NeoThermic.com

Actually, [quote="http://www.phpbb.com/features.php#support"]Support

* All this is supported by an increasingly large, thriving and friendly community of members from all over the world ready to help with any problems, suggestions or just for general discussion![/quote]:P

[quote="Lieutenant Clone"]Only users have helped other users. Anyone affiliated with PHPBB has been generally usless to awnser any questions. The if the person with the question doesnt get a reply that accually awnsers the question, they are left with a broken search, and 3000+ threads in the support forum to sift through... definatly not user freindly.[/quote]
Who said we have to be user-friendly?
Why not test admins a little? :lol:

The search really can be useful too. you just need to learn what to search for. And you can start a topic, just try the search first.
If you use the support template and mention that you did try the search, then we won't tell you to search, we'll just give you an answer

AlleyKat, thankyou for that. You are so absolutely correct in everything you said. I can see their need for rules, but they take it much too far.
The first time I used the support forums I was more or less yelled at by 3 differnt people for my sig image which exceeded the allowed dimensions by a few pixels (who knew?!). Needless to say I was discouraged by the unfriendliness sought other websites for support.

Everytime I visit, I read a moderator complaining about a double post, and instead of attempting to awnser the question, they give the ever useless reponse of "use the search function". Umm if you have used that in the past eternity, you would know that it DOESNT WORK! :roll:
Only users have helped other users. Anyone affiliated with PHPBB has been generally usless to awnser any questions. The if the person with the question doesnt get a reply that accually awnsers the question, they are left with a broken search, and 3000+ threads in the support forum to sift through... definatly not user freindly.

[quote="NeoThermic"][quote="VxjasonvX"]Oh, and happy late birthday. It's strange (I don't know why, but it is) to find out that you're younger than I.
(I turned 20 on July 13th of this year).

So uhhh, 1 more year until we're legal, eh? :)[/quote]Legal? For what? To drink? I live in a bit more civial place, where I've been legal for a good 2 years plus ;)[/quote]Bah. Those silly non-US contries, always making me look like a fool!

[quote="VxJasonxV"]Sorry to be offtopic NT, but I need a favor.

1) Seems your host's e-mail problems still exist, I never got the registration e-mail.
If you could activate my user, (same username I used for this post minus the -Guest part) I'd appreciate it.[/quote]

You're activated and on top of that, your post has been properly allocated :)

[quote="VxJasonxV"]2) I wanted to ask, where on EARTH did you find that trackback bot?
Did you build it yourself?
Would you be willing to share info if that's the case?
If not, a link will be more than acceptible :D.[/quote]

Er, its rather hackish. I buit it myself from the insert_post API, along with learning how trackbacks are done and parsed. Was a good hours worth of effort :)

[quote="VxJasonxV"]3) I'll spare you the redundancy and say that my thoughts and feelings and support is available on Area51.[/quote]

:)

[quote="VxJasonxV"]Oh, and happy late birthday. It's strange (I don't know why, but it is) to find out that you're younger than I.
(I turned 20 on July 13th of this year).

So uhhh, 1 more year until we're legal, eh? :)[/quote]

Legal? For what? To drink? I live in a bit more civial place, where I've been legal for a good 2 years plus ;)

NeoThermic

Also deep respect and good wishes for your future from me, Paul - I did post that somewhere else, but I can't quite remember where so better once more.




Pauls own blog seems to be down at the moment, but for once after taking time reading the various blogs about it and giving it some serious thought, I also felt like adding my 2 cents.



I've been critical about the way things are run myself, and that definitely still stands and has nothing to do with Pauls person, not that I think I'm one of those to put my foot in my mouth or whatever it was critics was supposed to do... I still feel that international supporters are ignored, not taken seriously and generally left to swim in their own lake. I did have quite some understanding for Paul not having time to deal with every little silly lang file update from every country, and also have quite some respect for the work gone into the system made so we can update lang files ourselves - it's nice, but we also had about a year where it didn't work and where one had to submit language files 2-3-4-5 times before having them accepted by the team. That indeed feels frustrating - as a total lack of interest and as if ones work wasn't worth the time and/or effort. The international supporter forum was also a nice initiative which isn't really used. It seems to me that half the relevant posts are ignored and international supporters left to their own devices - if it's meant as a private international-to-international-forum I'd understand it, but it was introduced as a link from the team to the various localized teams, and it simply doesn't seem to work.



I started with phpbb myself somewhere in spring 2003 and became danish translator over the summer. Come Autumn I opened a danish forum myself for supporting that very translation, and it was a fullblown general phpbb support site before christmas. We, too, have our own little team problems but haven't really felt the need to take it to international proportions, as indeed such don't really belong there. It's now a still-growing, active and pretty thriving phpbb community for, with and by the users.

I decided some time ago to limit my personal involvement in phpBB.com. My danish support site is still close to my heart and I spend quite a few hours helping users every week, but I must admit that my joy of visiting .com and giving it a shot at the support there too is gone. I also gotta admit that I haven't been all able to push it away - it still gets to me, because I hate seing people on the verge of a nervous breakdown due to something that is easily explained by someone with a bit experience - you all know how the same 25 questions are asked in 40 different ways daily on the support forum.


A few examples from the latest 2 months:
The closing of the PJIRC mod support thread due to Midnightz giving up further development may be all according to rules but it has totally killed otherwise well-working support for the mods users.

Being asked to remove 1 link too many from my signature because I had 1 more than specified as allowed by the rules (I had the usual li'l linkpic to my own site, and 4 links to help users getting started - with fontsize small). I even know Anon made an effort to get 'permission', but I'm frankly shocked that the question even arose. I'll readily admit that I hadn't noticed this detail of the rules, but if moderators are the only one to have a small list of useful links in their sig, so be it.

Graham's suggestion that people shouldn't trust code from anywhere but .com in the IRC channel some weeks back was probably correct, but still made me rather annoyed (and I still find it uncalled for) - a user asked where to find the update_to_latest file separately, and I took the seemingly unwanted liberty of posting a link to my local server with the zipped file besides suggesting he downloaded it from .com.



My only thought was "here must be some kind of serious problem". Get real! Are the rules so strict that the moderators aren't allowed to decide whats fair and what's not, or are they too yellow make any kind of moderation decision? The entire result is, that highly skilled users who contribute a lot to the entire phpbb community gets picked on - and no, certainly not me in particular as I'm quite the php amateur and anyway probably deserve most of such pickings, but many others - and they leave in disappointment, leaving still more inexperienced users in the dust.

In short, the signal being sent out is 'We have very strict rules, we know it all and decide it all - we neither want your help nor consider your suggestions'. Which I've just come to accept, but the losses of mod authors in itself speaks volumes, IMHO.

Thats why I can't quite help the feeling of "*shrug* so what" about all these (months-old) blog posts I've read today over the poor number of applications for Olympus - why did anyone expect a flood of applications to join? Frankly, I didn't personally feel sure that I had the skills required nor that I could dedicate enough time - but I've seen a lot of quite capable coders passing thru the site as modders and leaving because of the treatment they get - not from the users, but from the team as a whole.



I dunno why, but I had to get this off my chest, and I have a hard time finding somewhere fitting to post it on phpbb.com. It's none too positive, I know, but I've given it quite some thought on why I feel I've lost the spark about giving a helping hand myself and above covers it pretty well.



I'd understand it if it was just my own person being disliked, I have a tendency to step on peoples toes when I'm in a lousy mood or just out of thoughtlessness and I know it. Just because I don't care, doesn't mean that I don't understand as Fry would have put it. And I'm probably not one to tell others how to run a website. But wouldn't a higher degree of user friendliness be a good idea if you want dedicated, helpful and skillful coders?



If anyone wants me to expand on any of these points, PM me @ phpbb.com - I can't quite sneak past NT's Windows Serial-length Visual Confirmation for some reason (or maybe I can't read lol).



Hmm and after one monster bunch of words on how I see things, I still wanna wish all (extremely patient) readers a [b]merry christmas[/b].

Sorry to be offtopic NT, but I need a favor.

1) Seems your host's e-mail problems still exist, I never got the registration e-mail.
If you could activate my user, (same username I used for this post minus the -Guest part) I'd appreciate it.

2) I wanted to ask, where on EARTH did you find that trackback bot?
Did you build it yourself?
Would you be willing to share info if that's the case?
If not, a link will be more than acceptible :D.

3) I'll spare you the redundancy and say that my thoughts and feelings and support is available on Area51.

Oh, and happy late birthday. It's strange (I don't know why, but it is) to find out that you're younger than I.
(I turned 20 on July 13th of this year).

So uhhh, 1 more year until we're legal, eh? :)

[quote="NeoThermic"]The same holds true for the forums. While they are your biggest critics, winning them over (while mostly impossible) is always fun to do. If you ban them, you're only fuling their hate for the project, which is never good.NeoThermic[/quote]
That's true. Never thought of it that way though.

[quote="who_cares"]my only question is: Why didn't the admins ban more whiners? I think they should be banned immediatly for attacking a admin or mod that way.
But yes, proTFX was one of the best. It really sucks that he's leaving.[/quote]

[quote="Michael Corleone in The Godfather: Part II"]There are many things my father taught me here in this room. He taught me: keep your friends close, but your enemies closer. [/quote]

The same holds true for the forums. While they are your biggest critics, winning them over (while mostly impossible) is always fun to do. If you ban them, you're only fuling their hate for the project, which is never good.

NeoThermic

[b][url=http://www.grahamje.net/?p=13]Random Wibbles of Graham[/url] sent this trackback:[/b]
[

my only question is: Why didn't the admins ban more whiners? I think they should be banned immediatly for attacking a admin or mod that way.
But yes, proTFX was one of the best. It really sucks that he's leaving.

Say [url=http://www.petitiononline.com/byepaul/petition.html]Thank you Paul[/url]!

Since your blog doesn't support trackbacks, I just linked to yours from mine. http://www.michealcottingham.com/blog/2005/09/18/so-psotfx-left-what-now/ :mrgreen:
[size=75]
[Editors note: My blog now supports trackbacks. This topic's trackback URL is [url=http://www.neothermic.com/phpBB/trackback.php?t=44]here[/url]][/size]

Amen

Well put. :D