Neverside

In my humble opinion, and I know this is far too late to do anything about, but TF was great. I loved it, and honestly when the name Neverside pooped into my brain for the first time, I wondered, "Why try to fix something that's not broken?" I wondered this, because of all the things I saw, there weren't any problems. There were problems in the backend of things, this is apparent now, but as people's knowledge grows, referring to the devs, it seemed they went from something that worked, to something of their own, that ended up not working. Even if TF was on phpbb or vb(not sure which), that's a lot better than NS... I understand what the devs were trying to do, making it better, BUT, if TF is not broken as far as the end user sees, then the best advice I could have given at the time would be to have kept it up, and work on NS as a side project until it was into the beta stages, then have people critique it, and work out all the bugs, and once that's done, put out a released version, and THEN ask the community if they still want tutorial forums up any running. Chances are there will still be quite a few people who want to stay with TF simply because it works for them.

Who cares what one's intentions would be if they visit your site? They could just be doing a home project learning photoshop, or plan on being a CEO of their own software company, you can't judge the needs of a site based on what people might be doing years down the line. As long as there are devs available to keep TF up and running, that'd be good enough. Hell I'd be more than happy to help with tutorialforums if given the chance.

But, all this talk about nostalgia and such just makes me think, well why is this a nostalgic moment? Because in those days, it used to be awesome, joyful, and filled with happiness, and now it's like a f'in graveyard...

I'm just anxious to see what the new site will look like as well as the name of it. I hope to god it works, because if it doesn't, I'm going to go insane.

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Okay, guys. This is it. This is all the drama you'll ever get out of me, because I want to put an end to this.

As a Neverside developer, I saw most of the **** that happened. The fault is not Locke's. The fault is not Jeremie's. The fault is not anyone who had anything to do with the development and production of Neverside. The fault is not in the name.

These are all stupid assumptions to make. Let's clarify.

Locke is a great leader. He knows what he's doing. I've never seen anyone able to convene so many people for one purpose at one time than him. Truly amazing. He directed this whole process, so obviously people think that he fucked up somewhere. But he lead as best he could, and now that I've observed it... it was pretty damn well-done.

Jeremie is a great developer. He has his flaws, sure, like his monstrous ego among other things. But god damn it, he coded an *entire* forum system *from scratch* *for free*. Give him some fucking credit, guys. I've seen the NeverAPI code. I've used it. It's not nearly as bad as some people make it out to be. Hell, if someone were willing to dive into it I bet the whole damn thing could be finished. It would need to be refactored a bit -- remove some of the strange premature optimizations, but really... given the functionality we've got now, it's pretty impressive. Yeah, he "abandoned" NS, but whatever. It's not a big deal. We all move on.

Oh, and that three-month period of downtime? Unexpected. Jeremie overestimated how quickly he could code; there was some miscommunication among staff, and we ended up not being able to do much about it. **** happens, guys. It wasn't anyone's fault in particular.

The rest of the development team were mostly unable to contribute to the codebase as it was available only on the production server (which we realistically didn't have access to), and the SCM we had available wasn't production-ready. We should have pushed more for access to the code. Oh well. But chances are a bunch of us wouldn't have time to edit it anyway. We had lives. Neverside development is what happens in free time -- after all, we're doing it all as a service to the community. And we did fix what we could, we did develop what we could.

As for the name: seriously, guys. If this were a dedicated community, the name wouldn't have mattered for two seconds. People would not have risen against a name change as if it were the end of the world. What kind of immature reaction is that? People don't throw hissy fits when AT&T becomes Cingular becomes Bellsouth becomes SBC-owned-AT&T. Honestly...

The events that occurred were unfortunate. Mistakes were made, and they weren't anyone's fault in particular. Sometimes miscommunication and poor timing can't be avoided. That's what triggered most of this. For the rest of this, I offer a more caustic explanation...

I'm fucking sick of you guys shitting on Neverside, Locke, Jeremie and whoever else you think you can pin this on. The fact that there are so many threads about why NS is dead is evidence that the problem lies somewhere else.

Yeah -- I'm blaming you. All of you. Grow up, or move on.

I am.

--Noel

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<3

So you ditch this place for Audoptic with Locke, then **** on the users? Nice job.

Also, if your entire team was so great how did you manage to kill an extremely popular forum?

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FrankoTPC is my dad!

Simon-
I've never had contact with you and I've never seen what you've done. Until you popped up as a developer for NS, you were non existent to me. I don't judge people on their personalities, but rather their commitment to a project which they are involved in. I don't know what happened amongst the dev crew, but I do know something went haywire down the line. If the site was created by everyone on TF (suggestions, critiques, votes etc) it would have been a more strenuous project, but in the end it would have accomplished 'more' than what the dev crew had bargained for. My only real gripe is that the future of a large website was not controlled by the community, which is what made TF so large.

Noel-
I don't know who Jeremie is, but I know who Locke is. Locke has, to me, a leadership mindset but it is nowhere near being ready for large decision such as the forum shift. I gripe about him the most because he has a large, one sided mind. He sees things as he wants to see them and I have never once seen him use someone else's viewpoint. He reminds me of Agent Smith in the Matrix movies. This narrow viewpoint of course causes issues. I didn't think like this before, but now I do as my role in my job requires me to do so. He may have possessed some leadership traits, but until he proved himself as being a stable, flexible, understanding and worthy contributor to the community... he should have never been let in to the moderator crew and onward.

A lot of NS problems were unexpected. I still stand behind my belief that if the community was more involved in the creation, it could have been an even greater place to visit for everyone. Ns may have been a "in my free time" project for the dev crew, but the issue with that is if there is not enough contribution and involvement, progress will move at a gimp snails pace.

I can also side with Shadow. The state that this place is in should have NEVER, EVER happened. My only hope is is that the new design will be better and will encourage good traits in their moderators, dev crew, and administrators.

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STG2 (SW) in the United States Navy
Nemo is my homeboy!

Originally posted by Noel:

As for the name: seriously, guys. If this were a dedicated community, the name wouldn't have mattered for two seconds. People would not have risen against a name change as if it were the end of the world. What kind of immature reaction is that? People don't throw hissy fits when AT&T becomes Cingular becomes Bellsouth becomes SBC-owned-AT&T. Honestly...

That's because AT&T/Cingular sucks... I go with a specific company based on their services and quality of that service for the most part, but the name still DOES matter. I guarantee 100% if TF was brought back to the exact way it used to be, people would be cheering. Maybe the name might not matter very much, but once a reputation has been created for a community, it generally sticks... So that is the reason people incl. myself are fussin over the name.

Originally posted by Noel:

The events that occurred were unfortunate. Mistakes were made, and they weren't anyone's fault in particular. Sometimes miscommunication and poor timing can't be avoided. That's what triggered most of this. For the rest of this, I offer a more caustic explanation...

Owning up to those mistakes and continuing to fix it instead of running away when times get tough is not the right thing to do?

Originally posted by Noel:

I'm fucking sick of you guys shitting on Neverside, Locke, Jeremie and whoever else you think you can pin this on. The fact that there are so many threads about why NS is dead is evidence that the problem lies somewhere else.

Yeah -- I'm blaming you. All of you. Grow up, or move on.

I am.

--Noel

Great, blame the community, I'm sure that's the reason these problems happened...

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There's a soft spot in my heart for TF.

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Fomerly known as lasnaranjas. Holler.

Well, in theory TF could be redone. Just buy the domain tutorialforum.com and goto http://web.archive.org/web/20030203231057/http://www.tutorialforums.com/ to get all the graphics. It should only take maybe a few hours of work to get all the images lined up properly with all the correct dimensions and everything. There are certainly new versions of vBulletin/phpBB that have been released over the past few years, making for a more secure, better forum system.

People think forum communitys are dead, saying they died along with all those technical graphics we all used to think were so cool some odd years ago, but forums aren't going anywhere. Sure there are other ways to communicate, I know some forum haters who love messenger programs like AIM or Meebo, but forums are still quite popular...

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I blame it all on the fucking asshole known as Rider.

What the hell is Audoptic? The site doesn't load for me.

Anyone who complains that the developers were incompetent or lazy or anything else is an idiot. Maybe Jeremie would give a **** if he was being paid, but there is no reason for him to care other than to please random people on the Internet; I'm sure he was doing something more productive. The reason this site's development was so slow was that there was no incentive to work on it.

Last edited by Rad, December 14th, 2007 11:49 PM (Edited 2 times)

Originally posted by HelloMoto:

Well, in theory TF could be redone. Just buy the domain tutorialforum.com and goto http://web.archive.org/web/20030203231057/http://www.tutorialforums.com/ to get all the graphics. It should only take maybe a few hours of work to get all the images lined up properly with all the correct dimensions and everything. There are certainly new versions of vBulletin/phpBB that have been released over the past few years, making for a more secure, better forum system.

What the hell is the point of that? You think reverting Neverside back to a half assed version of TF is going to make any of a difference?

TF was good in it's own way. If Neverside actually gets revised and somehow becomes fucking awesome, it still wont be the same, so just drop it.

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