You may, then again you may not, ask what has brought about this decision? There are two aspects to it – the first is the personal aspect in that later this month I will be 75 and that seems like as good a milestone as any, coupled with the fact that I have been an active member of this board for almost 20 years which is longer than, as far as I can ascertain, only two other members, and in that time I have become one of the top 20 posters, so I consider that I “have done my bit”. I also have ongoing health issues to contend with.
The other reason is with phpBB itself. Over the last year or so I have become increasingly disillusioned with phpBB along with quite a number of other members both from the various teams, some of which do not appear to have visited the board for years, and non-team members! I have voiced my concerns about this in several other topics but those concerns, which are not just mine, have gone unheard or dismissed as “we know there are problems and are working on them”. None of this can be blamed on the volunteer organisation with phpBB because phpBB has always relied on volunteers.
Then there is the attitude of some, and by no means all, Team Members to me personally which I find discourteous:
- Being threatened that I will get an official warning if I post something that a Team Member does not agree with – even though I have not contravened any phpBB rules, and that particular Team Member cannot issue warnings anyway.
- Having Team Members continually criticise or contradict posts that I make.
- Team Members who continually advocate using sql commands or custom coding when there are extensions that will do the exact same function. This is when the whole ethos of the current phpBB versions is to avoid any manual changes.
- A Team Member locking topics because they may become too controversial, or are too close to the truth.
- A total lack of interest, for over two month, from someone in the Team (not the Team Member who is acting as a “go between”) when I try to improve a topic in the KB.
- There is no plan, or if there is then it is not published, for future version releases of phpBB despite the fact that phpBB 4 has been ready for well over 12 months (except for Chameleon).
- There are over 700 open tickets in the Bug Tracker, some going back to 2009.
- If there is ever a suggestion, or even an offer, to do something in a different way it is always dismissed with the “this is the way we have always done it” attitude – times change and, believe it or not, so does technology.
- Then there is the fiasco of Chameleon. The Chameleon project is beyond belief – it has been put in the hands of one person who has gone on record as saying that he can only spend one hour a week on the project – that is 50 hours a year – I have spent more than that amount of time in one week working on extensions. For the record I have never at any point said that there is not a need for a new style, or at least a re-working of the current style but what I have said, and will repeat, is that Chameleon will be a total disaster for phpBB unless some attitudes change.
As of today I will no longer be supporting any of my extensions.
And with that I will take my leave – and thank you.