We have no clear evidence that we don't have good developers simply because at some point in the past the developers made a project goal decision that rejects any value to phpBB core of quick reply. We do have some evidence that the community has been less than willing to let the matter rest outside the suggestion tracker. After years of inane debate, it gets harder than ever to make the discussion interesting, let alone profitable.Malphas wrote:...good developers will take into consideration the opinions of their software's community.
The significance to the project's goals of the personal opinion of the developers was my point, not that personal opinion was not at issue. I said as much in my opening comment. Communities are shifting sand, and phpBB's community is made up of everybody from hard core OSS advocates to people who want vB for free, and that's without getting into the subject of people who use multiple BB solutions either simultaneously or over time. The user base isn't nearly monolithic enough, it seems to me, to be the determining factor when compared to the much more stable (though changeable) point of view of the developers.Malphas wrote:This is exactly my point about any feature being subject to personal opinion on whether or not it is in line with the project's goals.
I can sympathize with your frustration here. If the community could show some sort of substantive argument, something that didn't run along the lines of "we like quick reply in large numbers, it's trivial to add and toggle, so therefore you're [insert adjective] because you [insert adjective] refuse to add it," I could see a reason for all the fuss. As it is, all I see is a battle of opinions and very little substance. That's not to say that I think quick reply is of no value, nor is it to say that I agree with the con argument you noted. It's more to say that I see very little point in this drawn out discussion at all. The suggestion tracker is the place to make the point, not the forums. Just my opinion, of course.Malphas wrote:...the argument against including a quick reply seems to basically be "we don't like quick reply, we believe it encourages lesser quality posts, therefore we're not giving it any consideration regardless of community opinion".
) I do want to put in my two cents and say that our forum has quick reply installed and our users are capable of and willing to make intelligent posts even so. When moving from phpBB2 to phpBB3, we didn't have quick reply for a decent amount of time, and the quality of posts reflected no change. I understand the developers' worries about it becoming too 'chat-like,' but the fact of that matter is that the maturity and purpose of each forum are determined by the members and the content - not where the post button is located.
