherever possible.

Ignorance is bliss. If you can afford a technician, of course.

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No, WordPress is no longer a blog platform in the public perception. It's long been understood that it's a CMS, even if it isn't a very good one at that.

If you say so.

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The reality is that you and I disagree on this and in the next few years we'll see who was right.

I don't argue in terms of who's right and who's wrong. Understanding is a three-edged sword.
Especially in the case of 'predictions', where, really, which of us is gonna give a damn about forum software and CMS in ten years..? I hope none of us.

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That and the autoloading stuff would probably in themselves require too many changes to keep in step. (For example last week I rewrote all the semantics of the scheduled tasks system to make each task its own class, which incidentally solves a problem that Wedge has at present as far as I remember in that a scheduled task added from a plugin never gets to load a language file to indicate its name and description)

Well, then it's simply a feature that plugin authors won't be able to use, unless live627 (or you) steps up and offers to fix it.

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The only downside as I see it is that I'm not using the more modern Wedge codebase, and need to redo a bunch of stuff (like the conversion to UTF-8 only) before I can start really going to town on what I want to do.

I still don't see why you didn't ask me for permission to fork Wedge. Pride, something like that..? Or simply the fact that because you left me in that shit, you don't see any reason why I should be nice to you? (I'm not sure I do neither, but it's not the point! :P)

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Sure I did. The point is that that wasn't the signals you were giving out. You expected every commit of mine to be a higher standard than yours and you rewrote them to suit yourself.

Never, never, NEVER had any expectations on your commits. The only expectations I had was that you kept working on Wedge until it was out. Really, that was an expectation of mine, and really, that was the only one. The rest was all in your head.

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That's one of the things. It's out there, but most people never saw it - including the Customization Team because they would have said something about it.

Well, anyway, can you remove it or not..?

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Oh I understood but when I talked about doing an overhaul, you were pretty adamant that you should be the one to do it,

A personal failure, yes. Like many others. I prefer not to dwell too much on the past, though.

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I don't disagree... and one of the comments of the time - about preserving the SMF legacy - is also just as true today as it was back then. The project is on the verge of collapse, to the point where several senior figures were very enthusiastic about the idea of my contributing code.

Well, I did talk with Bryan (who recently resigned) about using Wedge as a basis for SMF 3.0, but apparently the idea is a long way from making any sense, especially considering that it comes with a recommendation that SMF can only survive if the dev lead is also the project lead, so... Not realistic enough, I guess.

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Unfortunately, a certain person publicly called another person a lying two-faced cow, and I realised how much they were running around stabbing each other in the back.

Good fun.

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Unfortunately in my world I just see things I could have done better. I rarely spend time thinking about what I've achieved, it's always what I could have done better. I've been that way most of my life.

You should work on that.

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Here's the thing, you made it quite clear that a return on my part would be on your terms, not mine. That's not a situation I'm prepared to compromise on.

My terms are not very demanding; I still have a few people who are ready to help. I don't think I'm being unfair when saying that I'm now going to make all decisions, because that's precisely what I've been about in the project: the more stable developer. Perhaps not the 'best equipped' developer to handle an entire SMF fork by themselves, but still devoted to their task. (e.g. I'm not sure why I'm typing this long reply when I could be downstairs watching the latest 'Whitechapel' with Milady...)

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Since I apparently have to declare my plans to you: I'm not going to contribute to Wedge or SMF. I may share ideas with Elkarte. I am primarily working on C# and Unity and exploring my CMS ideas in my spare time with a project based on SMF 2.1 called Pyrapage.

'kay.
Where does that name come from..?

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From my perspective, the latter tends to end up being listening to the difference advices and then going with what you were going to do anyway.

Good one.

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I won't deny, I've been a little happier in recent days where the only person I'm really answerable to is myself.

Good, at least someone is happy with the outcome, eh..?

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Where I don't have to argue things, where I can just run with my instinct and not feel like I need to defend every decision I make,

I dunno, it looks to me like you're trying to defend your choice of generalizing autoloaders, rewriting scheduled tasks, things like that. I'm not complaining. I'm always interested in you sharing your technical knowledge. And yes, I call that 'contributing to Wedge'. It doesn't always have to be about pure code.

PS: I was hoping to make my reply much shorter... Still, I'm getting closer to a manageable size. I dunno if I can keep it up much longer, though.

forumsearch0r · « Reply #39, on September 13th, 2013, 11:32 PM »

Aw nice, so now (again), at least dev stuff is something I can contribute to:

Quote from Nao on September 13th, 2013, 10:48 PM

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You and I both did search and replace across a hundred files at a time. What's the difference between that and doing it on a smaller scale?
Because not everyone knows about grepWin or other mass s&r tools, not everyone wants to deal with these..?

Graphical S&R tools - even grepWin - are a pain to use IMO as they rarely do more than applying sed commands to a certain subset of files. Wedge could have been finished if you had used the command line instead. (Well, OK, probably not...)

Most text editors have a good (and some have a mediocre) built-in S&R by now. I'm not sure if grepWin counts as an insider tool anymore.

Quote from Nao on September 13th, 2013, 10:48 PM

because of this or that obscure setting in PHP or MySQL that makes the whole thing 12% slower than if I'd done it this way.

The "obscure settings" are documented well; at least you could find them if you want to. :)

Quote from Nao on September 13th, 2013, 10:48 PM

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It's a funny old world... I discovered that SMF and phpBB are working together of sorts these days in an attempt to try to bolster the forum market, amongst other things.
Haven't heard about that.

They don't seem to do it too successfully either. SMF's market share decreases AFAICS.

Quote from Nao on September 13th, 2013, 10:48 PM

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No, WordPress is no longer a blog platform in the public perception. It's long been understood that it's a CMS, even if it isn't a very good one at that.
If you say so.

The public perception is wrong. WordPress brings basic CMS features indeed, but it still focuses on simplifying setting up a blog. The public perception is driven by marketing people who never touched a single line of code, that's why the public perception is a perception of stupidity.

Quote from Nao on September 13th, 2013, 10:48 PM

Well, I did talk with Bryan (who recently resigned) about using Wedge as a basis for SMF 3.0, but apparently the idea is a long way from making any sense, especially considering that it comes with a recommendation that SMF can only survive if the dev lead is also the project lead, so... Not realistic enough, I guess.

I'm not sure if using a fork as the base would work anyway, given that it's mostly unreviewed code (which might not fit SMF's coding standards) and I'm not convinced that SMF heads into a modern direction at all.

jm2c.

live627 · « Reply #40, on September 14th, 2013, 01:32 AM »

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Well, then it's simply a feature that plugin authors won't be able to use, unless live627 (or you) ~~steps up~~is recruited by me and offers to fix it.

FTFY. Seems to me that that is closer to the truth. "Stepping up" implies the ability to ask to be promoted at any time at will, which doesn't work in closed "ivory tower" development projects, such as this.

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Well, I did talk with Bryan (who recently resigned) about using Wedge as a basis for SMF 3.0,

Can I see pigs fly first? :P

Wedge won't become SMF 3 because it's not "just a forum". That, and mod compatibility is totally broken...

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might not fit SMF's coding standards

Oh, it will. Just... not the ideology.

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none of us ever tried to make a non-default theme, even just to 'see' if it would work

Oh... right....

Nao · « Reply #41, on September 14th, 2013, 04:38 PM »

Oh, Pete, I'm not expecting a reply from you, but I was wondering about one thing... Since you're the MySQL guy here. You kept telling me that the approved flag on posts should be left unused because of its bad specificity, the fact that it kills performance to search for flags set to 1, or something, when most are.
What if instead we search for id_msg NOT IN (SELECT id_msg FROM wedge_unapproved_posts), or equivalent? I think there's such a table in the database... Haven't studied it, dunno what it does, but I suppose it holds a list of all unapproved posts, and if it doesn't, I can easily create a new one and fill it as needed. With just that -- a list of items that are unapproved and should be ignored.

I had another question about your repo, but I forgot, ahah...

Quote from forumsearch0r on September 13th, 2013, 11:32 PM

Most text editors have a good (and some have a mediocre) built-in S&R by now. I'm not sure if grepWin counts as an insider tool anymore.

grepWin has a nice UI. I used to use another software, written in Delphi something like 10 years ago, until I discovered grepWin. It didn't do replacements, so I then had to use another software to do these, but OTOH it had a nice feature that grepWin doesn't have, it actually showed hits 'in context' with a click, rather than just a single line in a long list of hits. The only way to do that in grepWin is to actually double-click the entry, and then re-enter the search in Notepad2.

Also, Notepad++ may be popular (and I use it for many files), but I've never liked its search tool, it requires too many clicks anyway.

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They don't seem to do it too successfully either. SMF's market share decreases AFAICS.

To whose profit..?

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The public perception is wrong. WordPress brings basic CMS features indeed, but it still focuses on simplifying setting up a blog. The public perception is driven by marketing people who never touched a single line of code, that's why the public perception is a perception of stupidity.

That's a bit unfair. Go tell that to the web design community. Most of them are very techy, and still consider WP as a proper CMS tool, so... I dunno. I guess it's just a matter of what you think a CMS is, eh..?

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I'm not sure if using a fork as the base would work anyway, given that it's mostly unreviewed code (which might not fit SMF's coding standards) and I'm not convinced that SMF heads into a modern direction at all.

I fit SMF's coding standards better than anyone in their team... I'm the ayatollah of SMF coding guidelines. Well, maybe I don't follow all of their documented guidelines, but I'm so used to the SMF codebase, I tend to stick to its choices, and I actually like them.
As opposed to WP's, for instance... (As we say in French -- beurk !!)

forumsearch0r · « Reply #43, on September 14th, 2013, 05:18 PM »

Quote from Nao on September 14th, 2013, 04:38 PM

Notepad++ may be popular (and I use it for many files), but I've never liked its search tool, it requires too many clicks anyway.

Ctrl+h and the Tab key should work. :whistle:

Quote from Nao on September 14th, 2013, 04:38 PM

Go tell that to the web design community. Most of them are very techy, and still consider WP as a proper CMS tool, so... I dunno. I guess it's just a matter of what you think a CMS is, eh..?

--> Stupidity :ph34r:

Compared to full-featured CMSs like Typo3, WordPress is, uhm, a bad joke? Sure, it works as a "news website" or website for a small project (especially with the bbPress plug-in), but I'm sure that most of those who think of WordPress as a CMS have never actually used a CMS.

Quote from Nao on September 14th, 2013, 04:38 PM

I'm the ayatollah of SMF coding guidelines.

:lol:

Nao · « Reply #44, on September 15th, 2013, 05:33 PM »

Quote from forumsearch0r on September 14th, 2013, 05:18 PM

Ctrl+h and the Tab key should work. :whistle:

This feature doesn't support multi-line replacements though, AFAIK. grepWin does, OTOH.

600 posts left to be at 14k... Phew...

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