I guess I can air what I think?
Yes.
Arantor is a great programmer, though I find him to really hypocritical as a person with the recent events.
He's... Complex. Even in the days of Wedge, I didn't understand him for all he did.
I mean, these days, I'm starting to wonder if his goal with his work on Wedge was the same as mine -- making the best forum software we could think of, something we'd want to use ourselves, something without the dead weight of the many mods and themes in SMF that always need to be catered for, something without the 'mass' of users in mind, targeted to people who're willing to get to work to have the best software around, and who don't care whether the software they use has a large user base, recognition or mod/theme library. It's now looking like his goal was simply to make a prototype of SMF 3.0... Because it's certainly what he's working on, these days. Taking his 'best' of Wedge and putting it into SMF.
Of course, there are implications to this line of work, that make me chuckle. I won't elaborate, though.
Arantor is what he is. He posted tens of thousands of messages on sm.org, which to me always sounded like "okay, I hate the SMF team, but I can't stop myself from posting all day long, so I have to have somewhere to post all my knowledge."
It made it pretty much impossible to follow him on the myriads of forums he was registered on.
So, he would start discussing things that I had no idea what they were about, and I would just let it slide. Things like this post here... Seriously, why did he care about an incompetent developer at the SMF team..? I mean, he WASN'T going to be using SMF any time soon, was he...? Turned out he had so much pride in Wedge, he used SMF to build his latest website. To me, that felt like a public renouncement. It was only confimed when he came back from his trip.
I had to laugh when remembering this thread after hearing the news that he came back to SMF. Though, whatever, anything to make him happy? I have to be honest, I felt like I was walking on eggshells when he was around here.
I think we all did. Including me. I'd already, ahem, 'experienced' the difficulties of trying to be frank with him. I learned my lesson, and progressively stopped sharing my thoughts on what he made in Wedge that I didn't like. I'm somehow glad I know I can remove them now, but I also realize it would take time to revert some of his 'innovations', and I'd rather spend my time finishing up a usable beta.
He was just hard to work with. He had an answer for everything, and he gave them with so much
aplomb that you just couldn't discuss them with him. Where I would post poll asking people where they think I had a good idea here or there, he just didn't bother -- his ideas were for the best, after all. Well, a majority of them were, but when you start fearing that he'll snap if you question one of his future implementations (or, worse, that he'll start arguing over it in novella-sized posts that no one can bother to read, let alone reply to), something's really wrong.
I for one, seriously hope that people will keep telling me what I'm doing wrong. Wrong direction? It's all right, I'd rather know when I just got started on something, rather than at the end when someone dares to speak. Perhaps I'm more understanding of 'newbies', simply because I'm a strong believer in the fact that "you're always someone else's dummy". In whatever field you feel you excel at, there's always going to be someone who knows better than you. I realize that (I even realize that person is often Arantor!), but if I keep thinking, "I'm not the right person for the job", then I'll never do anything. My Mahjongg Solitaire game sucked when I started it, which is why I released it for free, which is why it got popular, which is why I kept working on it, and years later made it into something that still to this day tell me is a masterpiece. I still think it was a piece of crap, but you have to draw a line: yes, someone else could have done a better job at writing Kyodai Mahjongg, but he probably wouldn't have bothered to work on it for 9 years, like I did.
When you have the guts and the will to do it, and to finish it, then you can do it. Doesn't matter if you have to restart from scratch several times. It will take what it takes to do it.
TL:DR. Yes, he's hard to see through, and whenever you start talking with him, you can't help but feel frightened that he'll end up shunning you. Most of the times it would end happily and he'd be cordial and nice, but do one single mistake, or insist a bit too much for his taste, and he'll crush you. And now where he is, I won't be there to possibly help smooth things between him and other people.
Yes, I did offer 100 dollars to the Wedge project instead of throwing it at a forum license for v.bulletin. Wedge fits the structure I want for my websites perfectly (especially with the unique privacy features, something my main forum really works upon),
Yeah, it still needs work, but it's something that'll end up as one of Wedge's finest features.
I mean, some of my ideas aren't implemented yet, but... You'll see! Once I'm done with the contact list system, I'll devote myself to privacy settings, and the bulk of the work is done, so you'll see.
Interestingly, I caught
a topic where a certain Arantor told someone that "SMF will never (stoop so low as to...) implement privacy features, because it's not what a forum is for." Aside from the fact that that particular topic shows his 'style' (half arrogant, half trustable), as well as his 'badge' thing (yes, we know you're proud to be at SMF, even though you said the exact opposite in this very topic), he also mentions the disastrous impact on privacy... Which, as championed recently by Pandos, is not exactly THAT big a deal. So... Yeah, whatever.
and I plan on using it in lieu of WordPress. Yet even after saying all of that, I feel really bad. I feel like I am leeching off of Nao's (and in essence Arantor's) hard work, hard work they pretty much did for free.
Well, we did sign up knowingly, you see... We just didn't expect to have more than six months of work ahead of us, which was manageable. My plans were to simply import my SMF->Noisen.com patch to Wedge (around 900KB of code which I progressively reduced to 400KB through implementations and deletions, before I finally gave up and figured the rest would best be rewritten), and his plans, err... He had more ambition than I did, which is the reason why we postponed every six months, and consequently why I started implementing other things 'because we had time'...
Now that I'm alone on the project (as the decision maker, I mean), I certainly can decide when I'm going to feature-freeze the entire thing. Not right now, but it's getting close. Hopefully, next month I'll have some releasable beta. And if any of Arantor's code is in an "unreleasable state", then we'll just work on it. At worst, I'll simply remove said code.
100 bucks is a drop in the bucket considering how many years was put into wedge. Wedge is priceless and I am hopeless as to how to give back efficiently.
Well, if I ever was going to have people pay for Wedge, it would be for an inexpensive price, less than $50. Probably around $30. I wouldn't expect to sell more than a few hundred copies (at best!!), so it wouldn't even pay for a month's worth of work on my current 'rate', so... I don't know why I should bother. If I could make it work as a sustainable revenue maker, then I certainly could envision working on Wedge for years and years to come. But alas, I'm no marketing guy, and I have no plans to turn Wedge into a marketing machine. As I said before, I'm only targeting people who know a bit of PHP and are willing to do what needs to be done for Wedge to work well on their setup. It'll mean less support questions for me, and happier power users.
PS: oops, I just realized it's an Arantor-length post. Sorry about that! I could probably shorten it by half, but I'm not sure it's worth it.
