The SMF Fallout

I am not sure how many are currently aware of the backend problems SMF is having but you can read this to get caught up:

http://www.lewisonline.ca/?p=426

This has the potential to ruin the project and judging by that blog post it was already havin severe problems. The ordeal is certainly creating tensions at SMF with the possibility that developers and designers are going to walk away or even fork the project.

Lawyers are now involved and a massive power struggle is occurring. In the end no one may win.

If you read the blog post it becomes apparent this problem has been building up for years and that it won't be easily fixed. It's also obvious that this occured because of poor direction and management of the project. IMHO you do not give away your power and leadership in a project and then expect your successor to do what you did. They will come in and run the project how they want. If not at at first they will eventually.

 

Be happy you are on mybb I guess. I can safely say I've never been interested in it from the get go.I dislike the design and to this day I even think vbs, current state of affairs, is better looking..

 

I am shocked at the inactivity of this thread. Where are all the SMF fans? I guess the project is going to die pretty fast.

 

they are probably on SMF forums...

 

As the blog post pointed out, the SMF project has not received a major update in at least 3 - 4 years. At one time the leader in free forum software was phpbb. Then that title was turned over to SMF,,,,. now it seems that mybb is passing smf up.

When you have a piece of software that sits stagnated for years, something is going to come along and bump it out of the way. And that is what has happened with SMF.

For years people have been asking for better built in features - better spam protection, search engine friendly urls, built in sitemap, built in profiles, where are the built in blogs?

What I do not understand, if your going to turn over the reigns, you better make sure that you have someone picked out that will get the job done. It appears to me that the new lead manager was picked in haste. And now the entire community is paying for that decision.

 

I tried SMF once. Even sent them a donation. I quit using it though because for some reason search engine bots were ignoring it. Went back to phpBB3.

I think the reason there are not many responses is because SMF is not that popular. It's too bad, they had some killer features on that thing.

(I just read the article)

What is killing it is what is (and always does) kill everything... Politics. Greedy and self-centered people that typically are not team players. The LLC thing was the main problem to begin with. They should have waited out the process and gone non-profit.

So much for the "Open Source" idea. I believe that a lot of this is happening in the so-called open source community. People start to get greedy and want to feed their ego. Human nature.

 

Im not really suprised, I was using a smf style for like 10 mins to build a forum, until I realized that the admin controls are seriously lacking, there are so many more hurdles to pass over to get what you want done... I switched to PHPbb and I m very happy with it so far (even though I havent used it yet )

funny thing though... I just found out today that the domain I just registered (smftutorials.com) used to belong to THEM!

lol

thats kinda cool/crazy lol

 

really sucks to see it go down, i've been posting there since 2006

 

I got over SMF when it was only spammers who joined every 5 minutes. I installed Mods to prevent it but was just sick of spammers.

 

I had problems with that too, it was way too easy for them to get in...which is how I found out about the insufficiencies in the SMF admin toolbox...

 

The admin is very disappointing aspect of SMF imho. It's simplistic and not well laid out even.

 

I perosnally found the admin fantastic :l

 

have you ever compared it to other forum admins though?...just curious...

 

It's all drama. He said she said.

 

I feel bad for SMF. I am also a MyBB user, but I still liked many things about SMF.

 

I'm also a myBB fan as well. They make life easier without doubt.

 

No SMF is here to stay, it has a community of modders that's absurdly huge and grows every day.

Who said it hasn't been updated in 3-4 years? That's not true at all, every few months it gets a pretty big update.

 

It's Cathy. She's the one who's really ruining all of this (according to one of my friends on the SMF friends team). They're apparently going to launch their own project later on.

 

Probably a wise move for them but this will shatter SMF in my view.

 

Poor SMF, although they never had a strong hold on market share (compared to phpBB and vBulletin), and now myBB has emerged, it wont be long until they shoot past them. I cant see SMF struggling much further into the future.