Such unkindness of his behaviour disqualify him as team leader und is really bad for CMSMS bussiness - he should do other jobs he like to do und should let make support by other users who has fun on supporting.

I would like to tell those who post here to stay focused and avoid getting into name calling and other offences.

Actually, if you are not a long time participant and/or under a pseudonym, please avoid from commenting.

This thread is publicly visible to the whole internet and it can be CONSTRUCTIVE criticism only. If this thread evolves into flame wars and name calling it will be deleted.

For those who don't know, or forgot, constructive criticism is what you give to your child. If you never tell them they are doing something you dislike they will grow up egoistic brats. But while you give �constructive criticism to your child you still love him and want hime to grow up the best personality.

I love the CMSMS project and at no time did I spoke vile language against CMSMS. People must see the difference between criticising in hopes of helping and criticising out of negative emotions and of not wanting to contribute in any way.

How many posts did Cyberman have before he was banned? More than five hundred at least I would guess? How can anyone think that someone this commited would not want the best for the project?

I will modify my statement. SPEAK UP CONSTRUCTIVELY or do not say anything and never speak about this in the future.

I'm a bit surprised at how many newly registered members who seem to know more things about this than many of us....

Btw I totally agree with Jos. Words!

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I'm using CMSMS since a long time for my business and till now there was no need to register and post in forum cause CMSms was really simple .

But if someone or something will compromise my business with bad verbal propaganda I'm really angry!

Currently it seams to me that only CG was the problem cause he does not want to play nice with the team (=community). He was born naked like all other here and he was not better than every newbie here in forum ... so he should do only his job, but completely without any affectations.

I dont think so - the deleting of bug reports without any solution is not really professional and can't be good for CMSMS ... only cause the bug reporter was a banned forum member

http://dev.cmsmadesimple.org/bug/view/5823



Yeah the only one what counts is the future of CMSMS.

500 posts? Make that more then 5000. 9460 to be precise, as he states in his letter. He was a busy man    Cyberman didn't get banned. His rights were taken, he left himself.

Openletter, you talk a lot about money in your first post. I think that is not the biggest issue in this case. It's more about your point 6: patches and hacked code posts. I suspect maybe there's some old pain related to mister pi. too.

I however fully agree with this rule. It doesn't look good to CMSms if the forum is overloaded with topics like "This is not working" and "That gives errors", while those people are working with hacked code. And it makes it extra hard to give support.
But if this is such an issue for both sides, then why is it not possible to find a solution everybody agrees with. Maybe a separate forumsection with restricted access can be created?

I agree with you and uniqu3 about CMSms not specifically being for professionals only. I myself don't know much professionals that hang out here. I for sure am not 

Uhm, professional?
It doesn't seem very professional to me to have a bugtracker that is overloaded with open bugs.
It doesn't seem very professional to me to see modules released with no changelog in the forge.
It doesn't seem professional to me the way dedicated people are treated.

Let me make clear that I don't mind, but to state that CMSms is for professionals, you would expect some professionality how things are done here 

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I know it seems like the Development Team is unresponsive to this post but we are working on a response to be posted soon, being that it is the Holidays it's not easy to get everyone together quickly...

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thanks Dr

It is public secret - CMSMS has gown up to a big project and involves many people. Managing software development includes very boring task - prevent programing crisis (when further development costs to much or is not possible at all). There is only one way to keep project viable - to follow common rules. "rules/recommendations" are based on decades of experience in software development (planning, programming, testing, fixing, publishing, resource management and so on).
A community should be responsible in the first place and just then demanding. But face it, there are plenty of tiresome leeches. As a result there is simply left no tolerance to well known community members (like cyberman). I am sure there is nothing wrong with patches in forum, but there is a group of people who tends to misuse code and later annoy everybody within reach.
CMSMS is rather centralized project it means human resources are very limited. I feel very bad about loosing active German comunity members but it would be intolerable to loose all dev team.
You guys intend to build CMSMS German formum. Will there be international place for patches to CMSMS and its modules ?
I reckon recent decisions were done to keep CMSMS alive for a long time and to regain some personal life to dev team. It was brutal to bin whole board, but i would like to see you all in international community in one or another way.

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I'been realising some projects in Typo3, Joomla and many, many in CMSMS.

One reason to keep on with CMSMS was not only the fine and flexible logic and its structure. It was also that I found the best working friendly support forum regarding a OpenSource-System ever.

Now I am adraid that the CMSMS-forum will go a similar way as some other cimmunities did. You get  one global answer for all requests as: Don't mess with the system: take it as it is - or leave it.

That would make me very, very sad...

There are two sides to every story. The readers of this thread are probably wondering why it has taken so long for the Dev team to respond. The reason for this is that we took the time to confer with each other and to discuss how we should respond. We think the forum is not the right place to respond to such an open letter containing personal critical remarks.

We understand that the impression has risen that the Dev team is on a personal crusade against Cyberman. We would like to emphasize here that this is not the case at all. So one of the first things we want to say is that the Dev team has always highly appreciated and admired his work and effort and still does.

We have extensively deliberated and discussed how we should respond. It’s not as simple as it may seem. With this open letter we and the entire community have been confronted with a one-sided interpretation. Besides that, in our opinion a few issues have not been taken into account in this open letter. After discussing the contents of this open letter extensively among ourselves we have come to the conclusion to place an extensive response that sheds some light on our side of the story and tells the readers of this thread about the efforts made from our side.

In this past year several members have put an effort into contacting Cyberman personally. One of them was Anne-Mieke (Compufairy in the forum / Razorfairy in the IRC). She contacted him by Phone. She did this because Cyberman invests tons of time and effort in our community in general and especially in building and expanding the German community. Knowing he is also THE powerposter in our forums she decided – with agreement of the Dev team - to contact him as she is playing a role in our marketing and general presentation to the World. She reasoned that he could be a great sparring partner to exchange thoughts about the future ideas, plans and developments in CMSMS and its community. She was enthusiastic about the talks they had and expressed this within the team, letting us know that he had a couple of very good points that should be discussed in the Dev team.

One of the questions she asked her fellow members of the Dev team after the constructive talks she had with Cyberman is why he – being an influential, skilled and passionate member of our community - is not part of the our team. She is one of our newer members (joined us in April 2010) and therefore she could not know that Cyberman already had been a member of the Dev team.

When you become a Dev team member you take it upon yourself to fulfill certain responsibilities. To be present in the Dev channel and to communicate and confer with your fellow teammates on a regular basis and to participate in online meetings are part of that.

Dev. Team members may, as needed, have access to CMSMS resources, such as administrator access to the various installs of CMSMS, the forum, the wiki, and login accounts to the server. Not every team member has access to all resources because they do not need it, and this access to resources is cleaned up from time to time.

An advantage you have as a member of the Dev team is that you are close to the source, meaning you have the opportunity to talk, debate and influence all kinds of actual issues. Ideas, suggestions, but also frustrations about CMSMS as a system and everything around it, can be discussed with fellow team members in a direct way.

Of course it can happen every now and then that a member is not able to be in the channel or in communication with us for a short while, this happens to all of us occasionally. Unfortunately Cyberman was rarely present at all and neither was there much communication from him to fellow Dev members. This is the reason why (regrettably) his Dev team membership ended.

We want to emphasize that we are not an elite squad and we certainly do not hide in an ivory tower. We think it’s important people can approach us easily, both in IRC (where the majority of the Dev team members are daily present) and on a personal basis. This is why our contact data is visible on the developers page of the main site.

In response to the friction which was a result of our decision to shut down the hacks and patches board Anne-Mieke grabbed the Phone and again contacted Cyberman. During this conversation she proposed Cyberman to rejoin the Dev team and to get actively engaged in dialogues, discussions and decisions and to attend our official monthly Dev meeting as this would give him the opportunity to share his thoughts and ideas in a more influential way. She emphasized that his participation would be highly appreciated and cheered on by the whole team. Unfortunately he declined because of the investment of time it would require, which we respect.

So Anne-Mieke made him another proposal. She offered to arrange a Skype conference call on a short term with Ted, Robert (Calguy) and him in order to give all the opportunity to get into a “man to man” dialogue. We’re sorry to say that Cyberman again declined, stating this was difficult due to the fact that he feels his verbal command of the English language would be insufficient. Anne-Mieke then offered to participate too so she could assist in overcoming the language barrier as she is fluent in both English and German, he still declined.

A few days later we figured that it might be good if we offered another alternative through means of the Language Partners Board. This part of the forum has been set up especially for the members in our community who run and moderate the international CMS Made Simple domains. This is a “members only” board. All foreign moderators (including Cyberman) have received a message about it and an invitation to join the board. In part of the first posting of the board we stated: "This board provides you with a more inside track to the decisions made by the CMSMS Dev Team. However access to this board does NOT mean that you have a vote in any issues that the CMSMS Dev team has to decide upon. We hope that this board provides you with a channel by which you can better understand what decisions are made by the development team, and why they have been made."

One of the goals of this board is to provide a private channel where the international site and forum moderators can voice their opinions, suggestions and concerns and they can get into a dialogue with the Dev team. We think it’s obvious that – even though final voting is an exclusive matter for the Dev team - well founded input in this board is taken into serious consideration!

A very important part of this board is dedicated to making a united effort to present all international sites in a uniform way to the World to show we’re all part of the same worldwide community that presents itself as one identity. We reached out to the international moderators and combined our efforts and skills to port the CMSMS main site theme to their websites. DrCss has dedicated a large portion of his time to assist in the CSS issues. One of the sites that already has been ported to the new design is www.cmsmadesimple.ru, thanks to the highly appreciated efforts of Sonya. The same goes for www.cmsmadesimple.hu. Most of the other international sites currently are still in the style of our former design, with exception of the French and the German site. As we speak the transformation of the French site is in progress.

We regret to say however that there has been almost no participation from Cyberman there either, whereas we thought we had offered a good opportunity which could have lead to a healthy discussion.

Finally we would like to respond to the remark about the banishment of a forum member that was referred to in the open letter. There has been good reason to do so. As Cyberman emphasizes in the German Forum section and which is also emphasized in all other language sections including the English one, there are certain guidelines. The person we banned had repeatedly ignored these guidelines in ways that were not only offensive to the developers (including third party developers) and the people who volunteer to give support, but also offensive to read for general visitors of our forum.

This also addresses the teams decision to remove the flag for the German site as there are some very derogatory remarks made about the system in general, the forum, and some forum members in particular.

We would like to offer Cyberman (for the fourth and last time) to go into a direct live dialogue with the entire Dev team to discuss and solve his (and our) griefs and to resolve this situation for once and for all in good peace in an online meeting. We leave it up to him to decide if he wants to invite the members that he speaks for in the 'open letter' to join the dialogue.

We propose to have this meeting in a separate IRC channel, and hereby ask Cyberman to inform us of three possible dates before the 7th of January. To ensure that the majority of the Dev team members can be present we friendly but urgently request of you to inform us about the possible dates as soon as possible and to plan the meeting between 7pm and 9pm (your local time).

The Development Team has had the opportunity to draft, review, approve, and voted in favor of publishing this response.

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I don't want to get involved because frankly I shouldn't but having read all that...Ted your first paragraph, which seems to have been your first instinct, is wrong. The reason is very simple, the loss of some part of the project, even if unofficial, affects the users more than the dev team. Personal criticism is not the point here and is coming from one or few any way.

My 2 cents

Ted (and team),

Thank you very much for this very comprehensive respond!
I understand that it takes time to write such big posts 

It turns out that some of the things Cyberman expressed in this open letter were not a very good representation of the truth. Mainly, the contact between him and Anne-mieke is a pretty big thing he 'forgot' to mention in his post.

My previous reply in this topic was written whilst I was under the impression that his letter was honest, but leaving that detail out was very wrong.

I hope he takes on the offer and everybody is able to speak about what's on their mind.

I also hope that in a couple of weeks we can look back at this situation as a little growing-pain in the evolution of CMSMS.

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Thank you for a formal response.

However, I would like to use this opportunity to ask a few questions.

I am not on the dev team, nor am I a full time programmer. I have made over a thousand posts (like openletter said and by whom I have been contacted to respond). It was made by quickly (sometimes being the first) responding to users with a problem. Many times I have logged into forum users' website to fix something for them. I have also made many upgrades of very old installations.

I would like to ask some questions pertaining to the spirit of the original open letter, and not to the Ted's side of the story.

I have attempted several times to help with issues that I have found, in only ways that I could. I am not a full time developer, but when I saw a problem I opened my mouth. If it was an obsolete module. If the module breached privacy ethics. If something looked broken to me. If I saw a problem that noone else seemed to have.

Because I have worked with many users, and upgraded many old websites I think I saw some valid issues that noone else believed.

Few examples - "A" character appears if database encoding not specified correctly. TinyMCE breaks if page title contains double quotes and/or then is deleted. All the obsolete modules I have documented. Default templates revealing email of users who posted comments. etc, etc.

I have been told

A) To not post this online because everyone else sees it all
B) To not post if I do not have a code solution to the problem
C) To not post because I was not experienced enough to have taken care of this myself.

I have, after several warnings given to me, deleted all my feature suggestion posts and I am not motivated anymore to post quick responses and things that I have found online.

I believe that good things can come out of bad situations. Having heard both sides, and several other people as well, I see issues remaining that I would like also to hear a response on, to have an official response.

I) What is the way for people like me who are not full time developers or part of the dev team to post issues they have run across, besides the Forge bug tracker when those bugs are not addressed by anyone in a reasonable amount of time.
II) What is the way for people like me to contribute with ideas and feature suggestions.

Dear Ted,

thanks for your detailed explanation why Cyberman ist not in the developers team anymore.
It would have been nice if someone had told this to Cyberman BEFORE doing it.
Now it is too late.

Did you ever think about that Cyberman would need to stay up the whole night to be in IRC at the same time you dev guys are? So IRC or skype must be a joke, isn't it?

But who cares about that?
What about the other facts?

Why is cmsmadesimple.de suddenly "commercial spam"?




Reminds me at Hitler when he said "Either you are with us or you are against us" ... uh oh, i said the H word ... i may be banned now. No, wait, didn't that Bush dude said the same?

Anyway, so critics aren't allowed, huh? Or what exactly are you talking about?
The "flame" in the german forum started AFTER the open letter was posted.
But the flag has been removed BEFORE this.

What about removing all german moderators BEFORE the open letter was posted?
Without to tell them "Thank you for your help, but we don't need you anymore."
Why did no one tell NaN that he is now moderator all allone?
I've never seen that guy in IRC anyway. So why was he elecetd to be moderator?
After about 5 years of translations and support Cyberman suddenly isn't worth to be moderator anymore - and informed about that decision - because he has an additional forum?

As i can read in the german forums no one wanted to leave this forum here.
They just wanted a place to talk about things that aren't allowed here: Development.
Removing allmost all german mods, removing the flag, banning users because of critics, restriction in postings ... etc. made them leave all.

Listen, those guys that left don't need this community. But this community needs guys like them.

All these things happened AFTER [a well known username here] noticed who is owner of cmsmadesimple.de.
At this time there was nothing up in the new german forums.
So please don't talk about "derogatory remarks".
This simply is not true.
It may be true now.
But not at that time.

CMSms is made by pros for pros, huh?
But what is this forum here?
You may only ask "What do i need to do to ... make it green?" or "Where is the button that i can push to ... ?" Questions a pro never would ask. A pro wants to tell "How can i fix this? Why don't you do it like that? This mod makes it faster. Here you can add a button to push to ... "

Don't tell me about the bugreports or feature requests.
If you read something like "GO AWAY! I DON'T LIKE YOU! I WILL IGNORE YOUR BUGREPORTS!" as a reply of one of the main developers when someone files a bugreport ... THIS is what i call very good public relations

Derogatory remarks...

Rediculous.