Great post Steven - I had planned to begin a 'goals for 2003' thread in December, but now's just as good a time as any.
As in most any volunteer project, time and the lack there of is the culprit in the slow-down of most sites. We have some people here many hours per day, but as we keep supporting more and more versions, we get spread thinner and thinner. It was much easier when it was v5 only
Easier for developers, everything was new, so whatever we did was ate up and asked for seconds. Version 6+ brought lots of new possibilities and lots of good stuff has been done, but each ubb version further dilutes the amount of time that can be spent focusing on new stuff. People are still asking for new stuff to be ported to older ubb versions
We addressed some of that with the consolidation of the forums a few months ago, but it persists still and we'll be adding another layer when 6.4 comes out.
Before someone says: 'drop support for the old stuff', consider us starting with the version you are running
People got fighting mad when we considered dropping v5 support a year or so ago. Yeah, it's a slow forum, but some people are still trying to modify it.. hehehe
You guys will be seeing similar stories elsewhere when vb goes version 3. To a much lesser extent mind you, since this is vb's first real update of the majority of the code in well over a year. We're getting tagged by IP every few months
It may or may not slow down after 6.5 is released. Threadsdev will be going through something similar when 6.2 is released as most modfications will have to be updated to work with member numbers. We had it relatively easy going from v5 to v6, as there was no sane reason for anyone to continue running an older version, updates were free or close to it.
Anyways, before I speak to the rest, what is everyone else's needs for the site? What do you think will bring 'busyness' back to the site?
