William,
The issue is that the moderators have had promises made for longer than I've been a member(16 months). It's not that I don't think that change can happen, but the glacial speed at which changes get implemented (if they actually do) doesn't justify my time spent on the forums anymore. I typically checked the forums at least twice a day, and sometimes 5 or more times if I'm helping someone with a specific issue. All sorts of promises were made in January and October. So far things aren't better and right now I'd take the old forum software over the new. At least I could use it. How a moderator ended up with a more broken forum than the average users is.. beyond me.
Here's how I see things in the future(and the past, even the recent past) shows that this isn't likely to change:
1. All the promises that have been made to moderators have mostly been left unfulfilled. And sure, people can keep saying "its coming", but they've been saying that for 2 years. I'm not longer listening when somoeone cries wolf. Show me the wolf and then I'll believe it.
2. The newness of the forum will eventually wear off (has it already?) and we'll be left with a forum that is broken and in whatever condition it happens to be in. I'm a moderator and for a few days I didn't even have permissions that regular users have(I couldn't edit my own signature, edit anyone's post.. even my own). Then things got better(HolyK fixed those 2 issues), then worse. Right now my forum settings are broken(and yes, I realize I'm just 1 person and not that important) but it does demonstrate that the forums should NOT have just been "rolled out without a thought" and then left all weekend to fester. Will more stuff get fixed this weekend? I'm betting there won't be unless HolyK fixes them.
You should probably note that many of us at iX put in extra hours to bring you free stuff because we think it's cool. Sure, there's also a product keeping that afloat, but at the end of the day we care about what we are working on. Many of the developers are so passionate about their code you would think they gave birth to it... So please, give us just a little kudos and praise; it will go a long, long way. :)
HolyKiller is one of very few forum members who has stepped up and provided us with as much administrative assistance as we allowed him to give. The Moderators have also done an excellent job of working with us to tackle the issues as they happened. (Are we experiencing spam issues currently?)
Also note, we planned the roll out, it happened. Life moves on. I personally tested the migration 3 times before assisting Josh in the process to make it live. This was carefully planned as to make sure all google search results correctly forwarded to the new links. (Anyone complaining about internal links being broken lately?). I don't appreciate being publicly ridiculed, as an individual, or a team, (who does really?) - after all the effort and man hours that have been allocated to this project, it is disheartening to read posts like yours. I understand how we got here; but do you recognize some of the immediate benefits we gained by moving forward? The dust has certainly not settled. We still have much planned and an endless list of TODOs. :)
3. As for demotivating, maybe I should stop and ask myself why I log in when the forums are more broken than they were 2 weeks ago(but this is an "upgrade", right?), people are still posting to the wrong sections(How-Tos are for guides, not questions), promises from before I was here(about 16 months ago) are still unfulfilled(and any attempt to ask about them via emails or PMs are unanswered), etc. I don't see why I should donate my time any longer. I'd bet I spend at least 10 hours a week in the forums(and probably more than 20) and I'd bet that the people with the power to get things don't don't spend 1/4 of that time in the forum. Sure, this week they may have spent their fair share, but I bet if it were averaged out over the year, they've probably spent less than an hour a month.
4. When was the last time someone asked a question that was directed at an iXsystems employee in the forum and got no response? Hint: last week.
Then bump the thread. Send a PM, invite alfredperlstein to the conversation if you really feel like cracking a whip down. Even with tapatalk we may miss a post or two, or TL;DR may be taking place. A friendly ping is always welcome.
It's not that the project isn't worth the time. Its that each person values their time differently. Some people (like me) don't have an appreciation for getting continually fed shovels of BS that things are changing/improving/whatever, then nothing for months(years?) Just because we got new forum software doesn't tell me things are changing. It tells me someone knows how to write a check and install some software. In fact, that really sums up exactly what appears to have happened here since it is blatantly obvious that no testing was done with the forum software before making it public. The plan appears to have been "load up the software and we'll fix it later". From the stuff I've been told many of the complaints in the forum are from 2011 and even with this new forum software they still aren't fixed. How much time should I allow for "later"? It's not like old time moderators from 2011 and 2012 weren't promised big changes "later" and they still aren't here. Should I really hang around a forum that has a track record of promises that, when fulfilled, is measured in years?
I didn't see anyone step up to help except for HolyKiller. Which team do you suppose launched freenas.org? All of this gets done by the same team. We also tested the forums, but could not account for one user (You) who seemed to have been punished the most by the upgrade. If you're volunteering to start a Web Quality Assurance Team, I would be very happy to hear that. It's tough to QC stuff you're also working on. An extra set of eyes is always welcome.
I do respect you William. I may have my information wrong, but you seem to be one of the top providers of code to FreeNAS and you aren't even an iXsystem employee. Despite how much things may suck in the forum you're very committed to the project and are okay with swallowing more BS than I am. I hate BS(which is why I hate all politicians). Tell me how crappy things really are, and give me a date you will have them fixed by, and put it in writing. Don't tell me "later" and then walk away(which seems to be the norm with regards to the forum).
Until now, forums have always been at the bottom of my priorty list. Things only got fixed when urgent and brought to my attention. Now it has been placed at the top of my priority list. :)
And I feel bad for Holykiller because he was the "forum technician" and was completely uninformed as to the new forum software as I was before the rollout. There's no doubt he's trying to fix things and is confused beyond all understanding while others(everyone else?) stands around telling the moderators that 'changes/improvements are coming". Every time I visit the homepage I see HolyK online. Where's all the iXsystems people that loaded this POS software and created this mess? Their weekends need to be spent fixing the smelly pile of poo that they created. If working on your weekend isn't "fun" perhaps you shouldn't have pushed the poo out the door. And from what I've heard this isn't the first time the forum has been completely screwed up trying to "fix" things and then walked away when they realized how much the poo stunk.
HolyKiller did great work - but he isn't an employee and we could not grant him the access required to perform a lot of meaningful operations. I personally spent several days with him to get things back on track. I had to switch gears and move to freenas.org's redesign, which actually still occuring right now. Soon we'll have a re-re-re-launch of freenas.org that will be yet another step in the right direction. Then it's off to iXsystems.com's re-launch, which will then move the forums to #2 on my list. All things considered, I like Xenforo a lot more than vB. And fyi, I ran an Ikonboard when I was 16, PHP-Nuke/Post-Nuke then a heavily modded phpBB forum when I was 18 - but it was just for me and my friends because MySpace was not around at that point. We all moved to Friendster, then MySpace, then Facebook, then Twitter, and now Google Plus (or all of the above). I have a geeky interest in forum software and experience setting up and administering many different options across multiple platforms. However, I have never been involved in a community as active and large as the FreeNAS Community (I'm not worthy!!) - I would greatly appreciate you looking at the forums again and this time think about the amount of effort that must be put in to not only read some of your several page posts, but reply to each of your points in an intelligent way. It feels unfair when you refuse to keep your messages clear and concise and choose to weave these multi-page rants in several different places in the forum. It feels unjust. I could spend my entire day just chatting with you guys about some magical add-on that is somehow revolutioning the art of communication. I could also make installing, configuring, and maintaining forum add-ons a full-time job. For now it's what I do when there's no pending web projects on my plate. As you can see by the new ratings feature I added today. ;-)
vB and Xenforo are MUCH easier than hacking Ikonboard, so in that regard, they are amazing peices of software. However, I always had a lot of trouble with vB and I am not sure why. Perhaps it was too different for me from my phpBB/Ikonboard background. Xenforo feels more friendly to the administrator and because of that I think it will help me help you a lot better than vB did.
This just isn't working for me. This is the "straw that broke the camel's back".
I am so sorry. I will happily escort you to the door, would you like more free software to test before you go? 9.1 Beta is now available, featuring pretty flippin' amazing additions to jails, plugins, the volume manager and much, much more!
http://www.freenas.org/download-releases.html
Don't lose faith because the forums aren't as shiny as you would have liked them. I stand behind the work I did as well as the additions HolyKiller provided. I realize our forum was never "perfect", but then again, PHP isn't the perfect programming language either. Which is why we ditched M0n0Wall for Django. It's always better to go with technology that "sucks less".
That's a rule to live by if you ask me. :)
