SMF so unpopular

It's hard to get focussed on something you don't even get paid for, and hard to give out support for it too.

 

Not really, if it's something you use, then it's easy to provide support for it in order to give something back so to speak.

 

Far from the truth. What's most interesting? Working on something you like so much you spend all your free time on, or something that's your daily job and you do it because yoy have to?

Besides, the Simple Machines community is a lot bigger and active as the MyBB community.
The team of SMF is also double the size of the MyBB team.

 

I think some of the criticisms are valid, but also shortsighted. I switched from an expensive vB installation to SMF, and I'm using SMF as a backend to power Live Business Chat - Forums News Blogs Articles - and although it's not yet finished, it's going quite smoothly, with tremendous amounts of dedicated support from the SMF people.

I agree, I would prefer a GPL or BSD license, but given the fact that the SMF people take such pride in their forum and making sure you get what you want out of it, I can accept that they want to keep a grip on their ownership of it.

It's quite customizable, and although I like fancy features as much as the next person, I prefer to keep things simple so that upgrading and replacement of forum software is easy. I guess that's it in a nutshell why SMF in great for me. I got tired of vB getting hacked, and the simplicity of SMF is what makes it more secure. It only has the features you want, and many of the nice features that people are missing are actually there in SMF, but they're not enabled by default. That reduces the number of possible ways SMF can get hacked.

I'm using version 1.1.10, and I can say without reservation that it needs a bit more polish. It is entirely production-ready however. The things I would like to see improved are fairly minor, and if you run into an unusual problem that can't be solved easily, the SMF support team is quite likely to bend over backwards to solve the problem for you, even if the problem is with your own modifications to SMF. It's clear they really want SMF to be the best forum software there is, and wherever it falls short, they'll personally pick up the slack.

SMF is a fairly new player in the forum world, and I think it fills a niche that no other package fills. With that said, version 2.0 is nearly ready, and many complaints about the 1.x series have been corrected. I put a lot of work into my forum, and my community of users. The SMF people do the same for their community of users, and that's the kind of dedication that I want on my team.

SMF may not be perfect for everyone right now, but given my tremendously positive experience with SMF so far, I am absolutely certain that SMF will fill almost anyone's needs, if you're willing to invest your time and energy in a future with SMF. Your needs WILL be addressed, and anything you need that isn't currently available WILL become available, if you're only willing to ask.

I'm sure it won't be long until the time comes that I won't need to speak so much about SMF's future, because it's well on its way as a maturing piece of fine quality software. As it ages, it will become more robust, more capable, and more customizable. When you pick your forum software, pick one that fulfills your current needs, and also be sure to consider what your future needs will be. If you do that, I'm sure SMF will be one of your top choices.

 

I have some what lost respect for SMF over the past couple of days. They've been banning team members and former team members for speaking their mind about how management is running things.

More information can be found here:
Oh SMF – What Happened To You?

 

The software itself is great, the people in charge of it now are not. As you said, team members were banned and as your link tells, the ones who created the software banned or frozen out as well.

A very sad week for the SMF software.

 

I almost forgot the users are also being censored for asking questions about what's happening at SMF. Yeah a few of the old team members have gathered to talk things over and decide on things like starting up a new BBS or hope that things improve enough over at SMF .

 

SMF is free and there might be a reason to first start off forums with SMF and later upgrade these forums to a paid software with better user and admin experience.

However for this issue, SMF does not work as the encrypted and other forum software like vbulletin can not read them. Of course vbulletin also has their passwords protected and other software as far as I know can not read them, but it's already a paid software with high user and admin experience and with this software you do not start having the idea from the start of upgrading the software to another one.

 

I see no reason to upgrade to a paid software. SMF 2 has same options as the paid options.

As for user experience, I don't really like a software like VB, so it wouldn't be an option to me.
I'll stick with SMF, until something better shows up. Right now, I'm just pissed at the SMF leadership.

 

more info here: SMF Friends - Index

 

You guys think we are looking at a fork or what at this point? It really seems like unless the current brass has a change of heart, there are some major issues that would prevent this project from going forward...

 

No, there will be no fork.

 

do you say that because of copyright restrictions that are in place?

 

No, I say it because the old team members being mad are not going to.

 

Even so, if they are going to jump into the BBS game, they could use the current SMF as a base and simply take it in the direction they want, and think twice about who they allow to have a say in the project.

Not to mention, it's a base they already know. And it will help give them a boost.

This all depends on SMF's License, though, I don't know what kind of license it uses so I'm not sure if forking is allowed.

 

Building a complete new version would be a big task, but they could start all over, correcting their mistakes from the SMF software.

 

The core of what is now SMF is ten years old, at this point. It contains many things that were very well thought-out, and well-reasoned, ten years ago with the first release of YaBB SE. Workarounds for MyISAM's table locking issues by splitting large tables into multiple pieces. Ten years ago, that was a necessity.

Now? Now that's stupid.

This sort of stuff is littered throughout smf's design and code. Even with that, it has effectively stagnated for five years - most of the stuff you see in 2.0 is several years old.

Each member of the team has gained several years of skills in the interim, while this drama played itself out in private.

 

The decline is still ongoing,by reading this LINK.

Even if SMF amazingly stabilize,there will be a lot of people jumping ship anyway.

The disarray will hurt them down the road.

 

I was a very active member on a VB powered forum for a long time. VB is very nice, no doubt, but SMF 2.0 is much easier to navigate. I am starting a forum with SMF, and the only problem I see in the near future is with more forum content. VB offers a load of options such as more categories, boards, better ad management, etc. SMF also offers these but everything is somewhat limited. For a small forum, SMF would be the way to go.

Or maybe I'm wrong about easy navigation? I'll be doing a review for my forum soon and I hope that all of you SMF "dislikers" will also join in on the review.

 

In what way?