Things seems to speed up

First of all, my take on Pauls leaving:

i hope he will join us again some time soon... :) He was a great mentor and were always my idol regarding development. He managed to think up well designed solutions as well as pushing new ways forward, inventing new ways of how to do things. Sometimes this led to saying "no" to other people. I will definatly miss his judgement, contributions, posts, just everything he did.

That he would leave was not at question, but that this happened from one day to another was a bit surprising.

Now i have to fulfill his development position as best as i can and trying to continue his visions as well as bringing mine more into public view. Within the last weeks i was able to code again a bit. :) There is still a lot to do though.

And rest assured, we will take steps to prevent what happens with Olympus (the long development time), but after olympus has been released. Communication to the public will get an overthought too.

I want to take the oppertunity to re-post my thoughts i expressed at our development forums here too:

What i want to make clear is that phpBB 2.0.x is still a stable product and no one would care if there would be no next version in the work, because no one would know. I think the mistake made was the beginning of announcing the next version too early, creating a hype which is now "not wanted" in some respects. But still, the majority of users are not knowing about olympus and are very pleased with what they have, a stable, free, easy-to-use bulletin board. With the mods and styles created by the community, users are able to adjust it to their needs (which would not be possible without those writing these things of course - and is one aspect of the success of phpBB).

Open Source does not stand for open development, to make this assumption is bringing comments like "why am i not able to provide a patch" up. You are not allowed because open source does not mean you are allowed to code within "our" branch - people are able to make modifications, change the product, fork the product, etc. but it does not mean we have to take others code. :) It is a general descission how you want to run your project, some do otherwise, some do the same as we, and both has its pros and cons.

At the moment the cons are of course visible, too few core developer for example, but this will be addressed too. The community coding project is a possibility for us recruiting new developers, those currently participating are being watched for their "possible adding" - this should be clear to anyone with common sense. We do not add developers just because they "say" they can do it, they have to "show" that they can do it. :) Paul made this experience a lot of times, and he also wrote about it lot of times - so i am not repeating this here.

Regarding the community wanting to dictate us how to run our teams - i simply ignore it. :D We know what needs to be done, what went wrong. And especially in my resort (development) i know that i will change some things to make it better (hopefully!), but this is a process and is not able to be put from day one on. These changes will only affect the 3.x development line, the 2.x development line will stay feature frozen (except security related features) for example.

Regarding those saying that we do not listen to the community, for some features we previously asked for input, now we tend to do this team internal (there are a bunch of users team-wide, also running their own communities) because of too much input (yes, too much). If you need to decide the way you want to go for a feature you need a rough path in mind and only need feedback for what you are unsure about or to grasp feedback from persons using a feature more than you (for example as a dev you would use the mcp not that much - but having feedback from moderators using it is essential to make it usable). Users are already able to discuss features (the karma thread at area51 is an example). :) New feature suggestions are another case. These are normally suggested by other people within our feature tracker. If we deem it usable we think about adding it. Those not added are normally released as Mods by the community.

But we finally decide which features we want to integrate (after listening to our userbase and weighting the pros and cons - you would for example never see an integrated photo gallery or chat). :) This is the beauty of running a project in free time, as a hobby, you do not have to obey to your userbase (or customer would someone scream in). We have a huge responsability regarding support and fixes, of course, but not regarding future developments - we pressure us here enough. :D