Wedge

Which raises another problem. Precisely the one SMF faces.

If we give private support, that would presume they get better service than the regular users. Which means we actively need to leave regular users without support for a while to give premium users premium support, simple as that. Which means we then lose users because of 'poor' support.

As stated, users have long gotten better support in the public boards than the private ones on sm.org.


Private customisation is a separate topic again. Usually that involves a third party designer or developer, who will use other resources like PMs to negotiate - nothing we need to deal with.

This I agree.
 ...

On the first note, yes some people are ungrateful, if they feel they are a bit left-out, then they should 'upgrade'. Simple!

Oh no... it doesn't work like that. It really doesn't.

These people won't upgrade because they fervently believe they are *entitled* to support. I have had people tell me that I, as a mod author, should be *grateful* to them for using my mod. Yup. Not grateful to me for making it for them, but that I should be glad they chose to use it.

even the largest smf forum seems to have major issues upgrading due to all the mods being used. they even resorted to removing the version in the footer just so people would stop asking them to upgrade every time they ask for support

I thought WC had actually upgraded to a current version these days? The other thing that should be noted is that any version below current has one or more known vulnerabilities.

Upgrading in Wedgeland is simpler because most stuff just doesn't pose the same problem, plugins don't get to modify files. So it's then only user specific changes, but that's ultimately their problem not ours.

i dont believe they have and i dont think at this point it is even possible due to the mods that are installed there... and the owner looking for even more for some reason.

i heard they are getting close to 50 million posts in the next few months.

i know they have worked on some optimizations but i dont think an upgrade due to all the custom code stuff and not wanting any down time.

I call BS. Any competent SMF programmer would be able to manage the upgrade. It's hard work, sure, but it's absolutely doable without screwing up the production environment for long periods. Hell, I did 2.0 RC3 to 2.0.2 on one site... which has SimpleDesk and SimpleDesk Shoutbox and it didn't skip a beat. It is doable - though I realise WC has a unique situation.

But it's time consuming to manually do the diff on everything, that upgrade took me two days to do properly.

then you could try doing it for them :P at one point i had gotten a diff from live627 [was done by him not directly from him i believe], i think the diff ending up being several thousand lines long and i am not sure if that included any files added by mods. [maybe it was 4k lines? i dont recall off hand]

The trick is that you're not trying to diff 2.0 RC3 and WC-current then reapply that diff to 2.0.4, at least that's not how I did it. I did a diff from old version (raw) to new version (raw) and just applied *those* changes. After that it's just about doing things in the right order so as to not create downtime.

Though, frankly, a webmaster who values uptime over security is not someone I want to work for.

50 million posts? Can someone please help me with the link, will like to visit the forum for inspiration.

It is not likely it would interest you.

I just want to see the success.
Thanks.

it is an RPG forum, so it would be unlike most normal forums most people would ever have interest in.

Yup, they have 45 million posts, 930k topics but only 97k members. Lots of very dedicated members.