noisen

Nao => Aeva Media => Topic started by: Nao/Gilles on 7 November 2010 à 14h00

Title: [Fork you, SMF!] The birth of Wedge.
Post by: Nao/Gilles on 7 November 2010 à 14h00
(Co-written with Pete, aka Arantor.)

Juxtaposition

For some time I've been worried about the course SMF is taking. New issues arose between the SMF team and us this week that just cemented how we felt, so we thought we'd actually announce something that's been going on.

We both did our best to maintain a working relationship with the SMF team, and we both feel that we're the ones always expected to compromise, with unpleasant consequences as you've already heard.

Sadness

The SMF team has been actively pushing away some of the most important contributors to SMF, such as us, Runic or the team that went on joining Yourasoft in January, simply because we were more vocal than others about the state of SMF and its team.

Some of us got bored waiting for changes, and simply left SMF to die by itself. Others wanted to see the SMF software live on and be able to tackle the new challenges that await it. Unfortunately, with the SMF team insisting on keeping SMF compatible with 5-year-old servers and software setups, and the "feature-frozen" state that SMF has been for the last 2 years, it was impossible to even try doing something about it.

So, in mid-August, Pete and I started discussing the possibility of branching off from SMF 2.0.

Separation

We figured, we can work together, away from the SMF team, away from the influences of as many wrongs as possible that SMF fell into.

To us, the main problem was with the SMF team, and getting rid of that element in the equation would pave the way forward. The idea was really simple: make a fork on our side, where the project managers are also the only developers, and never let anyone get in the way without being sure that they share our vision of the ideal software. Then, make sure to collaborate with the SMF team to share our bug fixes and feature implementations, so that they can also freely be added to the SMF codebase.

And without boundaries, everyone's a winner; just think of the possibilities!

Divorce

On August 25, we got started on development, and we contacted the team to negotiate a licence to fork SMF. With 2.0 final, it's moving to a BSD licence, forking becomes inevitable anyway, so we figured offering them a way to mostly get rid of us much sooner wouldn't be a bad idea.

It was intended in every way to be a friendly fork; as bugs got fixed, the fixes would go back to SMF (both of us fixed things for RC4, for example)

The request was ultimately denied, both by the NPO and the LLC. It's understandable, knowing as we do the reasons for the no-forking clause in the licence originally, but knowing the eventuality of licence change - work commenced anyway.

Determination

Yes, that's right: we are actively working on a fork of SMF - the licence doesn't prevent us doing that, all it prevents is distributing it and removing the copyright. (And if you think that's not the case, please read the SMF licence again.)

If it did prevent private forks, you'd never be able to have private mods and customised sites. As for us, we're just waiting for 2.0 final and the result licence change to be able to go properly public about it.

Suggestion

Before, I mentioned a new theme and new features - this was our way of saying that we're working on our fork. These are, or will be, in the fork itself, along with plenty more besides.

Lots has been done already - for instance, SMF is filled with compatibility code, changing a feature tends to break something else.

We must have pruned close to 15% of useless code by dropping support for many technologies that are either too old, or irrelevant in the SMF landscape: PostgreSQL, SQLite, PHP 4, MySQL 3.x, non UTF-8 character sets and many others. Things like the help manual were removed, because we strongly believe that if someone needs to read a manual to do something, then something's wrong and we should rethink how we do it.

Preparation

We did originally plan and agree to keep this quiet, and we're not revealing where the discussion is taking place for the fork, for its features and development, but it isn't here (but on a dedicated, private site.)

It is finally time to reveal because the team has shown hostility to both of us, and even more so in the last few days, and we feel it is totally out of line. You already know about Pete's issues with vbgamer45, and the SMF steering committee taking a stand to protect him, even though he's broken pretty much all of the SMF team rules -- several times.

Hell, he's been accused of trying to kill SMF. He might as well actually try living up to that claim, but for the right reasons.

Vilification

I, on my side, had requested for the ?action=credits link to be visible in SMF, as it is currently not even linked at all in SMF. In order to make a point, I moved the SMF credits at noisen.com from the footer to the credits page, and proceeded to link to the credits page from the footer. This was denounced by the SMF team as a licence violation, and as retaliation I was stripped of my credits, SMF Friend status, beta tester membership and access to the bug tracker and SVN... before anyone said anything to me.

Retaliation

Now, considering that such a behaviour would be perfectly accepted in a few weeks (because of the upcoming license change), and that the copyright was still there (albeit on a different page, but still just as accessible from the footer), and finally considering my role in helping SMF's popularity in the last few years with Aeva, I could hardly be put on the same line as a random user installing SMF and removing the copyright to replace it with their own.

What would have happened to Jeff Lewis, one of SMF's original creators, had he installed SMF on his website and removed the copyright? Would he have been banned for that? Oh wait... He'd been banned from the SMF website once before for less than that: questioning the team leadership, along with multiple others (see events in January 2010.)

Setting this aside, I didn't mind (much) about the retaliation. I was much more annoyed by the fact that (1) nothing was done to ensure that the credits link would be indeed made active in a vanilla SMF install, (2) the SMF team actually chose to get rid of one of their most active community members ever (without even a warning), instead of discussing the issue with him and listening to his requests (i.e. to make the copyright more meaningful.)

Not only that, but the SMF project manager, who is aware of our fork and accepted its very idea (without which we might not have started it, because we really wanted to be friendly to SMF), insisted personally on removing beta and SVN access.

What that means is, we can't see some of the new bugs or suggest fixes, nor report anything on the bug tracker, be it bug fixes or feature improvements. The SMF team has, effectively, shunned us from any potential influence over the future of SMF.

In short: SMF has turned our friendly fork into a hostile one, just like that.

Protection

Because of that, our fork will not, initially, receive the same BSD licence that SMF will have at that point; the original SMF code will still be BSD licensed, but the package overall will have a custom licence, because we do not want the team making off with some of the code. If they don't want to share their work, we won't share ours, as simple as that.

It won't be ready for public launch until after 2.0 is out, because there is so much we want to do with it that we haven't done yet, but it'll be out probably before 2.1 is ready, and with more features to boot (lots, lots more features, including ones the team would never consider putting in the core.)

We originally wanted to release a first version by the time 2.0 Gold is out, but the more we worked on the software, the more we realized we could do to improve on it. So, we simply decided not to give ourselves a time limit. Those of you who are used to using SMF RC's won't be far away from home. Even better, since most complex mods will have to be partly (or completely) rewritten for the fork, we will encourage development techniques that ensure they don't touch the main codebase, which in turn will allow anyone to update betas without losing anything.

Vision

Remember this is Nao + Arantor, or Arantor + Nao (whichever sounds better :P) at the helm - between us we have literally thousands of hours, and tens of thousands of lines of SMF related code under each of our belts.

Our fork, while it has only been worked on for a bit over 10 weeks, already has some impressive statistics. 240 commits (some of which add large new features), thousands of new lines of code, huge changes in both the frontend and backend, all within a global patch that would total over 2 megabytes if applied to SMF.

Anticipation

We're both committing ourselves fulltime to our project, and not expecting anything in return, if only for people's respect for what we're trying to achieve. That the SMF team themselves is no longer willing to respect us, only reaffirms the feeling that we took the right decision in forking.

When the time comes to release our first version, you will be able to install it next to your SMF forum, and compare the two different philosophies. Switching to it will be your own choice. It's been a long time since you've had a choice to make, rather than have a choice imposed upon you, hasn't it? Let's hope it will be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.



Minification (for those who want the tl:dr version)

We feel screwed by SMF, we got tired of taking it, so we're branching off from 2.0 now in a private repository and will go public once the licence to SMF changes.

Common sense - What does this mean for Aeva Media users?

Obviously, you all noticed that I slowed down work on AeMe in the last couple of months. This has probably been the hardest thing to do for me -- push the project aside to work on the fork. I'm still working on AeMe and playing with the layout and new features, as you may have noticed. The auto-embedding component of Aeva will be a core feature in our fork. I'm also considering integrating the gallery as well, although we haven't made a clear decision yet.
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Arantor on 7 November 2010 à 14h29
(It's better than my title. Wish I'd thought of it now.)
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Nao/Gilles on 7 November 2010 à 14h33
It's still time to rename your threads.
Actually I thought of it only yesterday. Then I Googled "fork you" and found that it'd been used in blogs as recently as those covering the LibreOffice fork. So much for originality, not that it's surprising. But still, I wanted to use it, because it relays conveys my feelings for a team that has consistently tried to find every little chance to screw us.
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: hartiberlin on 8 November 2010 à 2h24
Hi Nao + Arantor,
sounds great.
Will you still remove any bugs for the SMF RC4 version, which is out now ?

Then when your fork is ready, we could just use this, if other Mods
are compatible with it or does your Fork needs Mods to be rewritten for it ?

Many thanks for your hard work.

Regards, Stefan.
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: dannbass on 8 November 2010 à 2h36
I'll take the liberty to reply here to the second question by quoting Arantor:
Quote from Arantor
We have intentionally decided to break compatibility with mods and themes, because mods will be required to be rewritten (and with how SMF is structured, it's kind of hard to do anything really interesting without breaking compatibility)

Themes too will need some substantial work to be made to work, not least because of the structural changes that have been, and will be, made.
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: PantsManUK on 8 November 2010 à 10h22
Well, that's a bugger... I was kinda looking forward to upgrading to RC4 (and subsequently Gold) but you've thrown that particular baby out the window A+N (alphabetical ordering...  :gnehe: )

Excellent idea, I suppose it was inevitable, but the timing is ahead of my expectation. Look forward to a public release (and yes, I will side-by-side it and almost certainly choose your open solution over their close-minded solution, even if it will mean pain finding a new theme and mods...)
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Arantor on 8 November 2010 à 11h25
Sure we'll remove bugs from RC4, we just won't be giving the fixes back to SMF. Some of the bugs will disappear because the underlying system will be replaced; the current WYSIWYG editor will almost certainly just be replaced with something that isn't buggy.
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Nao/Gilles on 8 November 2010 à 17h53
Well, that's a bugger... I was kinda looking forward to upgrading to RC4 (and subsequently Gold) but you've thrown that particular baby out the window A+N (alphabetical ordering...  :gnehe: )
Oh, you can perfectly install them. As we said, we won't have an "upgrader", only a "converter". (Which we have yet to write -- the first release may not have a converter at all, in which case we'll write it during the alpha phase.)
Quote
Excellent idea, I suppose it was inevitable,
It certainly was avoidable in the first place... But I'm not the SMF team. It's their choice, really.
Quote
but the timing is ahead of my expectation. Look forward to a public release (and yes, I will side-by-side it and almost certainly choose your open solution over their close-minded solution, even if it will mean pain finding a new theme and mods...)
Technically, by the time SMF2 Gold is out, they'll be the open source solution and we'll be the closed source one.
However, we're not *planning* to stay closed source forever. Only during the time we need to protect our software from external issues.
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Arantor on 8 November 2010 à 19h39
You can be close-minded with open source, just as you can be open minded with closed source, and really whatever we come up with won't be truly closed source, just not entirely 'open' by the FSF methodology.
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Nao/Gilles on 8 November 2010 à 19h46
Yes, SMF was probably open minded when it started. It was closed source, but for good reasons -- it needed to build a reputation, first of all. After the original developers left, I think the closed source concept went a bit into the wrong direction. To the extent that in the end, no one understood why they were closed source in the first place. (And Joomla doesn't have anything to do with the switch to BSD.)

BTW, I guess our fork won't be forkable with Joomla. Unless a LGPL bridge is written or something... (I still don't understand why it's a problem.)
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Arantor on 8 November 2010 à 20h21
It was open minded - YaBB was forked into YaBBSE under the GPL, then you had a couple of very aggressive forks (like copying it, search/replace in the files and republishing). So with SMF they decided they'd not allow forks because they didn't want a repeat.

The whole GPL thing is pretty complex but I'll try and explain. Joomla is pretty militant about their interpretation of the GPL - you can be GPL and easy-going (granting licence exceptions in the name of good will) and you can be GPL and militant (like Joomla, WordPress and others)

The problem arises when you get into the realms of bridges. Specifically, when you have some code that runs in the same memory space and execution as a GPL app (like you include the file and run it), that's considered a derivative work and the resultant production should/must be GPL licensed.

Where you have a bridge that runs code inside both Joomla and SMF, the bridge must be GPL to be compatible with Joomla (since they're militant and don't even like LGPL stuff) if you want to distribute it. And since another part of the code would have to run in SMF too, you have to find a way of running it inside SMF without forcing it to be GPL code since the rule about redistribution is violated by SMF's licence.

Let me clarify something just here - it's not about doing it. It's about distributing it for others - I can sit and bridge the two, that's cool. But I can't redistribute the code because the resultant work isn't a GPL licensed work.

In theory, though no-one's ever done this as far as I know, you could dual-licence the work under a GPL/BSD licence and get round it that way, but Joomla in particular is pretty hard line about it.

There is the route that JFusion takes, which doesn't use any Joomla code, simply the database itself - this is defined under the terms of the GPL as a 'common interface' which means it does not have to comply with the terms in the same way since it's not code being run in the same memory space.


Licensing is a royal pain the arse.
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Yahmez on 9 November 2010 à 3h26
* Yahmez watches intently

FORK YEAH!  :gnehe:
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Nao/Gilles on 9 November 2010 à 9h45
Where you have a bridge that runs code inside both Joomla and SMF, the bridge must be GPL to be compatible with Joomla (since they're militant and don't even like LGPL stuff) if you want to distribute it.
Well, that's a problem... Whether they're militants or not, LGPL *is* GPL-compatible and they can't do anything about it.
Quote
In theory, though no-one's ever done this as far as I know, you could dual-licence the work under a GPL/BSD licence and get round it that way, but Joomla in particular is pretty hard line about it.
Ah yes, dual licensing... I never really caught the concept but I saw it done multiple times, such as for TinyMCE etc...
If Wordpress has no problem using TinyMCE, which can be tied to non-GPL code, then dual licensing could be the thing to do.
Quote
There is the route that JFusion takes, which doesn't use any Joomla code, simply the database itself
Does a bridge need anything else than the database structure anyway...?
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Arantor on 9 November 2010 à 10h05
Quote
Well, that's a problem... Whether they're militants or not, LGPL *is* GPL-compatible and they can't do anything about it.
True enough.
Quote
Ah yes, dual licensing... I never really caught the concept but I saw it done multiple times, such as for TinyMCE etc...
Best avoided, if possible. It makes everything so much more complex, for example if you realise that every mod ever produced for SMF that specifies its own terms is inherently dual licensed (at least that's how the team sees it, because of the wording of the SMF licence, you have to implicitly sub-licence of sorts)
Quote
Does a bridge need anything else than the database structure anyway...?
It depends, often not, but let's say you were running some CMS, plus SMF and AeMe - for the sake of argument, and you wanted to put a page in the CMS containing recent posts and recent media items. The obvious approach is the SSI stuff - except oops, you can't because that pulls in the other licensed code which is where it becomes a mess.

When it's just two base entities on their own (e.g. basic Joomla and basic SMF), bridging need not require anything other than what's in Settings.php (for things like the cookie name) but anything beyond that is where it gets messy - especially if you do something like private topics that would normally be exposed by the database without proper querying, which the bridge author wouldn't deal with normally unless it were the way things were set up.

Too often I've pointed out issues where people fudge access to topics or boards with just checking if admin or checking the groups, in an attempt to hide things from users, right up until I point out recent topics, SSI, RSS... there's a lot of different ways data can be obtained. (It also makes me think a more centralised access route may be required)
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: DirtRider on 9 November 2010 à 11h53
Boy I am asleep again only noticed this now  :sifflote: Is there any mention of this fork on the SMF site at all?
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Arantor on 9 November 2010 à 13h34
Not that I'm aware of, and if it were mentioned, I doubt the thread would be allowed to remain there that long.
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: DirtRider on 9 November 2010 à 13h43
Yeah I did have a scan around and did not see anything this is why I was wondering about it  :sifflote: :mdr:
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: hartiberlin on 9 November 2010 à 21h56
What about a Wordpress integration ?

Well, if you could make it work, so that it will work with the same user database as Wordpress
uses it, then it would be perfect...!

So one could use Wordpress theme templates and use Wordpress as the Portal for it and use your
fork as the forum of it !

That would be a great solution, as I just love Wordpress and the easy setup and plugin
structure !

Or just build it as a plugin for Wordpress !

I am now also building many sites with Wordpress and just love it...

Regards, Stefan.
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Arantor on 10 November 2010 à 2h07
There are absolutely no plans to do a WP integration.

If we thought WP was the ideal basis, we'd have started from a fork of that, but 1) it's GPL and GPL is an evil licence, and 2) it's code is abysmal. I'd rather start from nothing than that.

Seriously, the plan is to make the fork more powerful, have some portal features, maybe some blog type features in there, not sure yet on that one, but hell no to WP.

Someone else wants to do the legwork in bridging, more power to them, but I personally will not lift a finger towards it.
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: MAVE on 10 November 2010 à 18h44
I am curious, wish you strength and success  :cool:
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Nao/Gilles on 10 November 2010 à 21h47
If we thought WP was the ideal basis, we'd have started from a fork of that, but 1) it's GPL and GPL is an evil licence, and 2) it's code is abysmal. I'd rather start from nothing than that.
+1 on both.
Quote
Seriously, the plan is to make the fork more powerful, have some portal features, maybe some blog type features in there, not sure yet on that one, but hell no to WP.
I'm definitely adding as many blogging features from Noisen as I can...
Of course, I'm already having enough trouble adding built-in PrettyURLs support as is. Eheh. (Problem isn't the base code, but the subdomain stuff. It's really hard to rewrite it in a way that works everywhere. I'm already glad I managed to get rid of all of the .htaccess crap!)
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: hartiberlin on 10 November 2010 à 23h51
I see,
I did not know about the license problems and the code base in Wordpress,
but I just love the easy setups and the hundreds of useful plugins that update themself easily
with Wordpress..

It is all just so much easier with Wordpress and I heard that there are
now also some good forum plugins out, but did not look yet into them....


Anyway, if your SMF fork will be better and will have more features than SMF 2.0 Gold,
it will be very much appreciated...

I am currently using SMF/PortaMX and it should
be possible to move to your fork then easily, otherwise, if it is too complicated and
the few Mods I use will not work on your fork, I would rather stay on the normal
SMF/PortaMX.

At least a SEO (SimpleSEF), Admod, sitemap mod and download plugin and portal function
should be availabe and of course a great gallery feature.

Also cool would be, if there would be any template editor supporting it as
Artisteer or something simular, so it would be a breeze to design its own template.

If you can do this, surely many SMF users would change to your fork.

It just must be easy to move to your system without loosing too many plugins and
getting better integrated features, that don´t need plugins that might be incompatible with
templates, etc...
maybe you can get a few MOD writers onto your boards, so if your fork comes
out, then also some of these MODs will be available for your fork.

Looking forward to your releases.
Regards, Stefan.
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Arantor on 11 November 2010 à 0h43
Quote
Anyway, if your SMF fork will be better and will have more features than SMF 2.0 Gold,
it will be very much appreciated...
10k lines less crap in the base, plenty more features.
Quote
I am currently using SMF/PortaMX and it should
be possible to move to your fork then easily, otherwise, if it is too complicated and
the few Mods I use will not work on your fork, I would rather stay on the normal
SMF/PortaMX.
Moving the base should be easy. Not so sure about PortaMX since we haven't decided how far a portal in the core will go yet.
Quote
At least a SEO (SimpleSEF)
NO. There will be no support for SimpleSEF at all from us. Besides, there's pretty URLs support in the core which is similar. Oh, and it does NOTHING for SEO. I wish people would stop labouring this myth.
Quote
Admod,
We might build this in, not sure, we might roll it into the portal since really it's very similar functionality to just a specific type of block.
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sitemap mod
Not in the core, I suspect. Does little for SEO in a forum. However, there is a benefit to putting it in the core, that mods which come along might be encouraged to add their stuff in there too.
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download plugin
Use AeMe's facilities for that. No support is planned for vbgamer's mod and I seriously do not see him making the (large) number of changes to it. Besides, I have no intention of helping him do anything for the fork.
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Also cool would be, if there would be any template editor supporting it as
Artisteer or something simular, so it would be a breeze to design its own template.
Don't want much, do you? Note that, again, we're not building this for you. We're building it for US, and just being nice enough to share.
Quote
It just must be easy to move to your system without loosing too many plugins
I can guarantee almost no SMF mod will work. Just what I'm working on right now will break any mod that adds a new action for example. The whole point is to stop trying to continue with the methodology of SMF itself, because that road lies madness. No more file editing as far as possible, minimal amounts of theme edits to get things working etc.

Ditto for themes.

Oh, and when you realise that you have the second most prolific mod writer (second only to Karl Benson in terms of numbers) and the author of the long-time most popular SMF mod, both of whom have single handedly written tens of thousands of lines of SMF mods, rest assured that there will be good documentation for modders to get their heads round the differences.

I'm fully expecting to write a decent number of mods myself for it, btw.
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: hartiberlin on 11 November 2010 à 1h52
Okay, the most needed features would then be

1. an included Portal,
where you can have Javascript or PHP blocks everywhere, even
between the postings, not just at the borders,
so I could use this for ads and side-menus or single
extra pages.

2. Pretty-URLs, Meta-Tags and a sitemap.xml for SEO and better Google webmastertools indexing.

3. definable keywords, that will produce links on the fly in the forum pages to internal
pages with these keywords or to external pages with affiliate links
( to generate good internal linking ( helps Google index massively !) or to earn money
with affiliate offers..)

4. a Basic template, where I can graphically change the colors for all boxes and areas
inside the admin panel
without hacking CSS codes.
It should also allow to graphically change the border sizes
without needing to hack the CSS codes.
Must only be a basic implementation, so that I can just change areas and background colors
in color by point and click.
Also nice would be a changeable header title with different fonts options, so you can easily name
your forum/portal and have it displayed at the top without needing to make a GIF banner or something like this...


If you can do all this with your fork, I would immediately switch to it.

Many thanks.

Regards, Stefan.
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Arantor on 11 November 2010 à 2h02
What you are calling 'most needed features' are pretty much all at the very bottom of my todo list. Can't speak for Nao though.

A portal, yes, probably.

Pretty URLs is already implemented. Meta tags, yes I'll do those but not because I want to. I'm implementing those to basically defuse the "it's not good for SEO" horde BEFORE it starts. Meta tags do surprisingly little for SEO, doubly so for a forum.

If Google doesn't index your forum it's because of mods you have. It indexes mine just fine... probably because I'm not trying to shove SEO crap down its throat.

3. There's plenty of internal linking in SMF already and inherited in the fork. Again if you have issues with it it's probably either because the server is slow or it's broken by one or other of the things you've done for SEO.

4. Basic template yes. Basic template editor... it ain't on my todo list, because it actually creates far far more problems than it solves, because it invariably gets too powerful for basic users and too simple for advanced users leaving only a very tiny percentage of people it actually benefits.


Let me say this again, and remember, this is important.

We aren't doing it for you. I personally do not give two hoots if anyone uses it or not. I at least am doing it for me, for my use and making sure that I build it to cope with whatever others want to throw at it. So you can jump up and down and say you'll make the switch if we add a bunch of features that I at least am not overly interested in and as stated are implementing mostly to prevent people whining at us (less people whining about things that don't need fixing = less support hassles = more time we can actually code), but that sounds like an ultimatum to me, and I don't do so good with those.

Here's the deal: we're going to add features, that we want to use, that hopefully others will want to use too, and we release it. You install it side by side, try it out and if you like it enough, you keep it. Otherwise you ditch it and stick with your existing stuff.

That works great with me because you get the freedom to try without any obligation on your part, we get to release it without any obligation on our part, everyone's a winner. Except the people who tell us what we should or should not do, who will likely end up very unsatisfied because we're not building their dream platform, but building OUR dream platform that isn't quite up to their perfect standards.

We're not holding a gun to your head, we're not demanding you use it, nor are we begging for you to use it. When it's ready, it gets out there, and it's YOUR choice whether you try it, not ours, and throwing me a line of 'if you add x, I'll make the jump' doesn't inspire me at all. It actually makes me less interested because I have no time to cater to people who want it exactly their way.
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: hartiberlin on 11 November 2010 à 8h13
Thanks for your answer.
Well I am not demanding anything,
I only wanted to let you know, what would be cool to have.

Yes, I will try it, when it comes out and will see, if I could use it.

Many thanks again.

Regards, Stefan.
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: DirtRider on 11 November 2010 à 11h13
You install it side by side,
How will this work, not sure what you mean here
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Arantor on 11 November 2010 à 12h05
Stefan, while I appreciate you are not making demands, it certainly reads that way - "I'll use your software if you implement x, y and z" and as stated these are things we are not that enthusiastic about implementing.

DirtRider, the process of moving to the fork is much the same as any other conversion - you can delete the original files, upload the new files and then import the data, or you can do it in a trial fashion, installing it in another directory, running the importer to handle all the data and so on and doing that way - and if you like it, you can then get rid of the original one, rename the folder and move it that way.

There's all kinds of ways it can be done :)
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Nao/Gilles on 11 November 2010 à 12h08
Oh, it's just that the default talbe prefix isn't "smf", so you install the software in the same database... And then uh... You put the files into a different folder is all...
When our converter is ready, you'll be able to import SMF data into the fork. Everything will be converted except for mods we didn't build into the software, obviously. Then you can run both forums side to side to determine which you like best.
Should be easy enough. For users, not for us :lol:

@Arantor> What you mean to say, I think, is that right now, we're really not planning to add anything that we did not think of by ourselves. When we have a demo ready and we're about to release, then maybe we'll start taking suggestions.

@All> The problem isn't that we're not listening to you guys. It's that we already have trouble keeping up with just listening to ourselves! :^^;:
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Arantor on 11 November 2010 à 12h21
Nao, sure that's true to a point: mostly what we're adding right now is stuff we've thought of and wanted to do, some tweaks of that have come from friends of ours, though.

Certainly for 1.0 we're building it exactly how we want it to be, rather than because anyone is telling us it *must* have something. The only things it *must* have are things like boards, topics, posts, members, because without that you don't have a forum. Everything else is a bonus, and some people want more like a CMS than a forum, and to be honest, that's not the direction I see us going down. It gets away from the forum/blog/social direction we're going in.
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: DirtRider on 11 November 2010 à 13h09
Thanks guys sounds good to me  :cool:
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: sharks on 11 November 2010 à 16h39
OH! I am grateful for coming across this post. It is really so disappointing to have one's suspicions confirmed like that. And by none other than two of the most prominent SMF devs. Everywhere on the SMF site, mods are left out to die, not being updated or simply dropped to whoever would care to pick them up to continue their development. This is insanity, especially considering that SMF should be at its peak now that they "appear" to be finally closing in on the stable 2.0 release. I have been in the balance for a few years to be honest. I have tested phpBB3 as well as other free and paid alternatives several times, as it seriously felt that SMF was not supported anymore. So few people working on it, and when i compare with phpBB community, it's a world of difference. Still, i am more comfortable with SMF and the mods installation is much easier, so i stuck to SMF all this time. But i know several of my friends who dumped SMF as the competition was always updating and releasing very aggressively, relative to the frozen SMF development.

I have to agree 100% on your commitment and dedication. You have done so much in a few months (over 2MB of new code!) compared to the SMF team, which has stagnated for so many years on the 2.0 Gold release. I think you did good by branching out or your will and skills would have been stifled even longer and killed. This will be hugely beneficial to the entire SMF community and will prevent SMF from losing more faithful users by the day. On the contrary, your efforts will attract more attention to SMF being "back in the game".

Once SMF 2.0 Gold is released, you could just make a special patch, that would incorporate all your efforts into a single bundle. We could just use it via the package manager and also maybe add your own Package servers to the existing list, so that we can easily browse and use your updates. SMF 3.0 is probably not going to be released in my life-time (unless the SMF team is rebuilt with the right people) and i'm just a little younger than Arantor, so that's a really long time of expected idleness and unproductivity from a lost SMF team.

Nao/Gilles and Arantor, you guys have my full support; my server, bandwidth and space. I am one of the best beta testers (so i have been told) and have personally bought a few paid mods, most of which i have beta-tested and improved via feedback to the developers. So, if you could use my help, please do not hesitate to PM me and i will do my best to improve the SMF fork.

My faithfulness lies with SMF and if the SMF team is not going to do anything about SMF but instead just sit on their thrones and gaze around lazily and steal from others, then you guys should be applauded for keeping SMF alive via your forked venture!
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: DirtRider on 11 November 2010 à 19h28
sharks well said  :cool:
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Arantor on 11 November 2010 à 19h49
Well said indeed - there's just one thing I want to pick up on.
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Once SMF 2.0 Gold is released, you could just make a special patch, that would incorporate all your efforts into a single bundle. We could just use it via the package manager and also maybe add your own Package servers to the existing list, so that we can easily browse and use your updates.
Well, it would have to be a totally unmodded 2.0 gold with no custom themes in order for it to work and it would be modifying every single file in SMF and adding numerous more. We're not a small change on top of SMF, we're a colossal change, with so many changes it's unreal.

Without wishing to point fingers, I have to say I'm honestly curious to see what SMF 2.1 or 3.0 will look like since they are firmly campaigning to be a forum and not anything else, which does make me wonder what new things there are to add, because virtually everything they could look at is really a social feature rather than a discussion one.
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Nao/Gilles on 11 November 2010 à 22h39
I'm with Pete! Thanks sharks!
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: hartiberlin on 11 November 2010 à 22h53
Hi,
sorry, if my messages came across a little bit harsh, cause my first language is not english,
but German.
So I sometimes have problems with formulating it correctly in English language.

Well, how will your fork compare to
the Simple-Press.com
Forum for wordpress ?

As I am working in this moment often with Wordpress for other sites,
I came across this simple-press.com forum and wonder how it will
compare to the smf fork.
As under wordpress there is a really nice gallery script nextgen gallery
and also many very good plugins for affiliate programs like
autoblogging, amazon, ebay stores, etc...
I wonder, if I should not move completely to this platform.

Well, we will see, what will be the best system to use in the future.

I will hope Nao will still make paid versions of Aeva available for the standard SMF
version, so we still could get bug fixed, if somebody wants to use now
SMF 2.0RC4.

Also it would be great, if one could choose the layout in the AEVA admin panel,
where to have the comments or image details info box, etc...
I would be willing to pay for this, as I need it now and will
need to get this project finished now.
Many thanks.

Regards, Stefan.
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Nao/Gilles on 11 November 2010 à 23h18
Well, how will your fork compare to
the Simple-Press.com
Forum for wordpress ?
Well, how do you think Simple:Press compares to SMF?
To me, SMF is way better than Simple:Press in every area... (Even bbPress is BY FAR better than Simple:Press...)
I don't really see how we could 'compare' SP with our fork then. Our fork will just be better.
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As under wordpress there is a really nice gallery script nextgen gallery
I've never looked into it. (Never looked into any gallery system after I started work on SMG, actually. So I only know of Coppermine and Gallery2. Which both sucked.)
In what way is it any good?
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I wonder, if I should not move completely to this platform.
It's up to you.
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Well, we will see, what will be the best system to use in the future.
WP has had the momentum for a few years now. It won many prizes. Not because of its robustness, but because it has become the de fact blogging platform and many developers are thus working on improving it.
Now, WP is just that -- a blogging platform. I don't really see much of a point in building a CMS out of it. I dunno.
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I will hope Nao will still make paid versions of Aeva available for the standard SMF
version, so we still could get bug fixed, if somebody wants to use now
SMF 2.0RC4.
Well, if a bug is found... I'll fix it and update my AeMe SVN. And when there's enough crap to release, I'll release.
What I know, though, is that any media code I'll add in the fork, won't be ported back to AeMe. Too complicated.
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Also it would be great, if one could choose the layout in the AEVA admin panel,
where to have the comments or image details info box, etc...
I think I'll try doing something like that.
Dunno if it could be overridden for specific albums, too.
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I would be willing to pay for this, as I need it now and will
need to get this project finished now.
Paying for what?
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Arantor on 11 November 2010 à 23h22
Paying, I think for changing Aeva's configuration options, though not really explaining what he wants.

Trouble is, people like me and Nao don't do things for the money so much, but for the simple joy of making things, which means we're great at building, not so great about building things for individuals ;)
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Nao/Gilles on 11 November 2010 à 23h30
Pretty much it, yeah.
Actually, I can do that, but I just can't be made happy. If I'm getting paid for something, I'm a sellout. If I'm doing things for free, I'm a fool. So I just chose not to do anything for anyone unless I'm enjoying it myself.
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: hartiberlin on 11 November 2010 à 23h52
As soon as I will get my forum up again,
where I installed the AEVA and the SimpleSEF crashed it,
I will post a screenshot made with a picture editor,
how I would like to have the setup of the AEVA gallery.

Stay tuned, I have to go now, will do this tommorow evening...

Many thanks.
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: CJ Jackson on 12 November 2010 à 1h40
Hire someone, expect them to live up to your expectations, than expect a catastrophic fail.  :mdr:
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: PantsManUK on 12 November 2010 à 11h52
I know you've both said your not "listening" to requests, but...  ^_^

If I can put only one thing onto the wishlist for the fork, it's an API to allow programmatic control of the forum (making user accounts, sharing of authentication with the rest of a website, that sort of thing).
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Arantor on 12 November 2010 à 11h53
You mean like a mutant version of SMF API and SSI?
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: PantsManUK on 12 November 2010 à 11h57
Well, like the API, yes (haven't started looking into SSI yet, but it's only a matter of time); that being the only "blocker" for me.
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Nao/Gilles on 12 November 2010 à 12h01
The SMF API should be enough to help you write a bridge if that's what you want... Although it's not up to date and buggy here and there. (I don't know if they released the version with my fixes. I don't even know if it can be downloaded at all.)
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Arantor on 12 November 2010 à 12h05
The 2.0 version is (still) not available for download.

The API and SSI do not really cross over much; the API is for very lightweight stuff, for doing authentication with SMF but in other apps, or registering users. SSI is much more geared towards extending the forum in non forum, but non-other-app contexts, it's really aimed at the user who has an HTML website and wants to add some content from the forum into it - it's really not suited to anything more complex simply because it loads so much of SMF at the same time.
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: jjzx2sr on 4 December 2010 à 6h48
i may have missed it, bt what did you decide to call the Fork officially?
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Nao/Gilles on 4 December 2010 à 14h50
If we say it you'll find our forum URL soon enough. We're not sure we want to open it soon. Well, I want to, personally, but it might be wise to focus on work right now.
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: snoopy-virtual on 29 December 2010 à 6h29
Hi you 2

So here is where you were all this time?

I don't know Nao so much, but really have been missing Arantor's wise comments.  ;)

It looks like I have been missing a lot lately. I didn't even know Jeff Lewis was out of SMF. I wondered about it when saw his name out of the copyright in the footer, but really never thought ...

Should've known as soon as I saw Arantor going out of SMF but ...

Anyway, now that I know where to find you we will be in touch. And of course, anything you need from me it's yours. My servers are not dedicated (all shared) but I control a few. My skills programming are not as big as yours (I know) but I don't think I'm a bad coder (at least I know a little about fighting spammers  :mdr: ) etc. Any help you need, just ask.

And of course, if you need beta-testers, I volunteer. Can't wait to take a look at the code you are writing. You know how I love to read a good piece of code.  :gnehe:

Cheers(http://www.snoopyvirtualstudio.com/foro/Smileys/default/asturiaspatriaquerida.gif)
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: sokha on 29 December 2010 à 7h52
This is an interesting topic. I will have to come here and read it frequently for the update.

Thank you,  :)
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Nao/Gilles on 29 December 2010 à 15h51
I don't know Nao so much,
I don't know you either :P
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but really have been missing Arantor's wise comments.  ;)
He never stopped commenting... You can follow him on arantor.org, Runic's forum, here, and even on sm.org -- under the name IncognitoMuse (it's not like it's a secret.)
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It looks like I have been missing a lot lately. I didn't even know Jeff Lewis was out of SMF.
Happened years ago... :sifflote:
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I wondered about it when saw his name out of the copyright in the footer, but really never thought ...
That's unrelated really.
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Should've known as soon as I saw Arantor going out of SMF but ...
He never went "out" of SMF. He was pretty much kicked out by the team, like me.
We're still very much working on SMF. Actually, we can safely say we're the two most active SMF developers right now -- and by FAR.
If we were to apply a patch to turn SMF 2.0 RC4 into our fork, it would currently weigh in at 4.8 megabytes. And that doesn't even account for all of the files we removed, added and renamed.
(The current SMF developer patch over RC4 is less than a hundred kilobytes, IIRC.)
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Anyway, now that I know where to find you we will be in touch. And of course, anything you need from me it's yours. My servers are not dedicated (all shared) but I control a few. My skills programming are not as big as yours (I know) but I don't think I'm a bad coder (at least I know a little about fighting spammers  :mdr: ) etc. Any help you need, just ask.
Thanks ;) We don't need anything, though. Pete and I are more than happy to discuss features with people on our private boards, but we're not currently sharing actual code.
Quote
You know how I love to read a good piece of code.  :gnehe:
You will, in time!
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Arantor on 30 December 2010 à 0h05
Quote
He never stopped commenting... You can follow him on arantor.org, Runic's forum, here, and even on sm.org -- under the name IncognitoMuse (it's not like it's a secret.)
These days, though, I'm less about commenting on code and more about dispensing sarcastic justice, or something.
Quote
He never went "out" of SMF. He was pretty much kicked out by the team, like me.
Officially, I resigned, but it was either that, or wait around, get burned out, then get kicked out. These days I'm far too aggressive and rabble-rousing to be reconsidered for the team :P
Quote
(The current SMF developer patch over RC4 is less than a hundred kilobytes, IIRC.)
Pfft, I'm not even sure it'd be that. Might have to test that later just to see, out of random curiosity.
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: snoopy-virtual on 30 December 2010 à 2h01
I don't know Nao so much,
I don't know you either :P
Sorry Nao. That's not what I meant. Of course I know you. I suppose I was thinking too much in Spanish when I wrote that yesterday (and the fact that I wrote it at 6 in the morning didn't help too much either). Reading it again in English today I see I choose the wrong words.

What I meant is that we haven't talked together in the same thread before or any other way (maybe "I never met you" instead of "I don't know you") but I have talked with Arantor a few times.

But of course I have seen your work and read the kind of code you write and I feel a lot of respect for you (as I feel for Arantor). I always respect the people who write code properly. (But only the ones who never stab other people's back ;) ).
Quote
He never stopped commenting... You can follow him on arantor.org, Runic's forum, here, and even on sm.org -- under the name IncognitoMuse (it's not like it's a secret.)
Another thing I didn't know. Good to know. You see, I almost never enter the chit-chat forum or gossip sections in SMF. I'm always giving support (mainly of my mods, but also any other problems they ask me) but never talk with anybody of anything not related to code, bugs, spammers, etc. In fact that's how I found out yesterday about all that.

One guy told me he had a problem with Aeva Media and said he had asked in the support forum but got no answer. I told the guy I was not an Aeva specialist because I haven't needed yet a mod to add media to any forum, but I had always thought to download it anyway. Everybody talks very good about it, so if I ever need to add media I would use that solution. And even if I never need it I wanted anyway to read the code. I enjoy reading good code and normally learn a lot from it. I told the guy to give me a few hours to download the mod and read it a little.

So I went here (http://custom.simplemachines.org/mods/index.php?mod=977), started reading, followed some links, went to here (http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=200401.0), here (http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=395348.0) and a few more. After reading all that, I was already in shock. My first thought was: "Hold on a second. Am I then one of the few stupid ones here doing it for ideals instead of for money, power or what ever other reasons? What the heck am I doing here then?". And also thought then that was the reason why I haven't been seeing lately Arantor around and a few others that I used to enjoy talking with every now and then.

When Arantor left I read that he was resigning for "personal reasons". Didn't understand it then, but I know the truth now.

Next thought I had: "If this people are out of here they must be doing something somewhere else and it must be good, so I started googleing a little and found also this one (http://adminextra.com/page/index.html/_/interviews/interview-jeff-lewis-co-founder-smf-and-now-p-r48), this one (http://www.lewisonline.ca/?p=492) and this page we are just now.

When I started with this guy's problem with Aeva it was like 10 in the night. By the time I finished reading all that hundreds of pages it was already 6 in the morning and that's when I wrote that post.
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It looks like I have been missing a lot lately. I didn't even know Jeff Lewis was out of SMF.
Happened years ago... :sifflote:
Reading Jeff's site I had the impression that happened last January but, as I said, I read hundreds of pages yesterday (and some of them too quickly) so I must have been mistaken.
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Quote
Anyway, now that I know where to find you we will be in touch. And of course, anything you need from me it's yours. My servers are not dedicated (all shared) but I control a few. My skills programming are not as big as yours (I know) but I don't think I'm a bad coder (at least I know a little about fighting spammers  :mdr: ) etc. Any help you need, just ask.
Thanks ;) We don't need anything, though. Pete and I are more than happy to discuss features with people on our private boards, but we're not currently sharing actual code.
Maybe I should have said it like that: "Of course I suppose you don't need anything, but IF you ever need anything from me you only need to ask. I have very few to offer but anything I have is yours IF you ever need it".

And "IF you ever need beta-testers write my name on the list".

Of course I understand you cannot be sharing your code just now with everybody and you will do it only when you are ready.

Actually I read something from Arantor in one of the pages I read yesterday (don't remember which one) that I liked a lot because it's exactly the way I think:

Pete was saying you are doing this just for you (and because you like it) and if you share it it will be only because you want to.

That's exactly what I have been doing lately. When I started fighting spammers 3 years ago it was because they were attacking my forums, so I started writing anti-spammers mods for me (and also because I liked the challenge to see if I could code better than the spam-bot coders). If I have shared my work with everybody it's only because I wanted to, but I will never accept orders.

When somebody ask me for a new feature they think it MUST be inside any of my mods, the first thing I think is "Am I going to use this new feature?". If I see it's a good idea and I can use it I add it. If not, I put it in my list of "Things not too urgent to do whenever I have nothing else to do".
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You know how I love to read a good piece of code.  :gnehe:
You will, in time!
I can't wait to read it, but I will wait. (if you get what I mean)  ;)

One thing I am really sure: Whatever you do it's going to be good.
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Nao/Gilles on 30 December 2010 à 22h47
Well... I guess we can at least give you a private forum spot for you to dwelve into the feature list, if Pete has no problem with that ;)
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Arantor on 31 December 2010 à 1h29
Sounds good to me :)
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: snoopy-virtual on 31 December 2010 à 1h36
Sounds even better to me   :)
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: snoopy-virtual on 31 December 2010 à 18h03
Just a small question:

Can anybody tell me exactly what happened last January?

The more I google it, the more I found thousands of places saying "Yes, but after what happened last January ...", but I haven't found nowhere explaining exactly what was that.

Of course I won't expect an actual explanation. Just a couple of links to somewhere explaining it will make me happy.

Anyway it's not a big deal. I am more interested in the future then in the past, but it's always good to know the history (so we don't repeat again the same mistakes)
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Nao/Gilles on 31 December 2010 à 18h11
The future -> you can go to the website now ;)

The past -> IIRC, some 'higher-up' got fed up with the 'politics' (i.e. as the dragon would say in Merlin, "There have been enough bargains.") So they kicked everyone out of the team and demanded that they sign a paper saying that they promised never to talk politics again within the team.
Half of the team refused, and left.
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: snoopy-virtual on 31 December 2010 à 19h03
I see. It all makes sense now.
The future -> you can go to the website now ;)
I know. I have been there lots of hours already reading.

Haven't talked too much though because I don't like to talk before seeing what everybody else had already said.

At least the main parts. If I wait until I finish reading the whole lot I won't start talking until next year.

Wait a minute, that will be in just a few hours. I need to hurry up then.  :gnehe:

BTW, Happy New Year!
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: amlucent on 5 January 2011 à 19h04
Glad to hear you guys are still fighting the good fight.  I have high anticipation to see what you all come up with.  I am also interested to see the performance improvements that are found by getting rid of all the legacy support (php 4, old mysql versions etc)

I am curious about some topics that you addressed but I am fuzzy on...  are your plans to integrate aeva 100% into the code or just leave it as an addon/mod/plugin?  You mentioned a default portal and I have seen several threads about portamx as a candidate.. would this be a addon or be included by default?  or would these things be like the calendar in smf.. included by default but not activated?  is it possible to fork an existing portal (I dont know about their licenses so might be a stupid question) like tiny portal/simple portal since portamx's developers are being unreasonable?

Finally, just to play devils advocate.. by not leaving the BSD license and going to a closed license arent you putting the project in danger of eventually falling in the same traps and annoyances that SMF has?
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Arantor on 6 January 2011 à 2h17
I don't really see us using PortaMX by default... Fel and us, let's just say we clashed over ideologies.

The intention is for things like that to be available in core but not enabled by default.

At least one portal has a licence suitable for forking but it would become a rewrite rather than a simple fork so we may as well just build it ourselves and be done with it.

As for falling into the same traps, no, I don't think so. The key difference between our groups is that with us, the people with the keys to the kingdom (i.e. the 'management') are also the same people working on the code, which means it would take us both falling out to have that kind of hostage situation.

Yes, there will inevitably be licence issues down the road but...
1. For the folks who believe in the spirit of open source, I don't think we plan to market ourselves as 'open source' anyway (one of the pitfalls SMF fell into)
2. The closed licence, at least initially (no guarantees it will always remain that way), is for our protection. I certainly have no qualms about being up front about it. It is about protecting our hard work from those who would stab us in the back.
3. Yes, it will cause issues with bridging to CMSes and stuff that's GPL, but really, the bigger question is why you'd want to. The core would be able to cover a decent % of what most of the CMSes do, and a few add-ons on top should blow any need for bridging out of the water.
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Nao/Gilles on 6 January 2011 à 9h43
Glad to hear you guys are still fighting the good fight.  I have high anticipation to see what you all come up with.  I am also interested to see the performance improvements that are found by getting rid of all the legacy support (php 4, old mysql versions etc)
If there are any performance improvements in that respect, they're probably negligible. I didn't make any benchmarks myself. First, because our fork (whaaaaa I started typing its name, I have to be more careful....) isn't flat out compatible with SMF (it will require importing the original data, which has the added benefit of allowing users to compare apples to apples by running both identical sites in two different folders and then deciding which best suits their needs), and secondly because we're doing most of our tests on our local machines, meaning it IS ultra-fast anyway.

Our concern is not performance, it's usability and features first. I can be quite obsessive about performance so if there's an area that's definitely slower, I won't have rest until it's fixed. There are places here and there where SMF isn't efficient and when we find them, we make sure to rewrite them, but remember that in a PHP script, at runtime, 95% of the time is spent on 5% of the code. This is where performance is important. There is no point in optimizing an obscure function in the admin area that no one ever uses. Basically, in SMF, the deal-maker or deal-breaker is parse_bbc(). We haven't tackled this one yet (except for moving all of the BBCode to the database, allowing for mods to add their stuff to the database without worrying about editing files. Pete focuses a LOT on trying to keep files clean from mod edits, which is fantastic.)

What else? I don't know, we're only at the beginning really... We've been on it for over 4 months now, but it's far from ready for release in my opinion. Of courset that's partly due to the wait for SMF2 to be released -- in the early days, we were planning to release the fork in time for SMF2's release, but then it became obvious that the SMF developer team was too slow. When I fixed about 30 bugs in a month back in June (my infamous stint as a "consulting developer" over there), they only fixed 7 or 8 bugs in the last 4 months, and apparently they intend to release a bug-free SMF, so I'm starting to even wonder if we'll see SMF2 Gold before next spring... For that reason, we pretty much threw away our plans to have a "much improved SMF2" and instead went for the "perfect forum" vision.
And believe me, it's going to rock.
Quote
I am curious about some topics that you addressed but I am fuzzy on...  are your plans to integrate aeva 100% into the code or just leave it as an addon/mod/plugin?
100% integration, as mentioned elsewhere.
It's way harder than it sounds, BTW. Because of our changes to the codebase, a lot of AeMe's code is outdated. Going HTML5 is not exactly funny when you have dozens of tables in the template. (Yes I know, I could go tableless, but I'm focusing on the fork first. AeMe's templates will come later.)

Regarding AeMe's development, as I said before, it's on hold these days, because of the massive amount of work on the fork. When the fork is finally released, then I'll be able to start working on the gallery again. Sometimes I miss that. I really enjoyed adding features to it... And as I (again) said before, the fork will have AeMe2 by default. A few features may remain available only for 'charter members' or an equivalent group, but that'll be way cheaper than a SMF charter membership. (I haven't discussed this with Pete, but I suspect he will agree that we want to have several levels of charter memberships, one that gives priority support, and one that doesn't.)
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You mentioned a default portal and I have seen several threads about portamx as a candidate.. would this be a addon or be included by default?
As Pete said, PortaMx -- no thank you. I already told the story. I offered feline a spot in our private forum to give her a chance to share her ideas about performance improvements in SMF (something she enjoys doing but nobody in the SMF team even listens to her.) She said she'd only share her ideas if we gave her "half of the shares in our company". Since she calls herself a "corporation", she must have some delusions about everything having to be backed up by big names. No, that's no our thing. We're not doing this for money, we're doing this because we're two excellent coders and we were pushed away from the SMF team for also being vocal internally about the team's inability to do anything correctly.

So what we're doing here is *work on SMF* the same way we would have, if they had a competent team that recognized the interest in having Arantor and Nao join their developer ranks. Right now, they have Norv (who's busy on other things), and Antechinus (who's... busy on other things). That's all. Their only remaining developer, Sinan, no longer works on the project because he's been criticized for adding bugs to the codebase. I told him, SMF is a huge project, you're bound to add bugs to it, but that's what other team members and beta testers are for: they test your code, find bugs, report them, and you fix them. That's no big deal. Better doing two steps forward and one step back, than not moving at all.
Anyway... That's our point of view. And that's how I made AeMe. I coded, I published, I got bug reports, I fixed them. The latest versions available are pretty much bug-free AND feature-packed. If I had been so scared of committing bugs, then it would have only been bug-free. With the feature set of an SMF Gallery Lite (ahah.)
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or would these things be like the calendar in smf.. included by default but not activated?
I'd personally want to see our portal activated by default. I mean, if we're going to write it from scratch, we might as well show it :P
The homepage will be a given anyway. I can't believe that in 2011, SMF is able to launch a forum system that, by default, offers such a boring homepage. It doesn't make one want to visit a forum.
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is it possible to fork an existing portal (I dont know about their licenses so might be a stupid question) like tiny portal/simple portal since portamx's developers are being unreasonable?
I suspect Pete was talking about Dream Portal, because it's BSD. Problem is, we went upfront about this to them, and they said "no, you can't fork us". Then we kindly reminded them that we didn't need their authorization to fork it. They still gave us the finger. We have their main developer on our friend team so I don't know if it's related in any way. But it's certainly an area I'd still like to explore when we come to the day we start implementing a portal. I'm not a big fan of existing portals, but Dream Portal certainly is an interesting choice, and as I said, it can be forked. I can live with being 'enemies' with the software we've forked. After all, we're doing it already with SMF.... :rolleyes:
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Finally, just to play devils advocate.. by not leaving the BSD license and going to a closed license arent you putting the project in danger of eventually falling in the same traps and annoyances that SMF has?
We never said we wouldn't go BSD *after* a while.
Originally we were going to keep the BSD license but then I talked with Pete about the drawbacks of that choice.
First, you must keep in mind that we're doing a hostile fork. It's not something we decided to do, eh. SMF basically kicked me out of the team in July, perm-banned me in August, then after we announced the fork, they quickly removed my beta tester rights -- even though I was their most active tester and still suggested bug fixes after being banned! -- and my credits as well. We're not a hostile fork, precisely THEY're hostile to our fork.
So, because of the hostility, what do you think would happen when we go gold? SMF taking our codebase and renaming it SMF 3.0. That's what would/could happen. They would have to credit us in the files, of course, but they wouldn't care because they'd have screwed us. And even if SMF didn't do that, I'm sure vbLamer45 or another jerk would do it just the same.
Basically we're protecting ourselves to give a chance to our software to become well known.
Then, if the fork becomes somehow popular and no one can fool us with an early fork that attempts to cash in on our work, then we'll consider going open source. It's my personal plan, I think it's Pete's plan, we like openness but we'd just like everyone to remember that we're working on this fulltime, on OUR personal funds, and that there's no reason for this to change in the near future.
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Artur on 9 January 2011 à 3h08
I'm more than interested about this and looking forward for the first beta to test. :)  :sumanai:
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Nao/Gilles on 11 January 2011 à 10h56
I think that long before the first beta to test, you'll have a demo site to test. And I'm sure it's going to generate some excitement ;)
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: YogiBear on 12 January 2011 à 1h28
I think that long before the first beta to test, you'll have a demo site to test. And I'm sure it's going to generate some excitement ;)
:)  :cool:
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Nao/Gilles on 12 January 2011 à 19h35
(The friends group will get to play with the demo site before everyone else, of course :P)
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Artur on 14 January 2011 à 17h22
(Is not on the friends list :snif: ;))
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: sokha on 16 January 2011 à 2h18
Could I be in the list too then ;D ?
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Arantor on 16 January 2011 à 2h45
The list is relatively small right now, so that we don't get flooded with many feature requests - as it is, we have 7 pages of discussions of features that are 'right now' features, plus pages of 'would be nice later' stuff. The more people we have, the more discussion there is, and the slower development will get.
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: sokha on 16 January 2011 à 16h52
The list is relatively small right now, so that we don't get flooded with many feature requests - as it is, we have 7 pages of discussions of features that are 'right now' features, plus pages of 'would be nice later' stuff. The more people we have, the more discussion there is, and the slower development will get.
Well, I am not really a kind of person who like to request more features. Since I have a community which is running SMF smoothly with aeva mod, I would like also to join and test it. I will have to keep myself idle, testing. I also would like to see faster development. I am not a php coder, but I am happy to help if I could do.
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Arantor on 16 January 2011 à 18h28
I think we can safely say there is faster development :)

But a great deal of our time is spent not just adding new stuff but reworking what's there into a form that's better suited for us going forward, so unfortunately we're not adding stuff at the pace we'd like to, not yet anyway.

Mind you, I've already added an optimisation and a subfeature (a subsystem that other features will depend on) today and a new minor feature is coming along shortly after.
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: sokha on 17 January 2011 à 4h05
That sounds great!  :gnehe: Without reading from page 1 to 5 of this topic, will it possible to port SMF database to the fork one once the fork is ready (if the public is released publicly)?
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Arantor on 17 January 2011 à 6h53
The public version will be public, but there's a lot to do before that - not least SMF 2.0 final has to come first for legal reasons.

Yes, there will be a way to get from SMF to the fork, though we haven't started working on that (too much) yet.
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: sokha on 17 January 2011 à 8h43
Great! It must be a very long way to go. I will keep track on the development. May I know how many active developers who are currently working on the fork?

Thanks,
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Arantor on 17 January 2011 à 9h44
Two, Nao and myself.

Already there are nearly 500 commits to the codebase, some ranging to hundreds and hundreds of lines.
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: sokha on 17 January 2011 à 12h34
It must be a huge work for two of you. Do not you think that you need more people to involve? I saw there are plenty of developers in SMF official site and you "Arantor" is a very active member over there. At least, there might be a few of them willing to help you on the fork.
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Arantor on 17 January 2011 à 14h18
I'm hardly active on sm.org at the moment, nothing compared to what I used to be.

And I sincerely doubt any of their devs are interested in the fork, knowing how there is a serious amount of dislike on both sides. The only things the devs may be interested in is bug fixes but after the way things turned out, we have no plans to give them any of our bug fixes. I only reported a bug because I thought it was a security matter and therefore quite important to report.

It is no surprise that the title of this thread is named after a variation on a very common English swear word, directed at SMF.

There is a benefit to the fork of me watching support threads - it gives me more things to know to fix up front in the fork...
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: PantsManUK on 18 January 2011 à 10h17
Yes... 'bout the only thing I can see the SMF devs being interested in are the bug fixes and stopping you releasing (because nothing will make them all look quite so useless as a far better fork within a few days of them releasing gold...)
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Arantor on 18 January 2011 à 14h49
Maybe not a few days :whistle: But certainly before 2.1 is even close to ready.

But we'd rather not rush it being ready and release it when it's actually ready with everything we want it to be.
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Nao/Gilles on 19 January 2011 à 20h15
Yes... 'bout the only thing I can see the SMF devs being interested in are the bug fixes and stopping you releasing (because nothing will make them all look quite so useless as a far better fork within a few days of them releasing gold...)
We'll show a demo site and will also be more open about the fork but no it won't be out at the same time, contrary to our original plans. We believe in it and it's there to stay. It'll be out this year but we don't want to be rushed. We can't go faster than we currently do actually. Eheh.
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: sokha on 20 January 2011 à 10h31
This year?  :gnehe: :gnehe: That is quick.
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: PantsManUK on 20 January 2011 à 10h34
It'll be out this year but we don't want to be rushed.
Assuming SMF goes gold inside that time frame o' course  :gnehe:
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Arantor on 20 January 2011 à 14h03
Quote
This year?
Given that we've made 500 or so revisions - some of which individually commit a few HUNDRED changes across the code base or add complete new features at a time, just since August 2010, I think it's fair to say this year is likely for a release, just because we are able to throw the time, energy and experience we have at it.
Quote
Assuming SMF goes gold inside that time frame o' course
I'm going to hedge my bets at this point and say that I see no reason why 2.0 final won't happen this year. Even if that were the case, we do have a get out of jail free card on that score, but we'd rather not use it if we can help it.
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: wizzle on 24 January 2011 à 3h23
Personally...2.0 can't go gold fast enough for me.
I want the FORK!!!!  :gnehe:
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Nao/Gilles on 24 January 2011 à 7h57
520 revs by now ;)
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Arantor on 24 January 2011 à 8h43
It's coming along magnificently :)
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: t34 on 3 February 2011 à 22h26
I am looking forward to your fork! :cool:  :mouais:
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Nao/Gilles on 3 February 2011 à 23h10
557 revs committed by now, I believe ;)
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Nao/Gilles on 3 February 2011 à 23h12
Of course, until the smf team is done with their RC running gag (working on rc5 eh? How about you just go back into beta?), we can't release a thing.....
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: YogiBear on 4 February 2011 à 12h41
Hmm, could all be part of an SMF plot to stop us.  :scrogneugneu:
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Arantor on 4 February 2011 à 15h41
Apparently it's not, apparently they feel they may have to release another release to fix a security issue that I reported (though, according to Thantos, it's been known for years... and no-one thought to fix it?) because they feel it needs to be fixed and they're not ready to go to final yet in terms of licensing.
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: RustyBarnacle on 5 February 2011 à 19h29
I have a question.  How compatible will mods for SMF be with your fork?  I was able to write one for SMF1 easy enough 2 years ago and then thought nobody would want it because everyone was going to 2 beta and I gave up on trying to figure 2 beta out.

Recently I've tried again and thanks to Arantor I'm further ahead than I was 2 years ago when I gave up.  Not done by a long ways but at least the db stuff is working.

So will I need to make a third version for Forked SMF?
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: snoopy-virtual on 5 February 2011 à 20h40
Yes, you will need to do a third version for the Fork.

But don't worry too much. Arantor has already promised he will give us a hand to teach us how to implement mods (or plug-ins, as I think they will be called here) inside the fork. Working with us until we understand how they should be done.

And also, as soon as a few of us learn to do them, we can help each other as well, so all of us see it more clear.
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Arantor on 5 February 2011 à 23h22
The simple answer is yes, you will need to modify your mod - substantially, in all likelihood.

Firstly, $smcFunc is no more, it doesn't exist at all in the fork. Secondly, and more importantly, the whole system is going to be shaped more and more over time to avoid this tedious, fragile process of code modifying. For the vast majority of things, it's simply unnecessary - even in 2.0 RC4 it's less necessary with the integration hooks that are present, but the whole system needs to be massively expanded for it to be really useful.
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: ianus on 7 February 2011 à 8h57
Just want to pay a visit for some shake hands.

Best wishes for your fork and hopefully you have a lot of fun and success with everything you do.
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Nao/Gilles on 7 February 2011 à 14h13
Success also means more responsibilities... It's a double-edged sword ;)
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: ronnie42 on 8 February 2011 à 12h56
Havent you invited some former old Developers from SMF like Aaron van Geffen who did so many good things, in translations, or do you just wanna keep them outside your door?

As far as i am concerned i will go with the fork, i love the mediasoftware you have made as we use it successfully on our Forum.

Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Nao/Gilles on 8 February 2011 à 15h56
Havent you invited some former old Developers from SMF like Aaron van Geffen who did so many good things, in translations, or do you just wanna keep them outside your door?
Yes and no. Yes because Aaron is interested in the project and he's started to participate, and no because we're still not taking proper developers. Probably not going to happen before v1.0 is out, really.

Basically the team is just us, Arantor and Nao. We are both leaders and developers.
We both think that a project can only thrive as long as it is led by people who actually work on it.

Apart from us, our private forum has a few dozen members, either Pete's or my online friends. Among them, there are a few 'consultants' (i.e. people who can access our codebase and demos and give advice about them... Errr... They're not doing that much because it's hard to follow us but that's the idea ;)), and in the future we will also have 'guest developers', i.e. people who don't have commit access but who provide source code anyway, for a specific feature or so. We don't have any preconceived ideas about whom should be able to join forces with us, really. We're obviously a bit wary of seeing SMF teamies join us[1], but we have plenty of ex-teamies who've found renewed excitement with our project.

Aaron is very welcome to become a guest developer, of course. He only joined recently our forum, and right now he's getting acquainted (and overwhelmed) with our feature set. (Poor thing. Just for the record, there are close to 9k posts on the forum already, including 6k+ by Pete and I. And you have to read them all. There's a quiz at the end.)

But there is still time to decide everything, since we can't even release a beta version before SMF2 Final is out, and now that they're going to release a RC5 instead... ::)
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As far as i am concerned i will go with the fork, i love the mediasoftware you have made as we use it successfully on our Forum.
Well, if you're an AeMe addict, I guess you're better off with our fork in the future, since I've completely stopped developing it for SMF. (The fork is so much easier to work with, it would be a nightmare for me to go back to SMF.)
 1. Let's just say that our license even 'accomodates' for a few of them being potential nuisances... ::)
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: tfs on 8 February 2011 à 17h22
Well, if you're an AeMe addict, I guess you're better off with our fork in the future, since I've completely stopped developing it for SMF.
I guess that does it for me then.  :)  I've got thousands of hours wrapped into AeMe on my private family media album.  Bring on the fork... er... bring on SMF2, then bring on the fork.  :)

Is there still room for an old Foxy! owner to join your forkum?  (fork+forum)
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Nao/Gilles on 8 February 2011 à 21h07
Sure, we're hiring right now I think ;)
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: wizzle on 8 February 2011 à 22h16
Just wondering of the fork will have email obfuscation built in? Would be one less thing owners would have to worry about. ;)
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Arantor on 9 February 2011 à 0h52
Define 'email obfuscation'
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Nao/Gilles on 11 February 2011 à 11h49
I think he means making sure not to show e-mail addresses to spam bots...
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Arantor on 11 February 2011 à 13h42
That's the default in SMF 2.0 anyway. Users have to opt-in to their email address being seen ;)
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: wizzle on 11 February 2011 à 16h49
Define 'email obfuscation'
Using javascript to scramble any email posted, in a topic mainly. If the user/visitor doesn't have javascript enabled it will show a message like (you must enable javascript) in place of the email address. Since bots are unable to parse javascript, for now anyway, they cannot find the "@" anywhere in the source, thus, they can't scrape anything.

I've tested this with several scrapers and none can see anything. ;)


Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Arantor on 11 February 2011 à 17h47
Ah, I see.

There aren't any plans to add it right now, but truth be told we do have one or two things that take higher priority than this (like IPv6 support, rewriting the admin panel, you know, little things), but we can certainly look at it.

I'm not keen on the JS requirement, though. Personally I'd rather encourage user education: don't post emails publicly, you want to give out an email address, PM someone.
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: wizzle on 11 February 2011 à 19h14
I agree completely with the user education!
But some, are ahhh, well, (trying to be nice here) wont lesion. Then cry cause they're getting spammed. I know it's their own fault, yada yada.. I just like to provide as much protection as possible for my members.

Keep in mind it's just a suggestion!! I know you guys have MUCH more important things on the "to do" list.
 
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Arantor on 12 February 2011 à 0h29
It's not a bad suggestion at all :)

Just we have 7 pages worth of topics of 'stuff we're pretty sure we're doing' first...
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: b4pjoe on 12 February 2011 à 19h03
So, is it true that the delay for SMF 2.0 Final is because they are trying to come up with a license that makes it un-forkable? I worry that you guys might have shown your hand too early.
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: RustyBarnacle on 12 February 2011 à 21h26
I thought it was the other way around, they are going to a license that will allow forks.  The current license is unforkable.
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Arantor on 12 February 2011 à 21h55
So, is it true that the delay for SMF 2.0 Final is because they are trying to come up with a license that makes it un-forkable? I worry that you guys might have shown your hand too early.
No, that's not true. I can't go into the true detail, but suffice to say, if they choose to release on a non BSD licence for final, they hit two major headaches - one, the delay will be many months as much code will have to be rewritten, and two, it will upset a decent proportion of the community who want final sooner rather than later.

The current licence is as RustyBarnacle says, unforkable. We know, we asked explicitly for an exception to allow us to fork, so that they could get rid of us, and both the NPO and LLC denied the request. Can't say I blame them for it, but it would have solved a lot of problems. There is, should we need to, a method for us to be able to distribute the code to the fork legally, but we'd rather not if we can help it.

As for 'tipping the hand early', in all honesty we didn't want it to be this way. We approached the team last August, with an offer to fork but in a way that meant they got patches and fixes for stuff as we found them. That's also why my account reappeared on sm.org, so that I could report to the bug tracker. (I did, even, report the bug that primarily sparked RC5 - yes, I'm the joker who encouraged them to release another RC because of what I called a security issue even if certain team members didn't agree it was a security matter)

Trouble is, after we tried to bridge the gap, we got shit on, at which point we became a hostile fork.
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: b4pjoe on 13 February 2011 à 1h59
Fair enough. Thanks for the explanation.
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: tfs on 13 February 2011 à 3h22
Sure, we're hiring right now I think ;)
Can you send over a link?
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Nao/Gilles on 13 February 2011 à 14h49
Anyone interested just pm me or Pete.
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Artur on 13 February 2011 à 21h46
Interested in?
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Nao/Gilles on 14 February 2011 à 12h50
Read tfs' posts...
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Artur on 15 February 2011 à 1h01
Oh, whoops. Sorry. Mhh, if my coding skills would be better, I would help... besides of that I could only help with translations.
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Nao/Gilles on 15 February 2011 à 17h19
We're not asking for anyone's help really... We've been doing 100% of the work, just Pete and I, in the last 6 months, and we're fine with it. We will need people to provide support when the software package goes public, though.
The only things we discuss on our private forum are, err... Well, the new features and what we could do to make them even better ;)
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Artur on 16 February 2011 à 18h39
I didn't said that you do it, I'm just saying that I would help, If I could help :)
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: maxipes on 20 February 2011 à 18h55
Hello guys,
this is a good news!
I am a Language moderator and Language translator in to the Czech.
I am not satisfied how the SMF team behaves to translators.
This is my article:
http://www.maxiforum.cz/ceska-podpora-smf-fora/simplemachines-vydava-smf-2-0-rc5/
A am looking forward to you work :) :cool:
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Arantor on 20 February 2011 à 19h24
Yup, RC5 was mostly security fixes, though the licence stuff is still hanging over everyone's head - the sole reason RC5 happened was because there was a security issue found (reported by me!) and it was sufficient that it needed to be fixed now rather than wait for the licence/legal stuff to be sorted.

I honestly don't know if there will be an RC6, but I know I reported another security-related matter in the last day or so in combating the bots out there that were trying to hijack accounts, which may or may not be fixed in a patch and may or may not trigger RC6. That said, I personally consider the issue I reported this time more serious than the one I reported last time; the issue that prompted RC5 was not, IMO, serious enough to warrant the patch release - this one would be. But I'm not the dev team, I don't have any sway on what they do/don't do.
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Nao/Gilles on 21 February 2011 à 10h15
I don't speak Czech. What does it say?
Ps: I love Czech movies from the 70s :P
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Arantor on 21 February 2011 à 10h32
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I don't speak Czech. What does it say?
Neither do I but Google Translate made what looked like reasonable sense of it.
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: maxipes on 21 February 2011 à 13h51
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I don't speak Czech. What does it say?
Neither do I but Google Translate made what looked like reasonable sense of it.
Yes :-)
http://translate.google.cz/translate?js=n&prev=_t&hl=cs&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&sl=cs&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.maxiforum.cz%2Fceska-podpora-smf-fora%2Fsimplemachines-vydava-smf-2-0-rc5%2F
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: live627 on 5 March 2011 à 4h18
Nao, if I may ask, what will happen to AeMe on the SMF side? Is it going to dissolve into the shadowy mists of time or will you pass the reigns on to someone else? (Am I an annoying twit for asking such?)
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Nao/Gilles on 5 March 2011 à 8h00
If you're going to stick with smf it means you don't care about innovation, so why would you update aeme anyway ;)
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: snoopy-virtual on 5 March 2011 à 16h36
If you're going to stick with smf it means you don't care about innovation, so why would you update aeme anyway ;)
Nice answer.  :mdr:

Do you mind if I use it when somebody else ask about my SMF mods?  :gnehe:
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: live627 on 5 March 2011 à 19h43
Who said SMF isn't innovative with mods? :classe:

More people would convert to SAVE when Aeva gets dropped (Yes, some people are sheep, and sheep just use what they're told)
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Arantor on 5 March 2011 à 22h12
Even though SAVE provides an inferior service, too. It really isn't as flexible with the different kinds of URL out there. But sheep will be sheep - which is fine since it means less hassle for us in the long run, since we're not trying to support multiple disparate things.

And for the record, I totally agree with Nao on the subject of innovation where SMF is concerned; nothing I have heard leads me to believe 2.1 will be that exciting a release, I really hope I'm wrong - for their sake.
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Nao/Gilles on 9 March 2011 à 12h12
Do you mind if I use it when somebody else ask about my SMF mods?  :gnehe:
Why would I.

@John> Well, technically Aeva Lite supports 200+ websites and Save has only a fraction of that, and it looks like vblamer stopped updating it at all. So Aeva and Save users are basically in the same boat! It all comes down to whether the mod will be updated if YouTube suddenly breaks. (Of course I will. It would defeat the entire purpose of the mod otherwise... And it's only a matter of updating a single file in the mod page, and everyone would have their stuff fixed in less than a day without action on their part.)
I don't think Save has THAT kind of flexibility. :P
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Garou on 10 March 2011 à 18h25
I can't believe how long it took me to stumble upon this. Well since I took a long break from SMF myself, its not too surprising. The main reason I went back there was because I picked up a new client that really wanted a forum and unfortunately I haven't found an alternative I like. I was doing some research for something when I found Nao's signature linking to this.

I never liked the politics (especially what is seen publicly) at SMF. When the excrement hit the fan over a year I was all excited about the project the "SMF Friends" (I prefer ex-patriots) had in the works. The concept of it being a core code to which everything else would plug into seemed perfect to me. Unfortunately that project seems to have died almost as quickly as it started. The project site was down more then it was up which led to me losing my interest in it and last I knew over half the people that were initially committed to it did as well.

It is my belief the mods, plug-ins, extentions, etc should rarely and preferably never have to modify the core code to work. It just opens the door to extra bugs and incompatibility. It looks like this project seems to hold that philosophy too. I like that a lot.

After reading this thread beginning to end I really like what I'm seeing. After all the changes you two have made can it truly be called a fork at this point. [Unknown] may have had Yabb in mind when he was working on his "secret code" but by the time SMF was released it was truly something different. Without seeing your code, what I'm hearing/reading seems to be well on its way to being something very different from SMF.

As far as those concerned about mods, they are in the end simply mods. If the original authors of those mods dont get behind this project, there are plenty of other people that would be willing to recreate the functionality of those mods. I can already think of several that I use on a regular basis that I will be interested in porting over, if I like the finished product.

I can't wait to see the project once you guys make it public. I have spent enough time looking at the work you two have done over at SMF to know that this will find acceptance way beyond just the two of you.

Good luck and thank you, from all of us who have been disenchanted with SMF for the last few years.
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Nao/Gilles on 11 March 2011 à 16h29
I was all excited about the project the "SMF Friends" (I prefer ex-patriots) had in the works.
We all were, yeah... But it was interesting to 'build', if only as a confirmation that democracy is great on paper, but in any serious real-life project it can kill it very quickly.
That's why our fork is really just Arantor and I. Just the two of us as bosses, just the two of us as developers. Because we know the game. We've played it before -- sometimes we won, sometimes we lost. Put one and one together and you get a project that has now been under active development for the last six months and a half, with 652 commits so far, making for an average of 3+ per day. The SMF svn often remains silent for weeks, in comparison...

Also note that ever since I stopped all communication with SMF, there has been no single flamewar on my side. Interesting... And they said I was too unstable to join a team, eh. It was definitely not a problem on my side. *They* were too scared of seeing me join them, then end up leading them after a while. People with a vision scare them. Why do you think they've been stuck for the last 3 years on betas and RCs? Even SMF 2.1... They've started work on it. One would think that they would use the opportunity to put in all of the features they were prevented from adding to the SMF2 codebase in all these years, wouldn't they..? Well, sure. They did absolutely nothing. SMF 2.1 is already dead before it was even born...

Now, all we're waiting for is for them to release SMF2 with the BSD license and then we can officially take over. Problem is, they know how much work we've put into our project... The same way they were scared of taking me in, they're probably now scared of allowing our fork to go public. Because it will only show the incredible gap between the SMF team's work and ours.
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The concept of it being a core code to which everything else would plug into seemed perfect to me. Unfortunately that project seems to have died almost as quickly as it started. The project site was down more then it was up which led to me losing my interest in it and last I knew over half the people that were initially committed to it did as well.
Yeah... It was born in January, 'democracy' was brought in around early February, and by late February the project was dead. By the end of March, everyone had left -- either to rejoin SMF (ah ah), or to completely leave these kinds of projects.
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It is my belief the mods, plug-ins, extentions, etc should rarely and preferably never have to modify the core code to work.
My feeling, too.
Actually, I'd really like for our fork to completely prevent the ability of modifying core code... But it's hard than it sounds. There are some changes that can't be done differently. Still, I'm set on changing the terminology to call these edits "hacks", hopefully inviting mod developers to use hooks and external files as much as possible.
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It just opens the door to extra bugs and incompatibility.
Hooks are not the be all and end all of plugin programming, though. Just look at WordPress... Everytime they release a new version, some older versions of plugins become incompatible. It's not something you can 'fix' in any way. The only 'fix' is to no longer update the master software...
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It looks like this project seems to hold that philosophy too. I like that a lot.
Arantor is the philosopher, the one with a vision (and what a vision!). I'm just the one who hacks into the files, and either throws the hacks away or decides they're cool and keeps it. My vision is to write the software I always wanted to use ;)
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After reading this thread beginning to end I really like what I'm seeing. After all the changes you two have made can it truly be called a fork at this point. [Unknown] may have had Yabb in mind when he was working on his "secret code" but by the time SMF was released it was truly something different. Without seeing your code, what I'm hearing/reading seems to be well on its way to being something very different from SMF.
Well, I suppose it depends on how you view it...
Technically, you could say that some themes are even further away from the SMF philosophy than our fork is at all.
So, it depends on what you're looking at. If you use our fork for a while, you'll end up noticing that some things are different -- for the better. But overall, it's still based on the SMF engine. We did rewrite at least 25% of the codebase so far, but that still leaves us with 75% of the SMF codebase... Most of which is very good and doesn't really warrant a rewrite at all ;)
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As far as those concerned about mods, they are in the end simply mods. If the original authors of those mods dont get behind this project, there are plenty of other people that would be willing to recreate the functionality of those mods.
(Or even us...)
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I can already think of several that I use on a regular basis that I will be interested in porting over, if I like the finished product.
You can't port anything without the original author's approval, of course.
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I can't wait to see the project once you guys make it public. I have spent enough time looking at the work you two have done over at SMF to know that this will find acceptance way beyond just the two of you.
Google may help you here... Eheh.
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Good luck and thank you, from all of us who have been disenchanted with SMF for the last few years.
Wait until we go public and then you can decide for yourself whether it was worth the wait... (Hint: yes it will have been, eheh.)
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Arantor on 12 March 2011 à 1h55
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They've started work on it.
Yes, I can confirm there is a branch in SVN for 2.1. Given where it is, the fact it's not in the trunk but is a branch and so far contains a variety of untested micro-optimisations... (I know they're untested because at least one has broken functionality) it strikes me as not being worth the effort so far. I haven't backported anything from there that I hadn't seen off the tracker (which to me seems fair game if it's in public) but most of it is full on micro optimisation rather than anything actually interesting.
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Now, all we're waiting for is for them to release SMF2 with the BSD license and then we can officially take over. Problem is, they know how much work we've put into our project... The same way they were scared of taking me in, they're probably now scared of allowing our fork to go public. Because it will only show the incredible gap between the SMF team's work and ours.
The official line on this is that it's still being tossed back and forth between the lawyers - yes, they had to bring in lawyers to negotiate the contract of sale of assets between the LLC and NPO. I'm not against that, given how much distrust and dissent there was, but it certainly doesn't make it any easier.

One of the comments was that it seemed like every time they got somewhere, it would be the weekend again, which is the real issue at stake here - it's not fear of us, because they'll do what they'll do regardless of us, but I suspect that once 2.0 final happens and we can start being more open, the real fur will fly once it becomes clear what might have been.

They're not worried about us right now, but I suspect it's going to be like Luke and Yoda - "I'm not afraid." / "You will be. You WILL BE."
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But overall, it's still based on the SMF engine.
It is for the moment. As time goes on it's morphing further and further away. When I get round to getting something committable for the ACP overhaul, then probably the single biggest element of SMF's codebase will have a fire lit under its ass - since the ACP accounts for a scary percentage of the code, and once it's gone (bearing in mind how much other stuff changes to accommodate it), I see the figures skewing much more towards 75/25 the other way.
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Hooks are not the be all and end all of plugin programming, though. Just look at WordPress... Everytime they release a new version, some older versions of plugins become incompatible.
Sure, hooks aren't everything - but it's a massive step up from where we are right now. I've seen a few mods appear using hooks, which are interesting, but the implementation of some of the hooks basically knee-capped anything seriously awesome with them.
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Actually, I'd really like for our fork to completely prevent the ability of modifying core code...
I'm not planning to remove that functionality, but I am going to make it harder to use; perhaps a prompt in the ACP if someone wants to do that ("This add-on modifies your forum's core files, are you sure you want to proceed?"), but I'll be looking at submitted mods to see what people are doing that warrants a raw code hack. Some ultimately will need it, it'll be unavoidable for some, but the vast majority case shouldn't.
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(Or even us...)
I fully expect to get into writing mods, I'm actually looking forward to the prospect to a point since I'll be able to get mods out there to fulfill the typical functions that don't need hacks (I have been trying to figure out how to engineer points in so that hooks or similar can be used, without having to use the joys of raw edits)
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You can't port anything without the original author's approval, of course.
This is a matter of no little debate on sm.org, so here's the full legal position:

* If you are the owner of the mod, go nuts.
* If you have permission of the author to do so, go nuts.
* If the mod is under a licence that expressly permits code remixing and forks (e.g. BSD, CC-BY-SA, LGPL) without any nasty side effects (e.g. GPL), go nuts.

Anything other than a fresh rebuild is off the table, though. It should be noted that I've been thinking about how to make mod data compatible; I've already said I wanted to make getting data from SMF+others to be an import process, rather than a conversion (you go into the ACP, press a button and say "I want data from <here>" and it gets it and pulls it into the forum that's already installed). What I'm aiming for with that is the ability to make it so modular that it can support pulling in boards and posts and stuff, but also that it can be used to inherit from mods - for example, if the user is coming from SMF+AeMe, that it can support importing the SMF core stuff and then AeMe. Or SMF Gallery Lite. Or any relevant content from SimplePortal or TinyPortal. I think you get the idea ;)


In closing, I'll leave you with a few thoughts.
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People with a vision scare them. Why do you think they've been stuck for the last 3 years on betas and RCs?
I don't think it's that people with a vision scare them. I think it's people who 1) have a vision that doesn't see exactly the same way as theirs and 2) have the ability to take that vision and make it real. Which certainly includes both of us.

As for SMF's vision and future, two things come to mind. Firstly, who remembers the "I'm a PC" / "I'm a Mac" ad campaigns? SMF is in that, holding a placard, "I'm a forum." Which is great, it knows what it is. But that's all it is. It's a capable, extensible forum. But there's no place in the vision for half of the features we're doing because they're not strictly forum features and so don't fall into their vision of what SMF's future should look like.

Daft as it sounds, I worry about SMF's future, because they don't HAVE a vision. The most solidly agreed points for 2.1 are: IPv6 support, maybe draft posting and decluttering the core to avoid IE6 support. Everything else is maybe and don't know. I don't know about you, but that doesn't exactly bode well for much happening in 2.1 or beyond.
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: YogiBear on 12 March 2011 à 11h44
The question has been raised somewhere else on Noisen as to whether Project X (can't use its real name here) can any longer be considered a fork of SMF or whether it now exists in its own right? If something is 'based on' or 'inspired by' does that make it a fork along with all the legal hoo-hah in having to wait until SMF 2.0 Gold is finally released?

Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Garou on 12 March 2011 à 15h20
The question has been raised somewhere else on Noisen as to whether Project X (can't use its real name here) can any longer be considered a fork of SMF or whether it now exists in its own right? If something is 'based on' or 'inspired by' does that make it a fork along with all the legal hoo-hah in having to wait until SMF 2.0 Gold is finally released?
It really depends on how much code SMF can come in and say that's the same code we have. The closer it is to theirs the worse it is for this project at least under the current license.

Then if it were to go to court its a also a matter of how the judge feels about similarities. "This is almost the same as our code" or "you can see this is a direct derivative of our code". Granted its php and a lot of the code will end up looking similar to someone that doesn't really know what they are doing.

Even the friends project was worried about that and they were going to be more like a CMS with a forum included. With all of them having worked on SMF at various points its bound that some of the code could be questionable and questionable is enough to land you in court. Even if you win it can easily become expensive enough to bankrupt you even if you win.

Bottom line is that the US legal system is really fickle and it potentially becomes a big nightmare under the current SMF license. Once its changed its a totally different story.

For the future of this project its probably best to be private till the license change.
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Arantor on 12 March 2011 à 18h40
Until there is a total and complete rewrite from scratch, it's considered a derivative work, and until such time as it is sufficiently different that it isn't a derivative work, we have to play by their rules. It sucks, but there you go.

I should point out that we spent some time discussing this with the team, and we cannot make it publicly accessible, except as a mod package, prior to the licence change otherwise we can be hit with a cease and desist. Whether a US C&D letter would be valid for one developer in the UK and one in France is debatable, though I'd rather not take the chance.

We originally set out to be a friendly fork, which is where my account being on sm.org again came from, and why I've contributed some things to them, though not nearly all the things I could.

But ultimately, yes, we're not prepared to make it more public until such times as the licence situation is resolved.
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: t34 on 14 March 2011 à 16h37
It's amazing when you Google SMF Fork that you receive results about all the discontent at SMF.  Since they are so unhappy and can't get along, they should just transfer the license to you two.  You guys are doing something worthwhile that those of who use SMF appreciate.  When lawyers get involved, it becomes a total nightmare. 
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: tfs on 14 March 2011 à 21h00
Yeah... It was born in January, 'democracy' was brought in around early February, and by late February the project was dead.
Programming by committee always results in disaster.   :gnehe:
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Nao/Gilles on 14 March 2011 à 21h11
It has to be a determinate, half-crazy programmer (or maybe two :P) doing wonders, and a fan-club to cheer him up when he's lost. :D
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Arantor on 14 March 2011 à 22h32
From what I hear even now it's not all that great, even with all the restructuring and changes.

And yes, programming by committee is like anything by committee: you just go round and round and round.
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: tfs on 15 March 2011 à 1h46
And yes, programming by committee is like anything by committee: you just go round and round and round.
It ends up like the PFJ (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YawagQ6lLrA#ws).  :gnehe:
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Arantor on 15 March 2011 à 2h59
No, the Judean Peoples' Front! :P

Also reminds me of my friend's latest FB status:
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There's nothing grammatically incorrect about the sentence 'The committee sprang into action.'  It's just not plausible. ;)
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Trevor Hale on 17 March 2011 à 15h24
 :ouhla:  Pete,

I am shocked.  In my limited time with SMF, (September 2009) I have followed your support and activities.  Not so much recently cause I have been travelling for work, but whenever I had issues of any kind it was simple searches of your posts that often lead to the solutions.  Sorry Gilles, not really heard much about you.  But thats cause I am a sleep half of the time. 

regardless, Pete, to me (who is Still a Noob user, not permitted to the BIG forum) you were the face of SMF..  I honestly figured without reasearch you were the Lead on the project, and if nothing else thought you were SMF.  Bet you someone is kicking their but now that you two are gone. 

anyway..  I just want to wish you guys the best of luck with all of this, and let you know that I too have been in this kind of situation before.  Working tirelessly to help build something big and because of some narrow minded thinkers, you get pushed out because they know it all.

Trust me, Your better off now!!!  After reading all of this thread, I too like many here, cant wait to "Convert" It will be worth it.

Best regards,

Trev
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Garou on 18 March 2011 à 2h18
Yep it was a damn shame what happened with SMF, the things that led to Arantor and several others leaving the project.

Seems to me the only person that might be more knowledgeable about SMF is Mr Brackets. He kinda floats in and out of SMF or rather did before the mess. I'm not sure how close he is to the current code. None the less and with good reason Arantor is often compared to the father of SMF.

I like to think of it this way. Zef Hemel is the Grand daddy, [Unknown] would be the father, and Arantor is the prodigal son.  :D
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Arantor on 18 March 2011 à 3h20
Thanks for the kind words :) I guess for a while I sort of was the face of SMF, but it became increasingly clear that all is not well. Despite protestations from the team to the contrary it is my belief that all is still not well, and that the increase of 'democracy' hasn't helped one bit.

I'm not going to comment any further on them; they will be known for what they do and don't do going forward. I do know, however, that everything that's going on now is descended from pretty much everything that happened in 2010. It could all have been so different, but I think in the end, we would have gone our own way anyway; as has been said elsewhere, all the time we shared their vision, they were content to have us be their whipping boy, the moment we started to eschew that and have our OWN vision (bearing in mind we have the skills to fully realise any vision we have), that's the point we would have gone our own way. All that transpired just made it easier.

Mr Brackets is quite a way away from the current code; he left around 2005 due to the politics, and came back for a brief spell to try and help at the end of 2009 when this started to hit the fan, but into 2010 it spiralled and while I know he's busy with real life, I get the impression that he accepted it wasn't ever going to change and put it behind him.

As it happens, I have never quite seen myself on Unknown's level, some of the technical discussions he's been part of sort of put me to shame at times, but then I remember that he's been doing the whole PHP thing on a professional level for longer than I have - he was working with PHP at a professional level when I was still learning the language for the first time.

What we do share, though - what I think people like Zef, like Unknown and like myself and Nao have in common - we share the ability to take inspiration and fully realise it without being afraid of its consequences; all too often I've seen comments from devs about how complex things are (and I've made them with respect to some things people want to do) and not wanting to get involved.

There was a discussion for example about changing the permissions in SMF for 2.1 to go back to how 1.1 does it. Never mind why the changes in 2.0 were done, they're not relevant, they're just 'broken'. They've actively discussed making 2.1's permissions the same as 1.1's, though I doubt that's the final course they'll take. They're not interested in sitting down and polishing every aspect of it till it shines, merely until it's good enough. (I find it hilarious that at least one of the devs refuses to use 2.0 on his own sites because of permissions)

They do an awful lot of talking and not a lot of actual *doing* from what I've seen, maybe because they're afraid of the consequences. Well, Nao and I are officially those consequences, and whatever happens this year, as 2.0 staggers to a final release and then we march on doing what we do, we can safely let you be the judge of whether we did right to go our own way, but it's safe to say, from where we stand, we think we did the right thing.
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Garou on 18 March 2011 à 5h03
Thats what I thought I had seen about [Unknown] on the friends site. Ill even admit he probably has more experience but looking at all the support you gave to the community on top of all the code you put into the project as well as all of your own mods...

I think it comes down to passion. In your hay day at SMF, which really wasn't all that long ago reminds me and many others of [Unknown] during the early days of SMF and even Yabb SE. Ive spent a lot of time reading the older boards trying to learn as much as I can to make myself a better programmer. Your commitment to the community and the project are pretty similar.

Not to slight Nao or many of the others that have worked on SMF and supported the community. I have a deep respect for most of those that have been part of the development team and some that have just been part of the community. Well, there have been a few that I cant believe have ever been allowed on the team.. Ok Ill hush  :niark:

None the less, you Arantor, for a long time, I swore you could not be human. Add to the fact that sometimes your brand of help can be overly direct and a bit abrasive (yes I now know that it was due to burn out)... You just had to be a machine!  :D

There was a time not so long ago my friends had me thinking I was some sort of genius if not a web god. Many people I knew at the time and some even now use those WYSIWYG php builders like Front Page. They were amazed that I actually was writing in HTML and I had enough perl knowledge at the time that I could easily bend Yabb to my will. Then I got involved with SMF and saw what many of the rest of you know and can do... Ever since I have been extremely humbled.

Not fishing for a complement there. If the only true knowledge is in knowing you know nothing, I'm at least smart enough to know I'm just a hair above moron. There are times that even that much is debatable too.  :-/
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Arantor on 18 March 2011 à 10h03
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I think it comes down to passion. In your hay day at SMF, which really wasn't all that long ago reminds me and many others of [Unknown] during the early days of SMF and even Yabb SE.
Can't argue with that. It's amazing what happens when passion gets involved.
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I have a deep respect for most of those that have been part of the development team and some that have just been part of the community. Well, there have been a few that I cant believe have ever been allowed on the team..
There have been people that amazed me that were let in. And there have been people that amazed me were kept out. Nao is firmly in the latter category, apparently because of his attitude, except that his attitude is fine. You'll notice that Nao and I have something in common about that, really: Nao and I do disagree about things, but neither of us get angry about it... because we respect each other. Where it falls apart is where people stop respecting what goes in to working on such things.
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Add to the fact that sometimes your brand of help can be overly direct and a bit abrasive (yes I now know that it was due to burn out)... You just had to be a machine!
I don't see any point in wasting time pontificating and being flowery. And I find myself only being abrasive when I ask a straightforward enough question and people waste time answering something else, or going off in random directions "being helpful". Or, the worst, when people don't bother to read what's put right in front of them, that's easily the cause of most abrasion (from both me and Nao, as it happens)
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They were amazed that I actually was writing in HTML and I had enough perl knowledge at the time that I could easily bend Yabb to my will.
Perl was something I never got into, to be honest. Seen it, toyed with it, but generally avoid it, and I have respect for those that brave it.
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Ever since I have been extremely humbled.
A little humility is never a bad thing in my experience. I should note that recently I got told to pull my head out of my ass over something on sm.org, and to be fair they were right, I was a bit vicious :P
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Not fishing for a complement there. If the only true knowledge is in knowing you know nothing, I'm at least smart enough to know I'm just a hair above moron.
In all honesty, that's not entirely fair, IMHO. I'm only about a hair and a sliver about moron ;) It's all relative, really. For example, I don't even know how to drive a car :o

What I do know, though, is that knowing yourself, and more importantly understanding yourself is probably the greatest knowledge you can obtain for yourself.
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: CJ Jackson on 18 March 2011 à 16h52
Is it possible to refactor the code so it looks nothing like SMF?
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Arantor on 18 March 2011 à 17h05
It is possible, but distinctly non trivial to just upend it like that, and it still would have the legal status of being a derivative, until such times as everything as has been rewritten.

Chunks of it already have been rewritten and others refactored so it resembles its heritage less and less, but it's still overwhelmingly reminiscent right now.
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Nao/Gilles on 18 March 2011 à 21h10
Thanks Garou and Trevor for your posts.
Pete, I'm totally with it on this ;)
("We are the consequence", ahah. So true.)
CJ, are you working on a forum system yourself? (Saw that on your blog...)
Sorry Gilles, not really heard much about you.  But thats cause I am a sleep half of the time.
Nah, that's probably 'cause you didn't use Aeva Media... It was such a 'big' mod (sheer size of it, and the amount of community activity around it), that I ended up having to kill it several times -- each time coming back to it because it tickled me, and each time overwhelming me with the amount of work it represented. I had to choose between AeMe and our fork, so I chose the fork and never got to regret it. Will come back to AeMe later when I finish the port.
Anyway -- I never really got into the SM.org boards. I only posted in a few topics, always the same. No surprise some people never heard of me. Had no urge in posting everywhere. Unlike Pete who HAD to post under a new nickname after he'd left sm.org :niark:
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regardless, Pete, to me (who is Still a Noob user, not permitted to the BIG forum) you were the face of SMF..  I honestly figured without reasearch you were the Lead on the project, and if nothing else thought you were SMF.  Bet you someone is kicking their but now that you two are gone.
They're not kicking themselves, and that's the problem: they've never, ever done anything to hurt themselves -- and if you don't hurt, you don't move forward. Which is exactly what SMF needed... They're in their comfort zone, and they're not planning to move away from it. Seriously... They're so eager not to be involved in anything, that it sounds dumb. Just like this guy I heard on TV today: "Are you religious? - No no no... Neither a believer nor an atheist, all that shit." (News flash: if you're an atheist, you're religious. :mdr:)
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anyway..  I just want to wish you guys the best of luck with all of this, and let you know that I too have been in this kind of situation before.  Working tirelessly to help build something big and because of some narrow minded thinkers, you get pushed out because they know it all.
Well, good thing we had the opportunity to rebuild the thing ourselves then.
Only, it's way more work than I would have anticipated. I originally just wanted to rewrite a few features and include my mods in a default install, ah ah... Well, after 650 commits, we're not even there yet ;) (I mean, we've done tons of things, but I'm not done integrating my mods.)
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Trust me, Your better off now!!!  After reading all of this thread, I too like many here, cant wait to "Convert" It will be worth it.
I'm convinced of it, myself. :)
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: CJ Jackson on 19 March 2011 à 12h38
CJ, are you working on a forum system yourself? (Saw that on your blog...)
If that your way of putting it, then yes I am working on a tag-based bulletin board system exclusively for rockforums.tk, so far so good I already got the shortcode api implemented into the model.

Have you ever used Object Role Modelling?
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Nao/Gilles on 19 March 2011 à 12h56
No idea :mdr:
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Arantor on 19 March 2011 à 18h21
I have, though it's not something I tend to dwell on too much, it's certainly not something that PHP is *particularly* good at, though it can certainly be done with some of the bigger frameworks to a point where it's reasonably elegant.

RoR is much better for ORM.
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: CJ Jackson on 19 March 2011 à 23h57
I use ORM as a technique in designing the database structure, not as something I apply with PHP, RoR or any other programming language.  :gnehe:  http://cj-jackson.com/2011/03/17/rockforums-tk-design-progress/
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Arantor on 20 March 2011 à 0h44
Ahhh, gotcha. In that respect it's easily the way to go to figure out how a system works :)
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Nao/Gilles on 22 March 2011 à 8h08
CJ, have you had a look at FoxProg? (http://fox.noisen.com)
If you look into the database (not the blog itself), you'll find that it has many aspects that you're thinking of integrating into your system. You know, like the fact that an artist should be able to have several tags for them rather than just one category, things like that!
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Artur on 22 March 2011 à 22h16
You know one thing that I would like to see, is some stricter use of php.

No thinks like this:

Code: [Select]
// Show a link for locking the poll as well...
if ($context['poll']['lock'])
echo '
<a href="', $scripturl, '?action=lockVoting;topic=', $context['current_topic'], '.', $context['start'], ';sesc=', $context['session_id'], '">', (!$context['poll']['is_locked'] ? $txt['smf30'] : $txt['smf30b']), '</a><br />';

or this

// Show online and offline buttons?
if (!empty($modSettings['onlineEnable']) && !$message['member']['is_guest'])
echo '
', $context['can_send_pm'] ? '<a href="' . $message['member']['online']['href'] . '" title="' . $message['member']['online']['label'] . '">' : '', $settings['use_image_buttons'] ? '<img src="' . $message['member']['online']['image_href'] . '" alt="' . $message['member']['online']['text'] . '" border="0" style="margin-top: 2px;" />' : $message['member']['online']['text'], $context['can_send_pm'] ? '</a>' : '', $settings['use_image_buttons'] ? '<span class="smalltext"> ' . $message['member']['online']['text'] . '</span>' : '';
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Arantor on 23 March 2011 à 14h57
What's wrong with that, exactly?
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Artur on 23 March 2011 à 15h14
I miss {} everywhere..
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Arantor on 23 March 2011 à 18h01
Oh dear, you're going to be *very* disappointed then...
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Nao/Gilles on 23 March 2011 à 22h27
What's the point?
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: CJ Jackson on 23 March 2011 à 23h47
What's the point?
None, Artur has his ways, Arantor has his ways, you have your ways, I have my ways, everybody has their ways and I never complain!  :D

Yes, I have looked at Fox Prog or should I say Prog Rock, very nice!
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Nao/Gilles on 24 March 2011 à 7h24
Thanks ;)
As for {}, readability is seriously overrated.
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Artur on 24 March 2011 à 20h38
I like {Braces}'s.  :P

Soo.. anything new on the fork?
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Nao/Gilles on 24 March 2011 à 21h43
It has found its final domain name (I bought so many...) and I'm going crazy because I'm experimenting with 'perfect' vertical centering in headers and I can't find the minimum markup, maximum browser compatibility solution. Four days wasted on this so far. Thank you ie6 as always......
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: CJ Jackson on 25 March 2011 à 0h19
Have you tried "margin: auto 0;" in css?  I despise the Trident engine let alone IE6, why can't they use WebKit?

@Artur, you not a fan of Ugly Betty are you?  :D
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Garou on 25 March 2011 à 0h25
I say fork IE6, in this day and age I cant believe its still in use. Seriously people you've had enough time to update your in house software to use modern browsers. Get with the program or get left behind.

I didn't use to be a fan of WebKit but since they are proving to be the pioneer of HTML5 I'm gaining a new respect for it. 
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Joker™ on 25 March 2011 à 8h41
Nao I think if a user don't have even a decent browser then he don't deserve to see a perfect forum, like curves and all other perfect alignments.
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Nao/Gilles on 25 March 2011 à 9h30
The issue is that SMF2 does support IE6 nearly perfectly, and the little man inside me keeps saying, "if they do, why don't you!"... But OTOH another little man says "that's precisely because they support it that they can't move forward in terms of design"...
So, long ago I chose the mid-way solution: make sure it's usable in IE6, but screw any concepts of 'making it look the same as other browsers'... The problem is that IE7 is also quite hard to keep in line. Not as hard as IE6, but still annoying. And IE6+IE7 = not a negligible market share.
Thankfully, most of the IE6 users are in China (about a third of the users over there...), so if you don't plan to have a Chinese version of your website or to appeal to Chinese users in general, then you don't need to bother with IE6 at all.

As for vertical alignment, my main problem really is that even for modern browsers, providing flawless alignment requires at least one extra div nesting (a display:table then a series of display:table-cell). I just... Don't like that. Also, because it uses a table layout, I would need to change the order in which cells are shown (with a float layout, it's: left-right-center, while a table layout has a more regular left-center-right.)
So basically, let's just say that I made a lot of fixes to that six months ago, and I'm not in a hurry to rewrite these fixes just to make it all work in a table layout.
In the end, I decided against going inline-block or table, and staying with my current solution. After all, it works... It just doesn't work *as well* when the header takes at least two rows. But OTOH, this would never happen in a normal situation -- only place where it COULD happen is the current posthead (a custom header that shows the topic title in large characters, surrounded by previous/next topic links in plain view). And guess what? From the beginning this one had a table layout anyway... :sifflote:

Ah, you have no idea how lonely it is to get into vertical alignments... :lol:
I don't know if it's related, but the resulting commit will be revision.... 666.
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Nao/Gilles on 29 March 2011 à 12h00
Okay... Guys?
We think it's about time we went public with our URL and official website.

So, without further ado... The fork's name is Wedge!

And you can read about it and discuss it here: http://wedge.org

Hope you'll like what you'll see! (Well, you won't see a lot of things as we haven't published screenshots on the public area yet, but it'll come in time...)
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: dorje on 29 March 2011 à 13h14
 :cool:

Just signed in.  :gnehe:
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Smarts on 29 March 2011 à 22h25
great news!
the time has come
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: RvG on 23 April 2011 à 11h05
Okay... Guys?
We think it's about time we went public with our URL and official website.

So, without further ado... The fork's name is Wedge!

And you can read about it and discuss it here: http://wedge.org

Hope you'll like what you'll see! (Well, you won't see a lot of things as we haven't published screenshots on the public area yet, but it'll come in time...)
patiently waiting  :sifflote:

but i have noticed some higher queries. I'd like to keep on 20 queries and below.  :rougit:
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Arantor on 23 April 2011 à 16h21
So what if there are more than 20 queries per page?

Would you rather have 20 queries per page that all run slowly, or 40 queries per page that, in total, run FASTER than the 20/page?

Fewer queries is not always better, and I can show you case after case after case in SMF where that happens.

What about maintenance pages, are more than 20/page allowed there?
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Nao/Gilles on 23 April 2011 à 18h28
Yeah... What matters is performance, not the number of queries. You'd be surprised at how one single unoptimized query can be slower than the remaining 19 queries put together. Just get one query on a large table to generate a filesort, and it's doomed.

Anyway, I don't really see the point. wedge.org isn't running Wedge and thus it only reflects the performance of SMF, not Wedge itself. Although I don't think there'll be a noticeable change in these numbers in the final version, I'm hoping that users will get a feeling that Wedge is faster and leaner. (I want to insist on the feeling idea. This is, to me, the most important factor in website loading speed.)
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: RvG on 24 April 2011 à 14h19
So what if there are more than 20 queries per page?

Would you rather have 20 queries per page that all run slowly, or 40 queries per page that, in total, run FASTER than the 20/page?

Fewer queries is not always better, and I can show you case after case after case in SMF where that happens.

What about maintenance pages, are more than 20/page allowed there?
Yeah... What matters is performance, not the number of queries. You'd be surprised at how one single unoptimized query can be slower than the remaining 19 queries put together. Just get one query on a large table to generate a filesort, and it's doomed.

Anyway, I don't really see the point. wedge.org isn't running Wedge and thus it only reflects the performance of SMF, not Wedge itself. Although I don't think there'll be a noticeable change in these numbers in the final version, I'm hoping that users will get a feeling that Wedge is faster and leaner. (I want to insist on the feeling idea. This is, to me, the most important factor in website loading speed.)
I can confirm that the page loading is quite faster... i.e. performance makes sense.  :cool:
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: Nao/Gilles on 24 April 2011 à 18h58
How could you tell? No live website exists that's running Wedge so far...
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: RustyBarnacle on 25 April 2011 à 23h02
He used the force?  :)
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: YogiBear on 26 April 2011 à 22h32
He used the force?  :)
"May The Wedge be with you..."   :)
Title: Re: [Announcement] Fork you, SMF!
Post by: RvG on 27 April 2011 à 18h29
How could you tell? No live website exists that's running Wedge so far...
I have just the feeling that it was.  :hypocrite:
Title: Re: [Fork you, SMF!] The birth of Wedge.
Post by: Nao/Gilles on 27 April 2011 à 20h00
Nope...
Wedge looks (and plays) better than Wedge.org in every possible way. If it weren't any different, we'd already be using it and wouldn't need to build an import tool first. :P
Title: Re: [Fork you, SMF!] The birth of Wedge.
Post by: sharks on 10 May 2011 à 5h53
Thanks a lot for persevering in this fork venture. I have to ask if there will be a beta version out for public testing? or RC release, following in what SMF team does before releasing a final version? Or will we have to wait for the final version of Wedge? BTW, very cool name for your fork version.

Also, it seems that the SMF folks are finally releasing 2.0 gold at the end of this month. Are the Wedge devs going to rework everything from the 2.0 gold release, which is the recommended route to follow, as 2.0 gold will have even more bugs ironed out, so it is logical to build Wedge off of the most the stable 2.0 release, instead of customizing a bug-ridden 2.0 RC release.
Title: Re: [Fork you, SMF!] The birth of Wedge.
Post by: Arantor on 10 May 2011 à 11h57
We're not even at public alpha yet, so there's no way we can tell you what our plans are for later; we just do not know yet.

As for using SMF 2 final, we actually have to because of their licence restrictions, SMF does not go BSD until 2.0 final which means we can't make the fork code public prior to that point. But we're not going to make it public straight after because it's not ready for that yet.

We have been keeping up with bug fixes, since I still have SVN read access so I've been porting bug fixes back from their SVN into our repo as and when, though we have fixed more bugs than their repo has...
Title: Re: [Fork you, SMF!] The birth of Wedge.
Post by: Nao/Gilles on 10 May 2011 à 18h14
Thanks a lot for persevering in this fork venture. I have to ask if there will be a beta version out for public testing?
Yes. Why would we release a final public version without going beta first...?
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Also, it seems that the SMF folks are finally releasing 2.0 gold at the end of this month. Are the Wedge devs going to rework everything from the 2.0 gold release, which is the recommended route to follow, as 2.0 gold will have even more bugs ironed out, so it is logical to build Wedge off of the most the stable 2.0 release, instead of customizing a bug-ridden 2.0 RC release.
We can't release a RC-based version anyway, because RCs aren't BSD'ed, even after Final gets out.
So we're keeping up with the bug fixes in SMF2, yes. It's not like there's a lot to do. We do much more bug fixing, and we don't even have beta testers for now. :P
Title: Re: [Fork you, SMF!] The birth of Wedge.
Post by: acclude on 28 October 2011 à 20h38
Sorry for bumping this old topic.

Nao, I wanted to thank you publicly for all of the AeMe work and both you and Arantor for your work on SMF. I have many sites and use phpBB, vB, joomla, and various other software (paid and free) and I decided to give SMF a try on a new site I'm creating. I really like it so far and it's because of mods like AeMe. Even some of the most expensive paid mods I have on some of my vB and joomla sites don't function as well or have nearly as many features and usually the larger they are the more buggy they are which is not the case with AeMe. Needless to say that I really like SMF and the mods that I am using (paid and free versions) but since I'm new to the SMF world, I had no idea all of the behind-the-scenes stuff going on.

With that said, I will gladly setup a test server and help in any way that I can with Wedge development. Let me know if there's anything I can do to help. I'm a beginner-to-intermediate level programmer so I might not be the best at helping code, but I do have resources (server space and bandwidth) that I can use, I'm pretty decent at pen-testing and security, and I'm really  good at breaking things.  :mdr:

Offer stands if there's anything I can do to help with Wedge, let me know
Title: Re: [Fork you, SMF!] The birth of Wedge.
Post by: Nao/Gilles on 29 October 2011 à 1h21
Thanks ;)
We don't need help though. But you should post on wedge.org rather than here, additionally ;)
Title: Re: [Fork you, SMF!] The birth of Wedge.
Post by: Arantor on 29 October 2011 à 3h25
We will of course be interested to see what pen testing turns up once we've got a publicly usable release out but at the present time, we are keeping it to just the two main devs - and it's hard enough keeping track of all the changes with just us two sometimes...