I’ve discovered CMSms in June 2005, and I instantly felt in love. CMSMS was my life for the last 6 years. To me, it was like a child - all I’ve done was purely for the “baby” which I wanted and still want to see growing.
And I have worked really hard. I’ve done different jobs - first as moderator of the German boards. I didn’t have any experience in forum support. But from my job as a web designer I know what I have to do for my clients. So I’ve regarded every request on the German forums as request of my clients and tried to help as much as I can.
I’ve done several things for and with CMSms: project manager of the German translation team, website owner of cmsmadesimple.de, website admin of cmsmadesimple.org, forum admin on cmsmadesimple.org, documentation author, contact to the German press, international support and was member of the dev team too.
One result of my work is the German speaking user base being one of the biggest CMSms groups. This say’s to me I have done something right!
But after being online for 81 days and 6 hours, having submitted over 9460 support postings and a karma of 151 – this forum goes into a time of darkness.
Some time ago, my access permission to website cmsmadesimple.org was deleted - … without any prior notification, conversation, comment or information to me. A little bit later, I was kicked out the dev team … also without any prior notification, conversation, comment or information to me.
Some days before Geek Moot I got an email from dev team:
After that, a german board (I created ) dedicated to patches was closed/hidden.The Development team had an impromptu meeting on ... patches/fixes/forks in general, and finally we all came to an understanding on the subject. In essence, we will not allow anybody to post patches or fixes on the forum (whether they be good, or bad). And additionally, we will not allow anybody to advertise, support, or discuss their patches/fixes/forks on the forum.
Additionally my permission as a forum admin was deleted … without any prior notification, conversation, comment or information to me.
As I said – all requesting forum members are “clients” for me. I cannot accept a prohibition on thinking, on answering or supporting my “clients”.
I think a CMS should have a section in the forum, that addresses specific problems and often very individual problems and provides solutions. In the essence, basically any CMS implementation is very special and it's just strength of CMSMS that it can be relatively simple "individualized".
And I’m also thinking, it’s transgressing against GPL. If you make a look at the history of GPL software it is a history of patches (see Linux). Patches means development.
But dev team says:
Really? If you just take a look at the bug reports, you will find there’s even an unfinished bug reports from 2007We have a proper mechanism for submitting patches (people can simply submit a diff inside a bug report or a feature request), or for larger stuff can contact a developer directly via email. There is no need for allowing their discussion, promotion, or complaining on our forum.
http://dev.cmsmadesimple.org/bug/list/6 ... osed=false
When professional developers see that they are surely not motivated to post more bug reports. Means the mechanism does NOT work.
If it doesn’t transgress GPL in law, it so does at least to its sense. On many places around the world there are lawsuits to force producers to release their modifications based on GPL. But on CMSms it’s an inverted world.
Some days ago I was deleted as moderator of the German boards, was deleted as project admin for German translations, was deleted as “CMSms Language Partner” and the link to http://www.cmsmadesimple.de as a German support page was deleted - and all this … you will anticipate it … without any prior notification, conversation, comment or information to me.
Don’t know why CMSms wouldn’t want to have german users, a german support page and german translations.
Another intolerably point is the type of communication in the English part of the forum. Converning this I get mails like this:
Think - all customer are clients. Clients means money, directly or indirectly (orders, money from advertising, votes on packt awards). Why do you throw money outside the window with such bad communication?CMSMS is a really great system. But especially engaging in the English community is not really fun anymore (this was 1-2 years or otherwise). I feel this is too violent intervention in the freedom of opinion expressed in this forum. That is why I am not in the English forum, because here I had the feeling that his own approaches and some feedback on Plug-in/Modul level are not always welcome. I often had the feeling ... oh, who now feels stepped on their toes, what was, in just a discussion of the development.
And many people feel their opinions being suppressed. Also a critical member of the German translation team was banned … without any conversations, comments or information to me as the project manager.
And last but not least it’s about the current posting about “Commercial Advertising Rules”, which I cannot accept:
http://forum.cmsmadesimple.org/index.ph ... 29.new#new
The footer was not only used for spam, it was used too by really engaged (professional) users to provide information about their service. In my mind this is a great chance to give these engaged users a benefit. You can’t pay the supporters, but you can give engaged users benefits so they will do support you. If you disallow this kind of motivation – these users will be much fewer.
And don’t tell me something about commercial advices - I make cmsms support for 6 years now and I know how to recognize footer spam.
OK, long story short:
I’ve discussed these events, which might look like mobbing for everyone, intensively with my german co moderators, and we’ve made a decision in common – we (means cyberman, NaN - author of AdvancedContent, FrontendUser Mailer, GBFilePicker and some other extensions; Andiministrator - author of many useful modules like MultiDomain and some other - details here, nhaack - author of the really great “swizz knife” tag content_dump) will leave the forum on cmsmadesimple.org. You can be sure this was one of the hardest decision in our life.
Farewell CMS Made Simple!
Andreas Just
a ka cyberman