Is Kbin dying? I wanted to address the deleted thread and provide some insight into the current situation. ( kbin.social )

Seraph , 7 months ago

If I can't meet the deadline, I will step down from leading the project and transfer full rights over the repository and instance to the contributors.

I respect you entirely but this is a bit dramatic. Not all projects can be on time due to complications and no one is asking you to step down. Please just do what is necessary - you're doing fantastic!

Looking forward to the first version!

debounced , 7 months ago

100%. and therein lies the beauty of open source: if someone thinks they can do a better job, then fork it and move on.

Seraph , 7 months ago

If someone thinks they can do a better job they can go fork themselves!

Spaghetti_Hitchens , 7 months ago

Just don't fork their dongle. That does not go over well.

RickRussell_CA , 7 months ago

Everybody says that, but that's not really practical. It would be much better to merge those features into the main project, than to fork it and get stuck maintaining a separate codebase in perpetuity.

Now I will say that if someone thinks they can do a better job, they should sign up for the project and commit their changes to the main project, so all ernest has to do is approve it, rather than write it himself.

debounced , 7 months ago

oh, i totally agree with your points and i think most of us are already doing that... i was being borderline sarcastic. now, that said, i have no knowledge of what prompted this as a possible resolution by @ernest and it's none of my business, but i can take an educated guess at the calibre of individual(s) that prompted this as a solution. sometimes you have to be a hard-ass if you want to maintain quality and vision (cough mr torvalds) and @ernest has made it clear he's too nice. :-)

blightbow , 7 months ago (edited 7 months ago)

Yeah, there is no need for "final solution" style accountability here. This was a project that a single developer was working on when the stars just happened to align and drive a lot of attention to it at once. A commercially oriented website in the same situation would struggle to deal with it and be forced to take out loans in order to expand staffing and infrastructure capacity.

The phrasing of Ernest's initial post suggests that there is at least one exploitable vulnerability that spammers are taking advantage of and can't be openly discussed until the gates are closed. I understand the frustration and optics problem that comes with "easy and important fixes" sliding on the schedule (i.e. the topic of the other thread), but look at it this way:

• Ernest is too slammed with work to be consciously creating more work for himself.
• He needs the spam and bot problem to go away so ASAP so that it stops taking time away from him. This includes the missing moderation tools, spam/bot campaigns that are operating at a scale that those additional tools would have difficulty addressing regardless, and the issues he can't talk about yet that were hinted at above.
• If he is waiting to push out a fix to problems that would greatly reduce his workload, there are very good reasons for it.
• If he is not able to push out fixes that reduce his workload, it stands to reason that fixes unrelated to them are also sliding.

melroy Admin , 7 months ago

Indeed, nobody is asking you (Ernest) to step down.