Community Projects

[---MAD---]

Hi there,

One big factor that will sway people towards (or even away from) XF will be the amount of useful add-ons available that people require to run their forums efficiently especially if they are migrating from other software where they already have these add-ons.

I was wondering if XF plan (obviously not in the immediate future) to run community projects to get highly requested add-ons to be created by the community and monitored officially by XF staff?

I believe IPB do this and it appears to be very successful. This can at least help fill the gaps where popular addons are needed but require a lot of time for single devs to pursue themselves and would off course distract the XF staff too much from working on the forums, to do themselves. I can see this being especially useful for bridge addons (with different CMSs/blogs/chat/e-commerce) and maybe even a way to get a script produced to connect multiple XF communities.

These products would obviously be free for licensed customers and help the community collaborate together rather than set up to create an income.

Thoughts?

 

[Blandt]

I believe this is a fan base effort. There is such site xanfans.com hopefully it'll be up and running with lots of mods soon

 

[Jamie]

Although IPB does have community projects and they do work and help the community 'somewhat' they do go lacking in support and updates. An example. There is a community project over there called IP.Links and there have been a number of questions asked and never answered in that forum.. things just go silent...

If something like this were to happen here, I believe there needs to be some way to prevent this. The IPB staff can't force someone to answer questions and fix bugs, but since it's on their site some people expect it and the line between Company and Community grows dim.

As much as things have gone wrong over at vB, when I ran it I really like vb.org The way the site was set up making it easy to find stuff by version, style/mod etc. How you could click it as installed and if something went wrong (exploit) then you would get an email telling you about it. I also really liked the layout of the the first post/information about the mod and then the comments followed.

The one thing I didn't like and would like to see done differently here is when a developer creates something, and then some years pass and they haven't updated their mod, no one else can without their permission. I understand it's their code, but it would be nice if they agreed during the uploading of the mod, that if they didn't support it past a certain time (1 year? 2 years?) or past a certain version (2 versions back? 3?) then the code is 'released' to the community to update as needed. I don't know what a fair time is, but I have seen where a really great mod dies because the coder got a life, got busy or his wife wouldn't let him play any more..

I rambled on and on, this was more than you asked for.. I don't think "community projects' are a real good way to go, I think something more the lines of vb.org is a better bet in my opinion...

Jamie

 

[GeorgeEcuador]

Excellent proyect...

Thks you..