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Topic: Community health and joining committers

Hey guys,

while i had several problems with spam I read through much of the forum. As I could read development is stale and the team invited others to step up as devs. From my own experience, the way this has been done is not sufficient. I mean - you are just announcing "Please join". but what? How? what are my requirements?

What I mean is, there is need of a "Getting involved" page which explains how things work in punBB world. There is need for a "how to code" page. And honestly I believe that Informer is blocking punBB more than it supports. Not only employers should work on the codebase. And this in fact does mean that the open source team needs access to all resources and host code on a neutral code platform like googlecode or github.

As I can understand that informer wants to keep the trademark, they can add a "sponsored by" label somewhere - as long as they sponsor webspace for hosting or something like that.

If there are no steps done now, it seems that either a fork will happen - or - what is more realistic - fluxBB will be the successor of punBB.

With this post I don't want to step on anybodys toes - I just wanted to write down what I have learned the past days bout punBB. Feel free to discuss and correct me, if you think it is needed.

Cheers,
Christian

Re: Community health and joining committers

Did you PM Slavok? I think that would be a first step. The invitation was posted here: http://punbb.informer.com/forums/post/139252/#p139252 and I think that does give a good idea.

A fork already did happen and that is FluxBB, as you mention. As for Informer's role, I don't know what it really is, and don't think it matters to most people, but I know it does to some. For me, all I need to know is that PunBB is open source and that some developers are communicative and have what I consider is the right idea.

I'm happy with the way things are, and enjoy using the software as it stands. Of course there are always a few bugs and a couple of things which could be added, but when there is talk of development I always cringe. My fear is that features will be added (I hate "features" in all software) and we will see other fashion items creeping into the program. Hopefully this will not be the case here.

The community could use a bit more interaction though. There must be a lot of users out there who benefit from this software and it would be nice if they would drop by the forum from time to time and help answer questions. Certainly seeing only a couple of posts per day can be depressing.