sorry shiva, i wasn't trying to imply that talk was cheap for you as a person. i meant it in reference to the failed attempts to pass the baton over at VPF. at least i'm pretty sure that's what i meant.
as for your not being comfortable reading or doing searches at VPF- i understand, but i doubt there's anything i can do about it. so i did a search for "donations" in site news and came up with squat. like i said- some appeals on behalf of shivasite but nothing for VPF. so i don't know what else to say. "show me the money" i guess.
incidentally, i did find one little interesting statement from this thread:
http://vpforums.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=26420&highlight=donations
where AJ said: "I'm now part of the Dev team for vBPortal Plus, and I am adding more language support." the date was 10-2003. that's sure news to me, but then it's old news so i'd be surprised if he was still on that project.
About who's gonna step up and take on such a task with vpf? No idea, there's only 3 people with the overall knowledge of all aspects of websites, including not just the software, but web design, code writing, and the knowledge of apache, php and mySQL. A simple test is if that person doesn't know how to write the code for my.conf, then that person should not run the server. Anyway, one is AJ himself, the second is Apoc, and the third person is the other person who made it known that he would be willing to run the server if needed, and no one else suitable came forward, but of course, fixx did. Would anyone like to guess who that was?
that's a very good point and might go a long way to explain why AJ continues to hold the site and do nothing even tho he's stated that he's ready to pass it on. he might be worried that if he gave it to an unqualified person it would collapse- so he spins his wheels and works on his other projects.
as for the backend side of things- i'm pretty-much a rank novice at all of that, partly because i don't have access. if we admins had access at that level then at least i could have been looking at code and learning a little since i started. yet i'm not sure why you say the site-runner needs to be the do-all person. in my mind the site-runner could know almost nothing about computers, mainly handling the financial side, accts side, and people side and by delegating to those with the right skills could run VPF perfectly well. but maybe i'm wrong. it's just something that seems reasonable in my mind.
still, does it really require so much knowledge to simply maintain what's there and add new versions of the site software and hacks? the site's already fairly well configured it seems to me. if such extensive knowledge was needed wouldn't it mean there would be far fewer of these forum sites with CMS's all over the net?
VPF is a mess. It hasn't been maintained in 5 years (because that's how old all the software is) and all it will take is one hacker kidz 10 minutes to destroy the entire site, and that's just one small example of a lot of problems there. The site has been badly maintained, I doubt it's been maintained at all in years, and I doubt anyone with at least a good overall knowledge of what it takes to run that forum will be willing to spend all the time needed to actually fix it, and give the members there the site they should have had a long time ago.
i don't believe that info is correct. maintenance (i.e. some degree of customisation and hack installs) was done as late as 2003, possibly more recently. (of course i'm not counting the backup and optimisation which we still do regularly) also, the copyright appearing at the bottom of pages is "2000, 2002" which i take to mean vB was written in 2000 and the last major vB/portal install was in 2002.
your point about the site being hacker-vulnerable is cause for concern on one hand, but OTOH i doubt it's something AJ has failed to consider. possibly installing various patches and hacks to prevent that is one of the few things he still does for VPF. plus secrutity in the knowledge of regular backups, perhaps. i really don't know, can't find out directly, and so it's not much that's worth worrying about. like i said, if VPF goes down for some reason then let PN become the 'new' VPF, and maybe it will anyway.
I agree with shockman, some of those policies there just don't make sense, or are even workable. And speaking as a author of tables, and to actually keep to the orginal subject of this thread, I don't really feel my rights are being very well looked after either, and I won't even talk about the respect part anymore.
no idea what you mean about the policies, and as for authors rights- who is supposed to protect those other than the community-at-large? or if you want us to lock down or edit every messy thread that pops up we're going to need more moderators. and nobody really wants to be a moderator anymore. unless you have any candidates? :)
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