Open letter to CMSMS community

[nicmare]

i think everyone does a great job. cyberman, calguy and the other ones.
i could imagine there is just a lack of communication. maybe someone of the dev team should take some time and make a first new contact to cyberman and then everything becomes fine!

[Jos]

Please tell me that there never was a German flag with a link to the German CMSms site in the header of this page and that its absence has nothing to do with this issue here 

[owr_bgld]

@Jos - cyberman wrote it yet in the letter: - So imho this was one of the reasons of his decisions:

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.

[Jos]

ah ok... so many things happened, it's not strange I overread it  :(

But this is one thing that I understand the least

[Wolfhardt]

@HansDampf: Lets play the ball in stead of a man!

But what IS the ball here?

It's not the technical side this time. There may be missing documentations, bugs, etc. but that's not the point this time.

The ball is how certain people play it here and I will try to tackle that.

• * The teamleader is mostly silent, staying in the background instead of giving direction
• * another developer has grown in his place because of  his absence. He's made a lot of modules, these modules are essential and good, but his posts in this forum often follow the motto: My way or the highway. His other actions (bans, inability to react to critic, etc) are outing him as a complete loss in human behavior
• * a lot of dedicated users/mods/devs, who left this forum (not necessarily CMSms), while others keep coming back, ban after ban (connie, I'm looking at you )
• * Bugs are not solved, or the solutions are not communicated and that goes on for years. I myself had a problem with the Guestbook and the Smileys module. Both bugs were solved in the SVN but nobody cared about releasing a new Version. Why? Maybe the developers of this modules are a bit demotivated by the behavior of some developers in comand?
• * Many modules are discontinued, maybe for the exact same reason.

In a forum there must be rules and people wielding the Hammer of loving Correction.
But those rules and their enforcement with said Hammer must not cross the border of censorship, as it is IMHO the case here (ban me because of this opinion and you will prove me right ).

i could imagine there is just a lack of communication. maybe someone of the dev team should take some time and make a first new contact to cyberman and then everything becomes fine!

Yes, lack of communication is one of the reasons for this situation. But as far as I know communication is a bidirectional thingy and if one (cyberman, NaN and the others) try to communicate, but the only answer are  actions (which sometimes are louder than words) saying: "We don't want to hear, we don't want to communicate, we don't want YOU!", than there is something wrong. One very legitimate answer to this is to leave, and leave with an open letter.

I'm relative new to this system, mostly reading and learning. This situation opens the question for me, if this is the right system for me. On the technical side the answer is yes, Oh YES!!!, it's all I can hope of a CMS.

On the other hand there is the community. In an open source system this is at least of equal importance. Without community there is no support and no growth. And here is a massive problem and this problem seems to be (at least to me, a complete outsider)the behavior of one man.

If this problem is not solved I see no future for this technical great system. But who has the might to wield the Hammer of loving Correction against Censorshipguy?


Just in case I'm soon banned from this place I would like to say good bye to you and thanks for all the fish, especially to cyberman

[fredp]

Sigh... This is disturbing news, but I hope that community members (including the dev team) will work together to resolve these issues.

With respect to the ban on posting patches to the forums, I wonder if part of the problem may be that the dev team has started implementing some plan that is less than obvious to those outside "the inner circle".  For example, Ted blogged this summer that the dev team was moving toward "git" repositories as the means of submitting patches for the core, at least for 2.0. Perhaps the ban on patches is part of that move? I don't know.  In any case, there must be some forum for discussing proposed patches, but it doesn't *need* to be this forum.

Actually, I think the move to git repositories is a really good idea.  Anyone familiar with "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" will understand why I might feel this way. I come from the land of linux kernel development. IMHO, moving this project to a more "Bazaar-like" model of development would be a good thing in the long run.  But, I suspect that it won't happen without a few "growing pains" in the short run.

I realize it is a busy time of the year, but better communication from project management and more overall project transparency might help right about now. 

[openletter]

There are not too many people on this forum with 1000+ posts. Make your voice known.

Dr.CSS
alby
RonnyK
Pierre M.
Ted
Rolf
Nullig
JeremyBASS
Jos
jmcgin51
jce76350
Patricia
tsw
Peciura
Dee
antibart
nuno
nicmare
replytomk3

SPEAK UP

I would like to offer a few suggestions.

1) Advertising on the forum. Let's call things by their names. Developers would like the project to be financed. Well, don't salivate over posts on the forum. Those who lurk around here are bottom-feeders. We don't make a lot of money on paid services. Not to have it be even part-time. The fact that someone has advertising in their signature does not at all mean that they get customers left and right. That's just silly. I can be proven by the fact that whenever a single post on "commercial services" is posted, that person's inbox is instantly full. Because people swim in circles on this forum waiting for a job.

2) I had a customer complain that they contacted the Support>Professional services page they got no response. I had to explain to them that the forum thread similarly named is the only way to get fast response.

3) Blanket policies are never efficient. It might be a good idea to not allow signature advertising for hosting if it is not optimized for CMSMS (Since Arvixe advertises), but is there advertising visible for someone to log in and fix a minor problem???

4) If the dev team wants the project to be financed, come up with innovative stuff. Here are my suggestions -

a) Active commercial support. As in, real time chat. I think that even experienced devs might be inclined to open their wallet to ask a quick question. If you think it's not fair to offer free support 24/7 on IRC, then try something else.

b) Book, documentation, howto for developers. Don't let several other people on the forum write books and get the money. Do it yourself.

c) Donation drives. I have donated three or four times when I was happier.

d) Once-click ecommerce module implementation for dummies (more on this later). I have asked several times, and the stance is that an ecommerce solution must be pieced together with half a dozen modules. Why? Put it together in a single package, include a tutorial, throw in paid support, and sell it!

5) I think it is a critical flaw that developers want to say that CMSMS is only for developers. The package is so elegant and simple compared to other CMSes - which either do more at the expense of elegance or do less while crippling future website development growth - that a lot of resources are wasted. So we collectively are going to say that WordPress should be for beginners, who will be confused, but not let those beginners know CMSMS is better for them???

6) MLE, patches, and code posts on the forum. This has to be explained by those who made the decision. Don't do blanket rules if noone knows why. I have found it very useful to use other people's code posted on the forum. Critical privacy or bug fixes should not be posted on the forum??? We must wait for official core and module releases??? How many modules have open critical bugs, how many are obsolete and no longer working? How many times are major releases breaking something that is later fixed with a patch release? So now if someone is not smart to stay away from fresh releases for production sites and has a module break with a release, we can't post a code snippet while a patch release is made?

7) There times a come with large projects where it's a good time to drop doing other things, stop for a second, and think. In silence. And then do a little cleanup and reorganization (old modules?). Maybe cleanup is a little more important at this time than a shiny 2.0. What happens if this is not done? It will get only worse. 2.0 will be released and most modules will stop working. Sites will stop working after upgrade. Happiness levels will drop. Downgrades will become common.


Everyone save this thread on your computer. SPEAK UP or don't complain ever again in the future about this.

[Jos]

No, I am not going to speak up, not this way.

The general guidelines of this forum states that this is not a democracy. The forum belongs to Ted. The system belongs to Ted. He and his crew decide what to do. And I am happy with that.

I will not order them how they should spend their time, as much as I wouldn't like it if somebody does that to me. (But I'm always eager to hear suggestions, though not in the 'connie-way')

I feel very sad to see persons as dedicated to cmsms as Cyberman and NaN leave. I can imagine their dissapointment too well. The point that strikes me here is the total lack of communication (according to Cybermans story). This makes me think that it could easily happen to me one day, so be it... I better not get to devoted then...

I am here to make use of CMSms and help people to use it. I don't want to fight.

(Can somebody put the German flag back on top? Removing this is the most childisch action of all!)

[uniqu3]

@openletter
Nice write up, it is just a pity that you need new account to share your thoughts, so reading this post makes me think like:
If you don't have guts to speak for yourself and have to stay anonymous, why should others follow your suggestion.

@Jos
Amen to your words, Jos!

Edit:
It would be nice from DEV-Team, that at least a statement like:
We have arranged a meeting and will discuss the situation in detail shortly and speak to our Community soon.

Waiting with at least short statement will just make majority of German Community leave this place and if you look at numbers you know this would be bad situation.

Edit2:
@owr_web quotes removed 

[owr_bgld]

@uniqu3 could you shorten the quotes please - it's bad to read two articles in the next totally again.
EDIT: Thanks uniqu3 /EDIT:

@Jos: You're right with your opinion - but ... cause you're speaking abot the dev-team, there's a but

Actually imho the situation is like this:

They're driving together with a big van. One man is behind the wheel and driving directly against a wall. Ted is sitting beside him and sleeping. The Rest of the team is sitting at the back seats and doesn't say anything. Maybe their fear is, that the driver is jumping out of the van, Ted is not awaking and they drive against the wall without the driver. So in the atual situation - with actually not saying something, they don't have another choice than driving against the wall.

But the other thing is: I'm wondering this topic is on for a long time yet.

[Assange]

I got banned from this forum without discussions 4 times in the last years ..

My profiles:

Connie => jazzbüro => Avantart => wdberatung => HansDampf

all the time this was done without any dialogue or communication with me, one time as a reaction to a comment, where I wrote ironically: "now you can ban me again".. and the master did 

If he's really such a despotic guy he should give back the award "Developer of the year 2010" and should get the title "Most hated CMSMS supporter".

Clients are the kings, cause they pay the bills ... supporters should be only useful ghosts.

[winkelman]

All these actions are by Calguy who never responds, explains, communicates, but likes to rule like a souvereign in past times

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.

[openletter]

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.

[Coldman]

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!

[Assange]

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.