Why no official forum

JUNE 12TH, 2008 MooTools Blog: Offsite Hosting of Version Management, Tickets, and Discussions

Because of the increasing popularity of this project of ours, we have been under an increasing amount of stress to keep the various parts of this site running in good order. You may have experienced downtime relative to MooTools recently. We understand that many developers utilize MooTools in critical components of their projects, and such downtime is completely unacceptable.

To solve these issues for the 1.2 release, we have moved our critical components offsite to the best provider of each component, granting MooTools users with the highest possible uptime of all areas of the site. A major benefit of this move is being able to completely reinvent the way we interact with our community of users (aka you guys!).

On Sep 18, 2008, at 11:44 AM, nutron wrote:

I thought I’d answer this question directly, since the current state of the forums is, in some part, my responsibility (not wholly, but partially). About a year ago maybe, I’m not 100% sure, we, the dev group, were struggling with the forums. On the one hand, it made the community visible and easy to interact with. On the other hand, it was indeed, full of total noobs. The noobs being there didn’t bother us though. It was the interaction between the lazy posters and the more advanced users (and even, sometimes, members of the dev group).

The “lazy” users were the ones who just showed up and said “Accordion doesn’t work” or whatever. They didn’t follow the instructions. They didn’t search for an answer first. They rarely supplied code and, when they did, it was often very clear that helping that person was going to be fruitless – they didn’t want to learn. They only wanted their page to do something so they could move on to their next copy and paste activity.

The more advanced users, understandably, grew tired of this sort of behavior and increasingly reacted negatively to it. If someone showed up and posted something like “Framework X doesn’t do this. This is stupid.” then all hell would break loose.

The result was that, increasingly, MooTools was getting a bad rep (and by extension the dev group were, too). The general perception was that we were unfriendly towards new comers and downright brutal towards them sometimes. It was perceived that we had a strong dislike towards jQuery and that we viewed ourselves as superior to all other frameworks. Despite our efforts to say otherwise (for example, http://www.mootorial.com/wiki/mootorial/00a-mootoolsvsothers), this rep persisted.

The debate was between two options: close the forums entirely or just let it run rampant. The latter didn’t seem like a good option.

It was MY idea to disassociate the forums from the MooTools site entirely, and I’m still glad we did it. How people conduct themselves here in these forums (or mooforum.net) is up to them. The reputation that our community gets is up to or community to earn and shape. But no longer is the project itself responsible for it (well, it never could have been, but at least this way it’s less likely that the framework and its developers will be held accountable for it).

I actually suggested first that we set up something like mooforum.net. Just take the exact software and everything and move it to another domain. The devs could, for the most part, stay the hell away from it. I even suggested we set up some generic forum about javascript frameworks and invite other frameworks to send their users there (mootools.jsforums.com, jquery.jsforums.com, etc). That suggestion didn’t go over that well, but everyone did agree on moving the forums away from Mootools.net, and so we have what we have now.

I hope that this clears things up a bit. We do want to see MooTools grow and we do want new users to be able to learn it (hello mootorial!), and we are friendly, helpful people (the devs and most of the community alike). But our first priority is to build a solid framework that people can use, and having the forums not be our responsibility is a huge benefit. It’s a weight off our minds as well as a daily chore we don’t have a lot of time for.

So we charge you – all of you – to be nice and helpful wherever possible. When someone is being lazy or ugly towards you, just walk away. If you can’t say anything nice at all… find someone who needs your help and respects you and help them instead.

On Sep 16, 2008, at 8:16 PM, Tom Occhino wrote:

We like the mailing list format a lot better, as it’s what all developers around the world use, and we can view it from our own mail clients at our leisure. Please stop asking us to bring the forum back, or feel free to switch to another framework that provides their users with an official bulletin-board like forum software… (keep in mind, all other frameworks, including jQuery use a mailing list. None have an official forum, and none of their users complain about it)

That being said, there are other solutions. If you’ve never heard of Nabble, check it out. http://n2.nabble.com/MooTools-Users-f660466.html It’s basically a forum interface for the mailing list. Also, the guys over at mooforum.net are doing a great job, better than we could ever have done with the mootools forum, so sign up there and use it instead of the mailing list if you wish.

To the developers and moderators at mooforum.net, if you ever need anything, or think there is an important post any of the MooTools developers should check out, please let me know via email, and i will get right back to you. Thanks for all your hard work over there, we all appreciate it.

On Sep 16, 2008, at 2:34 PM, Valerio Proietti wrote:

Also, for everyone reading this post, let me say it again: MooTools will never ever have a forum again. Google groups is working great for us, and we’re very happy with it. I know, we still have no official way to promote plugins, but the forum was never a good solution for it. We are working on a solution (actually, i am not, the other developers are) but we are not rushing. If you need it yesterday, again, MooTools is not the right framework for you, and you’re very welcome to switch to a framework that suits your needs better.

On Tue, 10 Jun 2008 04:19:06 -0700 (PDT), Michelle Steigerwalt wrote:

== New MooTools User Group ==

As part of our offsite initiative, we have moved the community forum
to Google, where it hopefully will not crash and die. Note that this
group is not a replacement for the forum, which will be back
shortly.

We now have that forum-like interface at our MooTools Nabble Google Groups Mirror

On Sep 17, 2008, at 1:11 AM, Michelle Steigerwalt wrote:

The forum is back only in
read-only mode because Google Groups is much more stable and has
worked out to be a fine solution to user needs. :) Especially in
conjunction with Nabble, which is a much nicer frontend to the group.