[sabret00the]

I'll post my general thoughts on all this.

Last time i checked i was an advanced coder however i haven't reallly released anything in a while. mainly due to the fact i don't feel i can test code suffiently without it being run on my live board and until i bring my live board upto speed, i won't have the time to release mods i'm not using. as a result i'm not even supporting my mods at present, i ported what i could and allowed people to build on them. if there was an open source tick box i'd tick it on most of my 3.5.x releases.

While it seems that people don't feel appreciated here, i haven't got a clue about all that, i find users to be a pretty mixed bag anyway, some will promise you donations that never arrive while others will show you the world of gratitude without ever mentioning money. different people show gratitude in different ways.

IMO the problems with vBulletin.org vary. On one hand, there's the fact half the moderators here shouldn't even be mods, whether it's something simple like them being in the employment of Jelsoft, whether they don't post or whether they were appointed using a selection process so advanced, i won't understand it for another fifty years. i'm not saying that i feel anyone here sucks persay, just that i don't feel half the mods need to be moderators. you can look in there forums and to find them seems to be a near impossiblity, being a moderator requires presence and i don't feel the current team for the most part do this.

that said, maybe i'm not the best judge of all of this, my requirements and needs have changed near 180 degrees in the past year. As i see it now, i'm more interested in talking about code, in fact and all things PHP. i spend most of my time reading about people with code problems on the conceptual level and i enjoy it. i thought that teh new coders forum was a great idea, but as Ken mentioned, you can release a hello world script and get access, imo it should be restricted to Advanced coders and should get it's own PHP forum.

I hear people talking about community spirit and what not and you're right it has gone, in my time here i feel like i've had several coding mentors and i've thoroughly enjoyed being taught the little things that make my code nicer an better. one of my best moments in a while was just the other day and the discussion about ctype_digit() vs is_numeric() and in my opinion this is what vBulletin from a coders standpoint should be about.

Instead theres some real segregation, it doesn't really feel like anyone works with anyone else and with several mods on the existing php forum an incredible amount of threads go unanswered there. i spent a while making it my pesonal mission to make sure this isn't the case, but i honestly just felt it was fruitless, especially when you can do all that, go to post an issue you have and wait like a week including bumps just to get an answer.

yes we do have a few mods that suck and yes things could be improved in regards to attitudes around the site. but i feel that the biggest issue here at the moment is that the community in regards to coders doesn't exist. it's not about releasing work, it's about getting coders to want to be here and that doesn't happen, it's not really gonna happen unless some sort of action is taken either. and from my experiences here, there's really not about to be a moderator who's gonna jump up, take the bull by the horns and thread any of the forums into a brighter future. that in itself is a problem.

coders are the be all and end all of this site, whether anyone likes it or not. the amount of moderators that release stuff her is minute, so what is being done to ensure the future stream of hacks? if you want to ensure that the end user has an easy ride then appoint a team to deal with that, but the core of the site IMO should concentrate on making sure the coders are here.