I am going to be honest about the state that byobu is in.
Originally the idea of Byobu was to neatly integrate in Flarum, show discussions inline with other discussions - no distinguish made except for having recipients and being private. Throughout the course of several Flarum beta's people started using it as if it is a DM extension, while it was always was meant as a Private Discussion extension. The fact that code deviated from this goal created a complex and hard to maintain extension. An extension that was "donated" to the @FriendsOfFlarum ; but I doubt that donation can be seen as something benevolent.
Byobu has become extremely hard to understand. The unified index was a way to go back to the roots without shedding any of the gathered features it gained along the way, but .. it just doesn't work. I believe firmly in creating simple extensions that can be easily maintained or creating extensions that works as a framework in itself allowing other extensions to add features.
@IanM - being yet other maintainer who invested too much time into this extension - and I agree that we need to simplify Byobu and that is what we are attempting to do. Such a clean up would benefit the extension when Flarum reaches stable too.
This is the reason that Byobu takes more time, it's not an extension someone wants to work on because it is overly complex and decisions need to be made that not everyone agrees to. And that doesn't even include the time needed to test the new code in many different scenarios.
The following will change:
- We will drop the unified index
- Allow websocket extensions to push/update the sidebar byobu discussion count
- Heavily clean up the code
