Dev Diary: Build 18

jordanjay29

fakruzaruret and anyone else who encounters issues with the new release, please open a new discussion in the Support tag so we can address them as they come in.

Darkle

luceos Out of curiosity, what is the difference between generating the colours with the username and doing it with the displayName?

tankerkiller125

Darkle When using something like the Nicknames extension it could be wildly different colors, as an example while my username might be tankerkiller125 I might choose Matt as my nickname. This would lead to very different colors being chosen however other than that there is basically no difference.

Essentially we previously calculated it from tankerkiller125, now we would calculate it from Matt.

ctml

luceos
The first of many I hope! Had to start small 🙂

Darkle
tankerkiller125

Yeah exactly. There are extreme cases like mine where it makes a significant difference. I use SSO so my usernames are not user selected (no user registration process) which would provide randomness for the color generation. Instead the usernames are numeric identifiers (for example employee id's) because they are unique which is a requirement for usernames. This means usernames might look like 10000, 10001, 10002, etc. which basically results in all users getting assigned the same colour even though the display name is very different.

giter

luceos This is exactly what we want! It's great to be able to upgrade without having to wait for extended support!

therealsujitk

I think the installation command should be updated in the skeleton repository.

luceos

A little over an hour ago discuss (and some of our other domains) were impacted by downtime up to 26 minutes.

As far as we could tell this was not caused by anything on our end, but the connection between CloudFlare and Digital Ocean. The Laravel team reported similar troubles:

Everything should be back to normal now.

1Dot

Hello luceos Sir I seen that discuss updated its highlight file what about us, Is there any update, I still see that not found in console github gist in my latest forum v1.0.4.

matteocontrini

Hi everyone, I'm a bit worried that Flarum development is stagnating again. It's been two months since the 1.0 release and after a few bug fixes there hasn't been any concrete progress, from what I can tell from watching the GitHub repositories.

@davwheat has been doing a good job with frontend fixes and accessibility, but apart from that I don't think I'm seeing things moving? Is perhaps Flarum missing core developers? That's always been my feeling... @askvortsov was doing an amazing job to push things forward, but I guess he's busy with studies now.

To be clear, I perfectly understand why this could be the case, I've been having periods where I have a lot of time to spend on side projects, while in other periods I don't even have time to breathe. I'm wondering though if Flarum has a plan to cope with this (I'm pretty sure I've already asked this before 😅). There's a growing interest around Flarum, and the activity on this forum confirms that, but I don't see the same activity around the actual development. And there's definitely still *a lot* of work to do. I can see some important changes started with PRs on core, but many of them seem abandoned, there's code that has been work in progress for more than a year... 🤔 Many issues about basic forum features have been there literally for years.

And again I want to make this clear: I perfectly understand that this is probably normal for an open source project, but is Flarum going to evolve to something more than that? As you know, there are other forum platforms where development is much more active, and not a day goes by without a commit. Will we ever see that? 😃

meetdilip

matteocontrini Hi everyone, I'm a bit worried that Flarum development is stagnating again. It's been two months since the 1.0 release

I read only this much 🙂

luceos

Hi Matteo,

We have taken one cycle for people to do something else than Flarum. Having worked towards stable, pushing ourselves has caused some fatigue. We are in the process of planning the kick off meeting for v1.1 and are going to discuss the roadmap towards v2.0 soon after.

Yes, we are silent, yes there's little activity. Because it is intentional. And still, we released 4 patch versions with another one already in the pipeline.

I hope you understand. We are not going anywhere, we only lowered our activity for one build cycle.

matteocontrini

luceos of course I understand, I was just curious where everyone went 😂 looking forward to roadmaps... 👀

davwheat

matteocontrini looking forward to roadmaps... 👀

The milestone has everything planned for v1.1 so far: https://github.com/flarum/core/milestone/21

It might change, with things being added and removed all the way up until release, though.

matteocontrini

davwheat yeah I look there sometimes, but I've always seen many (most?) issues moved to the next milestone when approaching the release... Now that stable has been reached, maybe it would be a good time to review Toby's famous roadmap? I don't know if there's something more up-to-date than that.

Just to know, for example, if I can expect a new search system in 2021 or 2023 😅 I hope these messages don't sound rude, I obviously have a lot of respect for all your work, but after having run Flarum in production for 4 years I don't know how to answer common complaints from my users anymore. I get questions like "when will search actually work?" or observation on how terrible the mobile UI is all the time, and I can only tell them that it will change, maybe, at some point...

meetdilip

4 minor releases in 1-2 months. Is that not enough for a stable ? 😉

matteocontrini

meetdilip I wasn't referring to releases or its count, but to the approach of development. I was interested to know if there's a plan to make development a bit more, I don't know, organized. For example, I remember that Franz was paid for the work and could spend a fixed amount of hours per week to bring things forward and coordinate the development. So that if anyone else is busy, gets a new job, or whatever, there's still someone that doesn't rely on free time to move Flarum forward and not take 2 years for small things. I don't think I'm alone in this thought...

matteocontrini

Ok, thank you, I guess I'll avoid giving feedback next time... I'll keep contributing financially to the extent that I can, since I know that's the best way to help.

luceos

matteocontrini I don't know where this comes from. Are you that disappointed at us taking a break after stable? You've been around almost as long as I am, you've seen the hardships that we've went through to get stable shipped.

I know Flarum isn't perfect yet, trust me it will never be; at least not to the taste of everyone. But we're doing our best to pave the way in becoming the most extensible and empowering community framework that exists. It will take time, because that is what volunteers are dedicating to the project.

I am not entirely sure paying people (again) to get it forward will help; a noticeable drawback in our previous arrangements implied reduced activity outside of those paid hours. I still hope we can contract people full time again in the future. Right now our focus should be in planning v1.1 and v2.0 now that stable is out.

Thanks for all you do, it hasn't gone unnoticed. I, personally, am very grateful for all your contributions here on discuss, but also on GitHub.

meetdilip

You mistook me. Feedback is always welcome.

But the first line sounded very cruel. Flarum team worked tirelessly for around a year to bring out Stable. Don't you think it is very deserving to get some rest?

Also, 4 minor releases does not sound bad, right ? Obviously, they were not sleeping tightly.

I have no intention to discredit you. It simply sounded as mentioned above " cruel ".

matteocontrini

meetdilip that wanted to be just an objective observation of the lower activity, which luceos then confirmed. The message then went on with saying that it's perfectly ok to have some periods with lower activity, but I was also asking if Flarum will keep being developed as a "classic" open source project where core developers contribute when they can. I got the answer and that's okay, I'm sorry if I used the wrong words.

luceos Are you that disappointed at us taking a break after stable?

No, honestly I didn't understand there was a break until you told me today. But that was just the prompt for a wider discussion, that maybe is out of scope here.

luceos I am not entirely sure paying people (again) to get it forward will help

This helps clarifying and it's one of the things I was curious about, although it's not my business. And if I "complain" it's because I want to see things work well... As you say I've been around for a while and I hoped that this feedback could be taken as a friendly discussion on how things are going with Flarum, but I've seen the opposite. It was probably my mistake to put it the way I put it (and the language barrier doesn't help), so I guess I'll think twice before starting a discussion next time 😅

rob006

meetdilip Also, 4 minor releases does not sound bad, right ?

They're not minor releases, they're patch releases. Patch releases does not indicate progress, because they do not bring any new features, only important bugfixes. So this argument does not make much sense, because it actually confirms what @matteocontrini is saying. 😉

Darkle

I can understand certain points of @matteocontrini, especially in his case since he has been using Flarum in production for quite some time and maybe there are things that have frustrated him, but I think Flarum in this last year has had to fix a lot of internal things, something that is not as flashy as a new interface or features, but the development until stable has been frenetic worthy of any top software, for me even too much for such a small team so it's logical fatigue and a break was needed.

I really love open source as it is what has made Flarum what it's today, but I certainly look forward to the time when Flarum will find strong supporters, both to accelerate and ensure sustainable development for the future, also precisely for this reason I wish @luceos all the best with Blomstra, I believe that projects like this and strong supporters will really take Flarum to another level, but of course this will take time.

luceos most extensible and empowering community framework

P.S. I really like that you talk about framework instead of just forum, definitely Flarum is evolving in that direction.

luceos

matteocontrini I think you've been absolutely correct in opening a discussion, it speaks for your dedication towards Flarum. I actually announced the break in the OP:

luceos but first we'll take a bit of time off to relax after our months of effort in releasing stable

I must confess this statement is far too vague, even for me 🙈

matteocontrini This helps clarifying and it's one of the things I was curious about, although it's not my business.

Don't undersell yourself, we are trying as much as we can to be an open, transparent organisation. These questions are always valued, even when they hit a weakness in the project.

Darkle P.S. I really like that you talk about framework instead of just forum, definitely Flarum is evolving in that direction.

Towards stable it has become easier to see what our purpose is and where we fit into the community market. It might be harder to understand for some, but the further Flarum matures the more it will make sense.

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