What made you choose SMF?

[Pete]

Don't tell me, I wasn't in that train (Yes I did bad things but when it comes to end you can't say I didn't do it to keep the Software above the person).

None of us are innocent but I believe some of us (you included) can say that whatever we did, we did with sincere belief that it was about protecting the protect and doing right by it. Hindsight may show some of us were wrong, some of us were right and some of us... well... the past is somewhat the past.

 

[Deprecated]

It always gets down to this for me, I want the code and support without the emo and the drama. But it doesn't come that way unless the only part of their site I visit is the download section. So I mod their code and support myself. This works well for everybody concerned.

What would be nice is to have one person (or a group of a few) who have overall authority but are not involved in development or member support, who could tell the devs what will be, and tell the moderators to be polite to members.

It's so sad that they have a fundamentally good product and it's being spoiled by their people. It's mature leadership that they lack.

 

[Pete]

who have overall authority but are not involved in development or member support, who could tell the devs what will be

This has been tried, it always generates bad feeling because it makes the huge presumption that devs aren't users and have no say in what gets built.

See also comments about democracy.

 

[Deprecated]

And also it's hard to get unpaid labor to do what you want them to do instead of what they want to do.

Which reminds me with more than 1,000,000 downloads all I ever got for my mods was maybe bit less than USD$200 donations. I got a lot of thanks in my support topics. All the thanks plus 50 cents is still not enough to buy a postage stamp. That was for maybe 500+ hours of labor writing them.

I used to get $800-$1,500 for writing computer magazine articles, 3 weeks to write one article. Dr. Dobb's Journal, C Users Journal, etc.