How to engage co-working on mods

[ThorstenA]

I have submitted several products and everyone has the right to modify them. But with the exception of one example, no mods were developed further. Is it true for most mods, that they are only developed further by the authors?

For me it would be a great help if my ideas I brought into the product would be taken by other developers and we all would improve the products here together. Wouldn't that be a nice thing?

[Lynne]

I think most users aren't used to seeing a mod marked as reusable code where the developer really means they would love to have their product upgraded for the next vB version. Or, maybe the idea was already put to use in another mod? I know I had written a predefined taglist mod for my 3.8 site and see you have something similar. I shared mine so maybe users don't feel a need to have that particular mod of yours updated?

[ThorstenA]

For me there are two ways I could profit from putting mods on vb.org

1. to make money. I put a crippled release on vb.org with reduced functionality and then put a link to my shop page

2. to help my community. I put a product on vb.org and hope others make it better. In this case my community profits from it.

[Lynne]

I've always gone for door number 2. Just about all the mods I've released are ones I wrote for myself and then decided to share thinking somebody else out there may have need for the same thing.

[ThorstenA]

Yes, I understand that. But I distributed lots of products here and - not much came back. It would be good to have some motivation distribution products here - other than "doing something good". It could be a win-win situation if others would help improve the product.

[Adrian Schneider]

Yes, it would be nice.

Typically when projects get released here, lots of people do contribute things. Sometimes it's just bug fixes, bug reports... but sometimes people suggest or even post code to add new (basic) features. In order for me to contribute to a project, I do NOT want to make a new release based off that. Then we are essentially competing with each other. If I can look over a bug list, and commit patches to fix things, I will.

If you were to use something like Github, and commit to maintaining the project, any number of people can easily contribute to the project, while still giving you the final say. If you end up blocking progress, people's forks can be developed further instead of the original project.

So, if you want people to further develop on your project, put it up somewhere where they actually can, and actually stand behind it. If not, then, I guess marking code as re-usable is the lazy way that will probably just sit there and rot away. Personally, unless there is already an active project that's being worked on, I'd rather just start over.

If people here took the time to set up VDE, and have their projects in GitHub, I'd be actively contributing to dozens of modifications here. Unfortunately, either we're all behind the times, or are unwilling to do so.

Just my 2c.

[ThorstenA]

The idea with external environments are nice. I don't know how to use them. Is it a good idea to make it easier for vbulletin developers to use these things? Integrate them in some way with vb.org?

[Adrian Schneider]

Integration isn't really needed... you just need one person to maintain the release thread here.

Git / Github does have quite the learning curve, but similar things like Sourceforge or Google Code accomplish the same thing. However, I'd go for Github if you want to allow and encourage users to fork your projects and make it their own.