Hah. It could be worse.
I got a life-time ban for daring to defend myself here after receiving a series of personal attacks there.
That said, I think some precision is due here:
The TrueCharts team clearly includes engineering talent that is providing free work toward fulfilling a big community need. The scale of the demand is such that there will be some percentage of pushy, unreasonable users that bombard them on a daily basis. And I can say from first-hand experience that fielding that kind of input can be annoying and demoralizing. So, there is a strong temptation to make a lot of rules, etc. to control how much time is spent on support.
Also, it should be pointed out that it is now a decent sized team over there. Not everyone has the same attitude. I can personally say that there are some very helpful, patient people on their team.
Furthermore, I'm excited to see how the TrueNAS Community apps develop. But, so far, TrueCharts has done a better job (than the official apps) of including the bells and whistles many users need. For specific examples: app-level VPN support, app-level ingress configuration, faster version updates.
The problems, imo, are fixable:
1. They should partner with or promote from within someone who better understands basic business / customer service.
I can already hear the "this isn't a business! it's free! take it or leave it!" response. Sorry, that just doesn't logically work. Even a person who says, "here, let me help you with that" out of the blue has some level of responsibility. It's true that it's less responsibility than if someone paid for that help. But, when you offer any help, even when free, it's fair for the people who accept the help to assume that you are at least committed to doing the job right and being considerate of their interests.
"You fucked up by trusting us too much." is never reasonable or ethical, even when you aren't charging anything. Right now, that seems to be the project's motto. Anyone who has run a successful business or been involved with CX at a company will understand this and know how to fix the tone issue.
2. Doing the job "right" entails doing the work to anticipate the most obvious problems users are going to have and preparing solutions (upgrade scripts, upgrade tutorials, etc.) in advance.
Again, I can hear the response, "we dont have time to figure out everyone in the world's configuration." Nobody is asking for that. But, there are very obvious, predictable problems that have come up during upgrades/changes that zero effort was put in to beyond maybe a one sentence warning on some obscure twitter feed. Engineers should not be playing dumb about the difference between edge cases and predictable problems affecting 90% of users.
Not wanting to deal with those issues isn't some principled position. It's wanting to move forward with a project while neglecting a perhaps unpleasant but necessary aspect of it.
3. Scale down the scope of the project.
It looks impressive on the surface to list out 3 million apps. But, it would be better to have fewer apps with enough support that users can rely on them more and count on better solutions during upgrades.
I'm pretty sure that 90% of TrueCharts users are using the same 20 or so apps.