for those who have left

[tgreer]

I can see that my statements about the staff might cause all sorts of objections. It's always hard to say what you want to say, and get the "tone" correct. I don't know any of the staff personally. I'm sure they are great people, for the most part, trying to do a job as well as they can.

However, this site and the function it serves for vBulletin and the vBulletin community are too important to be run this way. Jelsoft owns it, but takes a "hands off" approach to running it? So instead you have an adhoc staffing community drawn directly from the membership, complete with all the baggage that must necessarily ensue in such an environment. I think that's wrong. I think vbulletin.com and vbulletin.org should be merged, and that JelSoft employees should staff it. Then you wouldn't have thinly disguised personality conflicts derailing the site's operation.

The private "coders discussion" serves to promote and reinforce the elitest, entitlement mentality I sense among many of the plugin authors. That mentality creates a barrier between hack authors and hack users. You say the site is about the coders? Hmm. Without someone willing and wanting to use your hacks, there'd be no reason to release them. Many want to seem to have a private "hackers only" club, and I think that is anathema to the site.