HTS Needs to Stop Sucking

[insomaniacal]

The attitude here is the problem. Everyone's pissed as fuck about fuck-all. It reminds me of Kindergarten. Yes, Kage is far from perfect, so are most of us. This whole flame-fest really boils down to one thing. No one knows WTF is going on. The forum staff, for the most part, don't, regulars to the site don't, only the devs and a few admins know if anything is getting done or not. People see promises and talk of a recode, and it looks dead from the outside. That spawned this thread. A short, weekly news post, even filled with mundane, boring shit would resolve this problem.

As in,
[1/11/11] - Worked on Blog Code, fixed the bugs relating to post dates.
[1/13/11] - Several security holes found and fixed in mission system.
[1/17/11] - SQL injection vulnerability found by user X, fixed. THANKS!
[1/18/11] - That's all for this week! If you have any questions, please ask a Dev, or PM an admin, thank you!

This shows the community progress is being made, helps keep everyone roughly on the same page, shows you care about the site, and would most likely have prevented this flame-fest bullshit from going on. I'm suggesting we drop all the hurt feelings, accusations (false or otherwise), and emotion from this issue, and help fix it by implementing something like this.

As for Framework discussions, that's the job of the Devs. They have the final say, so there's no need to bitch endlessly about it if you ask me. This is a comments/suggestions section, so suggest something, don't act like an elitist douchebag and expect people to drop down and obey your clearly superior intellect.

Now please, let's all be civil and either continue a discussion of ideas to make HTS a cooler corner of the 'net, or let the thread die, and hopefully take a lesson away from it. That's all.

[fashizzlepop]

That's exactly it and was my primary concern in the OP.

[Korvin]

The attitude here is the problem. Everyone's pissed as fuck about fuck-all. It reminds me of Kindergarten. Yes, Kage is far from perfect, so are most of us. This whole flame-fest really boils down to one thing. No one knows WTF is going on. The forum staff, for the most part, don't, regulars to the site don't, only the devs and a few admins know if anything is getting done or not. People see promises and talk of a recode, and it looks dead from the outside. That spawned this thread. A short, weekly news post, even filled with mundane, boring shit would resolve this problem.

As in,
[1/11/11] - Worked on Blog Code, fixed the bugs relating to post dates.
[1/13/11] - Several security holes found and fixed in mission system.
[1/17/11] - SQL injection vulnerability found by user X, fixed. THANKS!
[1/18/11] - That's all for this week! If you have any questions, please ask a Dev, or PM an admin, thank you!

This shows the community progress is being made, helps keep everyone roughly on the same page, shows you care about the site, and would most likely have prevented this flame-fest bullshit from going on. I'm suggesting we drop all the hurt feelings, accusations (false or otherwise), and emotion from this issue, and help fix it by implementing something like this.

As for Framework discussions, that's the job of the Devs. They have the final say, so there's no need to bitch endlessly about it if you ask me. This is a comments/suggestions section, so suggest something, don't act like an elitist douchebag and expect people to drop down and obey your clearly superior intellect.

Now please, let's all be civil and either continue a discussion of ideas to make HTS a cooler corner of the 'net, or let the thread die, and hopefully take a lesson away from it. That's all.

IMO, the flaming is originating with the mods, not fashizzle. fashizzle is giving great suggestions, while the mods/devs/admins are arguing about them.

[sanddbox]

The attitude here is the problem. Everyone's pissed as fuck about fuck-all. It reminds me of Kindergarten. Yes, Kage is far from perfect, so are most of us. This whole flame-fest really boils down to one thing. No one knows WTF is going on. The forum staff, for the most part, don't, regulars to the site don't, only the devs and a few admins know if anything is getting done or not. People see promises and talk of a recode, and it looks dead from the outside. That spawned this thread. A short, weekly news post, even filled with mundane, boring shit would resolve this problem.

As in,
[1/11/11] - Worked on Blog Code, fixed the bugs relating to post dates.
[1/13/11] - Several security holes found and fixed in mission system.
[1/17/11] - SQL injection vulnerability found by user X, fixed. THANKS!
[1/18/11] - That's all for this week! If you have any questions, please ask a Dev, or PM an admin, thank you!

This shows the community progress is being made, helps keep everyone roughly on the same page, shows you care about the site, and would most likely have prevented this flame-fest bullshit from going on. I'm suggesting we drop all the hurt feelings, accusations (false or otherwise), and emotion from this issue, and help fix it by implementing something like this.

As for Framework discussions, that's the job of the Devs. They have the final say, so there's no need to bitch endlessly about it if you ask me. This is a comments/suggestions section, so suggest something, don't act like an elitist douchebag and expect people to drop down and obey your clearly superior intellect.

Now please, let's all be civil and either continue a discussion of ideas to make HTS a cooler corner of the 'net, or let the thread die, and hopefully take a lesson away from it. That's all.

IMO, the flaming is originating with the mods, not fashizzle. fashizzle is giving great suggestions, while the mods/devs/admins are arguing about them.

Oversimplification. Thank you for degenerating an important issue.

[0xBEEF1337]

Part 1:

This shows the community progress is being made, helps keep everyone roughly on the same page, shows you care about the site, and would most likely have prevented this flame-fest bullshit from going on. I'm suggesting we drop all the hurt feelings, accusations (false or otherwise), and emotion from this issue, and help fix it by implementing something like this.

You know how we deal with flamers professionally? You simply ignore it, talk about the relevant parts and forget about the primadona-induced rage screaming that distracts from the core idea.

eg,
Alice: "I believe we don't have enough technological interest in the foums because admin XYZ is a sack of rotten assholes"
Bob: "The technological interest is secondary to issue QWERTY because of A, B and C."
Moderator, private to Alice: "Alice, if you can't control what you say, you will be removed from the discussion."

Long story short: Don't bitch about a flame-war if you're participating. You can have your mods to clean up the place if you're not.



---------------

Part 2:
The technology and dev journals are lovely and a great way to show what's going on from a technological development perspective, but, where's the 'business plan'? What are your goals? How are you going to get there? Please, technology is only a way to facilitate reaching your goals, it will not make them magically happen. If you build it: they still don't care. New memebers don't care about what technology we're running, what holes have been plugged, or other concerns like moving to vB from PHPbb, we simply don't.

[Wells]

Well, I think we all just have to be patient and wait. The Powers That Be have heard our suggestions and it's now in their hands.

-- Tue Jan 25, 2011 4:18 pm --

Part 2:
The technology and dev journals are lovely and a great way to show what's going on from a technological development perspective, but, where's the 'business plan'? What are your goals? How are you going to get there? Please, technology is only a way to facilitate reaching your goals, it will not make them magically happen. If you build it: they still don't care. New memebers don't care about what technology we're running, what holes have been plugged, or other concerns like moving to vB from PHPbb, we simply don't.

Dude, we're on the same wavelength. I've been saying this for years but nobody seems to get it. As far as I can tell there is no plan. All they have is a TODO list with programming-related things on it. They're using LDAP for a central authentication/authorization system, and yet there is no end-user feature/use-case to justify this choice. HTS is currently just one site, one server. There is no reason to use LDAP.

HTS never seems to make decisions centered on the user or on features, instead it chooses some fancy technology for the sake of it.

[0xBEEF1337]

Dude, we're on the same wavelength. I've been saying this for years but nobody seems to get it. As far as I can tell there is no plan. All they have is a TODO list with programming-related things on it. They're using LDAP for a central authentication/authorization system, and yet there is no end-user feature/use-case to justify this choice. HTS is currently just one site, one server. There is no reason to use LDAP.

It's a tragic symptom of organizations that once had a large market share due to lack of competition quickly disappear. Technological budgets and concerns expand under the belief that legacy software is the cause of these symptoms such as lost market-share. A failure to trace the symptoms to a cause. This seems to plague internet communities like this, and it's not the only one I've been on that has these problems. A gaming forum I post on did the same thing, nobody cared about content but they got donations together for a vB licence and spent a bunch of time making a new skin, and... we're sitting in the same area content-wise. There's been two news posts in the past month.

[Kage]

http://www.hackthissite.org/news/view/583

[insomaniacal]

This is a great first step! The post doesn't go into technical detail to the point where it'd be annoying, but it outlines plans and progress sufficiently.

[Wells]

From the news post comments:

*waits for Wells to appear whining*

See, lots of people seem to get the wrong impression of me. I criticize a lot because there are lots of things to criticize. Most people around here aren't professional software developers. I am. That doesn't mean I'm always right of course, but I've been seeing some pretty fundamental mistakes being made so of course I'm going to offer my suggestions.

But anyway, I'm happy to let this project go on its merry way and I wish it luck (honestly). But I don't want people to think I'm just one of these whiners that only complains and doesn't contribute anything solid. I would be perfectly willing to work on HTS if I thought my time and efforts would not be wasted. However I don't think that would be the case.

This is why I'm working on rootthisbox.org instead. In just 2 days I've got a working site up locally, so hopefully this will be a bit of a demonstration of the usefulness of codeigniter+datamapper that I've been talking about so much. I even recorded a video of my first coding session although it will probably never see the light of day.

RootThisBox was actually some of the most fun I've had in this community, so hopefully its revival will be something people get excited about.