August 5th, 2006 
My Thoughts... and yes they're nice
Case of speed vs. dated software anymore.
One thing I am going to clear up (kidd posted this rather interesting statement in the news post):
Originally posted by kidd175:Well, seeing as how I was apart of the April Fool's joke back on TF, I was guarenteed exlcusive member privs, a case of Bawls (which I never saw), and a lifetime subscription.
Only person I promised Bawls to was ActionPlant and he wasn't really interested in it. Not everyone who participated got Bawls (That was over 50 people that day Kidd), but the membership bit we thought would be cool. Unfortunately that was never implemented so it's not really possible to reward it now is it?
If you'd like to see a case of Bawls, I will gladly send you a case to your house today (I am not kidding either), however I do not remember promising you in particular, I think only 1 or 2, it was 2 years ago after all. If you really wanted it you should have said something all of those other times you bugged me. So don't piss over spilled milk if you never spoke up, as I never heard from you about this little 'thing', if I did and I did indeed promise it I would have sent it. So if you truly say I said it, I will send it out. Not kidding either.
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As for TutorialForums vBulletin, this needs to be explained rather thoroughly, but I am not going to as I'm tired of going over it.
The decision to goto NS in the state it's in was a misjudgement on my part and my responsibility is accountable for it alone. Not Jeremie or the other developers, I was just so sick and tired of getting a text message or e-mail about how the server is down every other hour that anything was bliss to me, so my judgement was clouded and I made a poor decision. Welcome to life.
vBulletin was a disaster area due to 1 LARGE and important reason.
Jelsoft has the crappiest idea of implementation of a feature I've ever seen in my life. In the 2.2.x series of vBulletin, which TF ran off of upto 2.3.2 or so. Akash, Brian, Rob and Dave installed hacks from the http://vbulletin.org community. Back then, it was all hardcoded for the most part and template/file changes. This made upgrading usually a *****, and it showed. The performance was due to the hacks + the upgrading being horrid from Jelsoft.
Now, with the vBulletin 3.5+ series, the new system called Hooks is a modular based system that removes the hardline crap and fully makes modular enhancement and integration much easier.
So, my overall recommendation is go back to vBulletin. NeverAPI is dated anyways being on PHP4, and I will even say it's optimised incorrectly as Jeremie got carried away often. It's fast, yeah but also it is Procedural. It would have been fine if Jeremie would have A) Documented the engine, which was never done and B) actually worked on the engine himself when he said he would and fix the stuff.
When you work with more than 1 developer, OOP is the route to go. Whether or not you sacrifice speed or not is irrelevant, if it's a team project OOP wins. However... I made another misjudgement and allowed it to be done in Procedural as I was assured it would be documented for the other developers. Once again, my fault and my responsibility alone.
So, I recommend fully to going back to vBulletin and re-implementing the features that was set out with NS. I would even say go back to TutorialForums at this point, but if you want to stick with NS then the redesign should be influenced from Rob's 2 skins that were popular. The Original and Macish ones, which they seem to be a bit on course with what I've seen so far.
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So in complete closing, and with great annoyance in eating my own words, there it is. Yes, the site is faster however it lacks even the BASIC features of any other community out there (proboards has more features for it's free users). So yes, features do make a community possible and the fact PMs and Search took a year to implement just further showed that fact. Scott has his own life though, getting married, school and a job -- He doesn't get paid to do this so you cannot expect him to finish it promptly when other things have priority. Same goes for Joe, Dave and the rest of the staff.
Best of luck to all.
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For the record, this is not a blast to Jeremie or anyone else. Everyone did a phenominal job in getting things this far. Members and Staff alike, it's just poor decisions were made and some poor execution. There isn't a single individual to blame, even though I do blame myself for most of it.
It's just simply run it's course, so lets call it a day.
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Last edited by Locke, August 5th, 2006 01:53 AM (Edited 2 times)
We're basically on the same page now in regard to vBulletin.... though not final, I'm leaning that way and trying to work out a full plan on how to make it happen if I do choose that. I'm glad to hear about the vBulletin "hooks" for installing plugins now - that's waaaay better than the old way of directly hacking the PHP source code.
