Profile of Seb

I'm disabling the Shoutbox because I suspect it being the reason for the site to be slow right now.

It should be back soon enough, at least it gives me more room to work on the server.

The shoutbox is not like a live chat because it keeps the history of previous messages, and this won't change anytime soon.

How would you feel about a new dedicated page on the site (and not on the right column) with a typical live chat with no history but a user list?

Is that what you request? This would be surprisingly easy to do if we decided to. The "main issue" is not technical, but moderation.

Well, kinda. I also asked later on i think. And not knowing him was not a problem for getting janne on board for example ;-)

Janne worked an insane amount before getting where he is now, as much before being on staff than after. He also was not made coder until a long time, also because that wasn't his goal in the first place. He was first and foremost a modder who did his own stuff, and still do in parallel now as well. We didn't know him, but he more than proved himself with the tools he had at every step of the way. I wasn't always there to baby sit him or congratulate him (not implying that is what you wanted, I know we didn't even give you the opportunity to be in such position), but it didn't prevent him to get stuff done.

Apart from the fact that others knew me... but thats not even the point. Neither is that i could have finished my programm on my own. The point was that "searching for coders" is a bit weird when you have sitting around and not accepting them.

...and of course driving people away by making them feel unappreciated.

Indeed, we have made mistakes, and it will probably happen again (hopefully not the same mistakes!). Those regarding coding are most likely my bad, which I already acknowledged.

I think there was a mismatch between your expectations and ours, and our way of handling it. Personality issue or communication issue I don't know. We had other coders with whom it didn't work out either, and others with whom it obviously did work.

That said, I do not know a single company/community/group where every application leads to a successful hiring, and this is a good thing. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with searching for coders but not going through with all of them.

Two reasons, imho:

First one: intellectual property. Fully understandable.

Second one (potentially): security through obscurity. I don't like that one :-)

This is correct. Conceptually I don't like the second point either, but it would be more dangerous to release it now, compared to if it had always been open source. The code isn't that insecure as I actually do pay attention to that stuff, but I assume exploits could potentially be found still.

That said the main reason it just that we never planned it to be open source at all. Maybe that would be a business model for us right there, open it and provide paid support and custom features. But there are so many open source forums either way, and ours was not even built to be distributed and tailored.

About the site itself we also do want to keep control about what goes in. I know this is just as easy as denying a merge request, but what's the point of even allowing them if we potentially wouldn't agree with the changes made. I also would not always have time to review all the requests in a timely manner, so I would prefer to work with coders we can eventually trust.

I posted it earlier on the shoutbox for you: https://www.coh2.org/replay?load_id=54986

You can use that filter and change the map, the only issue is that the maplist there is kind of a mess, so it's hard to find the correct one.

It's below any thread index.

If you want to search everything just use it from https://www.coh2.org/thread#uf_search_form

Since there seems to be an issue with its visibility, where did you expect to find it?