[magnus]

Originally Posted by AuroraStorm

I realize it's hard work and very painstaking to have people constantly asking you questions and then having to explain things over and over again but that's what happens when you create a product for others to use.

Actually, that's the big misconception. Releasing a modification, free nonetheless, does not entitle the users to support of any kind. Any support you do receive is out of the kidness of the author's heart, not out of obligation.

I really like that the vBorg staff added a checkbox when posting a modification stating whether or not the modification was supported or not. It's just a shame none of the users pay attention to it.

I support my modifications as well as I can. However, I'm not going to buckle down for hours and try to find out why 1 or 2 people are having compatibility issues. For that level of support, the hack would almost have to be commercial.

Sorry...no disrespect to any of you coders but sometimes I get frustrated to near tears with the non-existent to the rude responses for help I get sometimes to where I just give up with trying to integrate a hack...with some of the hacks, if they look like they're gonna be too difficult, I don't even bother because I know I'm gonna ask a lot of what seems to be dumb questions and they're gonna get impatient...

Like I said above, the majority of authors are willing to assist to a reasonable extent, it's just that unfortunately many of the users here believe hack authors are here at their disposal to be called upon on a whim.

Also, hacks grow unsupported over time. Generally, the best time to get support for a hack is within the first few weeks it's been released. After that, things generally tend to calm down and problems more or less plateau. When users later on start to randomly discover/install the hack and have problems, the author has by that time either started developing/supporting a newer hack or sort of faded off to do other things, which is to be expected.

I can speak for all the authors here, but I know when I first develop a hack I'm extremely intimate with it's workings, hooks, etc. However, over time and especially once I've started working with newer hacks I slowly become less intimate with what I did with the previous hacks and that makes supporting them hard. Especially if they're hacks I no longer us on my own forums.

Authors need to be cut slack, too.