Separate forums for supported/unsupported hacks

[nitro]

Originally Posted by Regs

A good suggestion.

Another idea:

Create another 'service agreement' whereby an unsupported hack, or even an abandoned hack, can be picked up by the community of coders to be expanded upon, i.e., the license for the hack becomes a quasi- open-source script. Of course, those picking it up or working on it would need to agree to keeping all credits intact with the noteable exception of 'linkback copyrights'.

A great starting point for something like this would be vBookie. The original author allowed another coder to pick it up but that coder has not updated it since. The new coder is now an offical vB programmer so that's even better - The vB team giving a piece of code to the community to improve upon

Cheers and happy new year!

~Regs.

And to not run off with it 6-12 months down the line and place it on their paid scripts site. If a hack enters communal authoring it remains there.

There should also be an agreement were any gnu/gpl or free source hacks taken away from here by authors who have gained specific permission to pick up a hack the last version prior to such a fork remain available here as they were gpl or free source in the first place and the new authors fork does not take the hack name with it.

Originally Posted by maranello

At least force authors to check supported or unsupported box and please do make an option to sort the hacks with respect to supported/unsupported criteria. I am spending more time fixing my forums due to hack screw ups and fixing the hacks themselves than anything else and afterall this is a paid service (i know vb.org is free, use at your own risk, so on and on). I really want vb.org staff to be more strict about this.

I have to question exactly what forcing the supported/not supported check box would achieve over and above a concious decision being made at the time of posting, it wont force the support, an author can say supported and then do zip after even if forced to check a box at post time, which as that does happen now the forcing would change nothing at all except perhaps put some authors off checking the supported box at all. Everything thats posted here is on an as is basis, and even when you get to know the better authors who do provide what your after in goods and support, even then times change, people move on. Nothing in life carries a 100% guarantee ever, even if the box says so.

The best bet is assume even if the "supported" box is checked that it will be slow support if it exists at all, then when you get more than your expectations for free you will feel much better than the other way because no matter what becomes enforced it would not change the status quo in what is posted and how the support is provided for them. Raising expectations by such enforcements would simply make it worse in the short and long term.