Wedge

I don't think you're alone in feeling that way, DR. Personally, I'm becoming increasingly disappointed with the way SMF is going. When politics takes over from development then Users are bound to loose heart. I'm no coder but at SMF it looks like one bodge after another along with some (but not all  :) ) badly written and/or non-updated mods.

But Hey, hang on in here because The Big W is on its way.   :cool:

The way it is now I am just done and need to move my forum on ASAP. Already purchased VB and will start the process of converting next week  :eheh: I have just setup a small closed forum for a friend  18 people using RC4. What a nightmare as some of the mods even being RC4 would load and just not run. Some were so bad that they just would not even load on a clean install. Had to roll back to RC3 version and then upgrade them to RC4 to get them to work. Then some were just so bad I had to just drop them completely  :whistle:

I see I will be converting some of my other smaller forums to Wedge when the time comes and then I will be completely done with SMF  :eheh:

Let's be completely fair for a moment: any environment where there are people who are paid a wage to provide you support should be able - all other things being equal - to provide you better support than a volunteer environment. It's a given, and one that too many on sm.org don't want to accept.

For a long time I've lamented about those who want the power of vB without the price-tag, though not quite for the same reason as you've mentioned.

Most of the mods on sm.org are not written by professional/semi-professional grade programmers, and when you apply changes at code level, it's simply going to become more and more fragile. This isn't me bashing SMF, this is a simple fact of life.

The ecosystem is crumbling because the essential requirements - enough people with the skills, the time, the energy - just aren't there any more. Even though I know for a fact there is now a branch in their SVN for 2.1, with half a dozen commits or so, they're all micro-optimisations rather than anything actually useful.


I will not get on a soapbox and preach and pretend that Wedge will be any better in the long term, because I don't know that. But I *do* know that we're distinctly moving towards a more mature codebase that makes it easier to write portable mods that don't edit the core code, that have no real reason to interfere with each other and so on.

I half expect we'll end up with the same shit attitude as on sm.org of people wanting it done for them, but I KNOW that a large proportion of the requests - namely "can we get this upgraded for x version" will really not be that much of an issue because mods that can cope with being portable just won't have that issue.

Ew. Go with IPB. The forum looks cleaner, the code is cleaner and the support is better.

Even XF looks cleaner than vB. Can't vouch for the support, code quality etc since I've not dived that deeply into any of them.

If I'm following you, when I'm doing that it's a nice thought, and when they're doing it, it's useless :niark:

Well, exchanging == for === in maintenance operations that happen sporadically if ever seems like a waste of time and effort to me. Doing that in heavy duty operations like parse_bbc can make a difference but in the 'empty unimportant logs' operation?

It doesn't help that only stuff in trunk appears in TortoiseSVN so if I want to see what's going on I have to look at it via their SVN viewer with its godawful 'view changes since previous' code.

Fixed it for you. :P

I can't vouch for xF yet as I don't have a license :)