Lack of Designs in SMF?

[vbgamer45]

Why i don't submit many mods.. Approval chances very low Still waiting for approval.. MyBB at least lets it post to their site but it says the "staff hasn't reviewed it yet"

• Author: vbgamer45
• Submitted On: April 29, 2018, 11:57:57 PM
• Last Updated: May 03, 2018, 02:01:32 PM
• Total Downloads: 0
  
  

 

[Deprecated]

vbgamer you have more mods than me and started before me. I was on the SMF mod squad for a couple months. (They suck!)

I think you just have the bifurcating issue that SMF and MyBB have different mod policies. However SMF has a "working on mods" forum section where mod authors can post works in progress, ask for peer review.

Remember that SMF's mod squad has to understand and test your whole mod including security aspects. And they are unpaid volunteer labor. I almost got sucked into that, the logical place for a modder to go.

The thing I was intending to take up as my crusade was to enforce mods not interfering with other mods. I was going to watch things like whitespace and getting tabs wrong. You have to diff each and every modified page and make certain that the coding style (indents and such) have not been altered, or the package manager just can't cope with that.

 

[Pete]

Remember that SMF's mod squad has to understand and test your whole mod including security aspects

They haven't even started looking at a mod submitted a month ago. They're not part way through a review, they haven't even started looking yet.

The thing I was intending to take up as my crusade was to enforce mods not interfering with other mods.

Better time and energy to be spent in making mods that didn't interfere with other mods by not making file edits at all. This has been a core feature for the last 8 years. And before anyone tells me it's impossible to do x or y with hooks, it almost certainly isn't.

For example check out LevGal - the gallery I did. While just adding an action etc. isn't a hugely complex deal with hooks, doing pretty URLs for just the gallery in the format of index.php?media/item/media-listing-2.130/ with SMF is... interesting. As well as the fact that I needed to catch when people deleted membergroups (to tidy up the case where albums were owned by membergroups that were just deleted)... for which there isn't a hook. Nevertheless I figured out a way to do it in 2.0 anyway even without a hook - and still no file edit.

Oh, and it also made blocks available to both SP and TP without any file edits. But I digress: fixing the 'file edits playing nice' is fixing a symptom, making mods work better fundamentally is the real challenge and the real goal to be achieved.

 

[Deprecated]

Wow, the mod squad is acting just like the mods and devs. If they had been nicer to me I might have still been on the mod squad. I'm glad they weren't. I have more time for my own sh.... stuff. They are probably short handed. Obviously the mod squad has to have enough team members to carry the work load in a timely manner. I think 4 weeks should be the maximum from submitted to approved.

You are preaching to the choir. I converted *ALL* of my mods to hook paradigm maybe 18 months ago. There are a few times you can't avoid changing code, but the rule should be that any modder must prove they can't hook it before they are allowed to change base code. I still have a few places where there were no hooks for what I needed to do.

One possibility I have never seen anybody discuss, there is absolutely no reason you can't mod the code and add your own integration hook. The code and process are simple.

Pete, you always assume the worst about me. You assumed my mods do not use integration hooks. Nothing could be further from the truth. All of my mods make maximal use of hooks, and only very few of them touch the code at all.

Please note that during my tenure on the mod squad hooks were just beginning use, and the majority of mods were code changes. At the time the majority of mods killing my own mods (in my support topics) turned out to be somebody messed up the base code with things like indentation and other whitespace problems that prevented my mods from installing correctly. Please also note that during that time the hooks were not in wide use so code conflicts were the leading reason for mods killing other mods.

I changed some of my mods to hook driven before I withdrew them from the mod site, and the rest of them to hook driven once they became private mods.

Please do not make assumptions about me. You are projecting negative things onto me where those things do not exist, are inaccurate, are worst case assumptions about things you just don't know. If you have any questions just ask. All my mods make maximal use of integration hooks, and none of my mods make any code changes unless absolutely necessary.

 

[Pete]

there is absolutely no reason you can't mod the code and add your own integration hook. The code and process are simple.

Except that misses the point. The whole point is to not have file edits AT ALL. If you have to edit the file, the process is already broken. Because if you have to edit one file, why bother avoiding edits for other things? Before you know it, you save nothing.

You assumed my mods do not use integration hooks.

When you talk about making sure whitespace isn't a problem, a problem that literally cannot occur with hooks, I have to wonder why it's brought up at all... when the only reason to bring it up is when hooks aren't used.

As for why I think the worst of some people, I'm responding to what is said. If you talk the talk where it's clearly only about issues caused by file edits, I'm going to assume you're talking about file edits.

The worst thing though, if I'm honest, is the "in my day" speeches that don't really match up any more. Almost none of the people that were team when you were are still around. Most of the people when I was team first time around are gone too.

And the real kicks in the teeth, you definitely weren't around for, like Unknown saying it was "like my baby has a cancer". Given how much time and energy he put into it, I can see that. You weren't around for the times when the project managers all basically resigned at once, or when project managers literally kicked everyone out of the team until they signed an agreement to be nice to each other. You weren't there for the blackmailing, or the team threatening to send its own members DMCA notices.

Don't tell me you're one of them, because you're not. You're better than us. Don't keep trying to argue that you're down on that level, because for those of us who were there, it was a shameful time for us all. We all failed the project, every one of us who was involved.

I'm just bitter than in the last few years, no lessons have been learned, and I'm bitter that it took me three forks and countless hours of code to finally say "no more".

 

[Deprecated]

Except that misses the point. The whole point is to not have file edits AT ALL. If you have to edit the file, the process is already broken. Because if you have to edit one file, why bother avoiding edits for other things? Before you know it, you save nothing.

Pete, you are missing the point that there are sometimes instances where it can't be done with the limited hooks they provided.

Please quit explaining to me things I already know, pretending I don't understand them.

And yes I am glad I wasn't around for that nasty business. I quit playing with them because of the nastiness that preceded the nastiness. Your stories about the dev battles have amused me, in a sort of sick way. I should be wishing they'd get their interpersonal problems fixed, but instead I'm thinking in terms of poetic justice.

And the people who use their code are the real losers, getting messed up code, late, and getting insulted when they ask support questions.

You and I are among the lucky who can fork off and write our own code. I'll sniff 2.0.16 when/if they release it, and use 2.0.x until they break one of my more complicated mods. Good thing is they are hook based so there's a good chance they will continue to operate correctly.

But 2.1? No, not gonna happen for me.

 

[Pete]

I guess you didn't see the point about doing things where there weren't hooks to do it with, and doing it anyway. My example: there isn't a hook for "delete membergroup" to clean up my stuff afterwards. I figured out how to do it, without edits, still using hooks, in 2.0.