Wedge
Public area => The Pub => Off-topic => Topic started by: DirtRider on October 19th, 2011, 03:39 PM
-
I come here and read the topics and not being a programmer some of them are beyond me. So I actually feel bad that I was invited here in the early stages of this project but have not really been able to add much value to it all :(
-
Welcome to the club :blush:
-
Hindsight is a wonderful thing. Hindsight tells me that programming viewpoints were needed earlier on, but right now for the bulk of things, we're actually finding that we need probably an even split between programming and non-programming viewpoints.
Take the bulk of the discussion of last night and today in the New Revs - Comments threads. That's talking about ACP options, where they are, how illogical and useless they are where they are (as they're not even searchable) and whether they should be moved. Very little of that is programming related, in all honesty.
Tell you a little secret: having people who aren't technically inclined helps us get it right more than you'd think.
-
I come here and read the topics and not being a programmer some of them are beyond me. So I actually feel bad that I was invited here in the early stages of this project but have not really been able to add much value to it all :(
Nah, seriously, I always wanted to have a split representation of coders and users. Plus you have the demo site to play with, haven't you? :P
-
Ooops we have a demo site I missed that now that would give me something to do
-
Oh please... :whistle:
We have a "demo site report" topic where friends post their bug reports... Isn't that enough of a hint? :P
And there are countless topics where I posted how to get the demo site URL... :^^;:
-
Is the demo site up to date?
-
Nope... It's about a week behind or so.
So many changes recently, it'd probably be worth resetting it... (And then spreading the URL around :P)
-
please, its getting lonely in there :lol:
-
It was never meant to be an actual forum. Comments about it should be posted here not there ;)
-
Damn, that explains it then ;)
-
Oh please... :whistle:
We have a "demo site report" topic where friends post their bug reports... Isn't that enough of a hint? :P
And there are countless topics where I posted how to get the demo site URL... :^^;:
-
You gave money to vBulletin?! Meh... Worst forum system ever...
-
I gave money to xenForo reasonably willingly, really can't see me giving money to Internet Brands though; I'd give money to IPB before I did that.
-
I think that if I had to pay for a forum software, I'd go for IPB...
-
I'd go with Wedge and I'd donate the money to someone who really needs it and won't use it to throw lawsuits and capitalize and generally be an ass.
Same goes to all hosts that offer a 'free' copy of vB. Run away from them!
-
You gave money to vBulletin?! Meh... Worst forum system ever...
BTW programmes like yourselves could make some serious money out of doing a few good paid mods for it.
-
BTW programmes like yourselves could make some serious money out of doing a few good paid mods for it.
That said, I want to believe, which is why I'm putting in support in the core for third party plugin repos that can be account locked for just that reason.
I am curious, what would be 'good paid plugins'? WedgeDesk is going to be paid but only because it's sufficiently niche that I can get away with it - it's large and scary enough, and with me as the only dev, I need to have some reason to prioritise it above, say, core Wedge dev.
-
Well taking about a free forum software no I think you will not make much as most people take the free forum software and then want everything free and support by yesterday :whistle: However when I was using SMF I always made a point of either purchasing the paid mod or a least giving a donation to my main mods, I feel it was just the right thing to do
If I look at vBulleting the guys that have done PhotoPost are making a killing as it's the only game in town right now. We purchased it and it is not bad but nothing near what you guys did here. So if you had to get this one working on vBulletin I am sure you would have a winner and make money on it.
Another for VB that I could think about would be a Yellow pages they do have one but the guy has dropped it and it has bugs. Overall the SMF mods were done well considering it was all free
-
Well taking about a free forum software no I think you will not make much as most people take the free forum software and then want everything free and support by yesterday
It doesn't help that while there are three (AFAIK) paid theme sites for SMF, each with a decent amount of reputation that they've legitimately earned, there are three paid mod sites, of which only one could justifiably claim to have good standing, the other two are clearly out for whatever they can get, including buying up other mods and taking over other mods just so they can promote the crap out of their own paid stuff.
I will say, though, I had an interesting discussion with vbgamer once on the subject, in particular reference to the ad management mod after he'd bought it. The mod's free (branding notwithstanding) and because it wasn't using template layers and so on, it did a number of core template edits. Needless to say: support nightmare. So he started offering a paid service to install it, $15 a time.
I don't have a problem with that. The thing is free, and if you aren't using the default theme, you can install it yourself with fairly minimal effort. But if you want someone to do it for you, it's only fair that you should pay them the time to do it.
And yet, he was annoyed - and I agreed with him about it - at the number of people who didn't want to pay the $15 for him to do, but also didn't want to do it themselves.
One other little anecdote. I once talked about doing the vBookie mod for SMF. It's a simple enough project, really, but it would have required template edits to do properly, and would be big even if it was pretty simple. So I talked about the fact that I didn't want to do it for free, and that I thought $25 was a reasonable fee for it plus a year's support, or an extra $15 on top for me doing the installation for you. Cue a surprising amount of nasty feedback - I was genuinely surprised at the volume and ferocity of some of the messages, even though I thought it was quite reasonable.
So, I then said, fine, I'll look at doing it for free, but for 2.0 only to make *my* life easier, and look at maybe charging for support because of the complexity of it. Even that triggered a surprising amount of crap, though not nearly as much as before. People just do not want to pay for stuff, generally speaking, for a free platform.
What it comes down to is investment in the platform. We have a rather irrational take on sunk costs, that we'll often spend over the odds not to have wasted the initial sunk costs, such that when you spend upwards of $200 to get into the platform in the first place, you're prepared to spend a bit more on add-ons for it, even if you could actually achieve everything you wanted with another platform.
-
I agree with what you are saying and this is why if you had to make a few great mods for VB and have the support to go with it you would have people breaking down the door to get them. Once I crossed over from free to paid I knew that just the cost of teh forum software would only be the start of it. Well I must admit up until now I have only really found the one paid mod I had to get and that was photopost. Overall being a paid platform I was expecting a higher quality of mods available and was prepared to pay for them. I was surprised to see this was in fact not the case here.
A lot of the mods are very manual when it comes to installing them as in having to actually edit your templates and insert the code. I am not a big one on these as I am not a programmer so even the simplest edit can become a huge issue for me :lol:
-
I agree with what you are saying and this is why if you had to make a few great mods for VB and have the support to go with it you would have people breaking down the door to get them
Well I must admit up until now I have only really found the one paid mod I had to get and that was photopost. Overall being a paid platform I was expecting a higher quality of mods available and was prepared to pay for them. I was surprised to see this was in fact not the case here.
A lot of the mods are very manual when it comes to installing them as in having to actually edit your templates and insert the code.
-
That would require me buying a vB licence and learning to code for vB, neither of which is going to happen any time soon. There is more chance of my learning to code for xenForo than that - but I have Wedge instead ;)
I want to be surprised by that, but I'm not. Given how poor some of the paid mods for SMF are, it doesn't surprise me to see that people are trying to make a quick buck with some trash on vB.
To a point that's unavoidable. If you're modifying something inside a template with a mod, it's almost certainly going to have to modify the template to make it work. But that's only for very specific changes, for a lot of things the modular approach that Wedge has will remove that need.
-
Yeah I suppose it would take a bit of work to get into coding for VB and you would need the licence and it's not cheap either
Yes well I know all about that as I paid for a mod and later just dropped it and purchased another one as the support was none on the first one
You can usually tell the kind of support you're going to get on premium resources by looking at what they've done with their free ones. If the free ones are poor, paid ones will be - free goodies are promotion, bad free goodies are not promotional at all.Yeah I suppose most mods need to change the templates but most of the VB ones do all of that when you install them. Just some of then don't and I think maybe they are being done by noob coders and they don't know how to make it so it installs everything.
-
I would also only use DzinerStudio and BlocWeb when I was purchasing my stuff and I never had any issue with them so yes it is important to check out where you going to spend your money. Unfortunately when I purchased my first gallery I was a bit of a noob to SMF and did not do my research the way I should have :eheh:
I think just from what you guys have done on SMF in the past anyone that has been around knows that your guys work is solid. Hmmm.... just thinking about when you do release this you may have a rush on support and only being the two of you really it may become a bit of a bind on your guys, I really hope not.
-
*nods* The best demonstration of quality is to let it show itself off, and that's certainly what I did with my mods over time.
As for support, I don't really see that being too much of a problem. At first, the biggest issue is going to be settling down bugs we didn't initially find, but that's what beta testing is all about - and figuring out what's a support issue and what's a bug fix issue. I also predict a fair amount of 'IT'S NOT WHERE IT WAS IN SMF!' but that should be relatively short-term as people grow to understand the mentality in Wedge. All in all, the redesigned ACP should help with that.
Then again, my ability to post 100+ posts a day when I'm in the support zone will probably help... :whistle: (my peak was 530 in one day...)
-
*nods* The best demonstration of quality is to let it show itself off, and that's certainly what I did with my mods over time.
As for support, I don't really see that being too much of a problem. At first, the biggest issue is going to be settling down bugs we didn't initially find, but that's what beta testing is all about - and figuring out what's a support issue and what's a bug fix issue.
I also predict a fair amount of 'IT'S NOT WHERE IT WAS IN SMF!' but that should be relatively short-term as people grow to understand the mentality in Wedge. All in all, the redesigned ACP should help with that.
Then again, my ability to post 100+ posts a day when I'm in the support zone will probably help... :whistle: (my peak was 530 in one day...)
-
I cannot wait for the beta to come out it should be great fun playing with it and seeing the end result.
Funny you are right and I really don't get that type of thinking as it's not SMF and that is the whole point.
-
Except I have the feeling we're going to see it a lot because that's the standard we are going to be judged by initially, and that's understandable - except that if they wanted it to be the same as SMF, why aren't they using it? Answer: BECAUSE I WANT MY FREE SHIT EVEN IF I WON'T USE IT!!!!!! Yeah, you've probably figured by now that I assume the worst in people, particularly in users, until I have any reason to think more positively about them.
~45,000 posts in 2 years is crazy.
-
Sorry I've been a bit quiet recently though I'm usually quiet anyway. I agree with Nao an Arantor on this. Though we have 2 great developers at the help user input and/or use case scenarios are always a great help.