Becoming Concerned....

Captain Joined: Oct 20, 2003 Posts: 335

I'm starting to become a little concerned about the betaNC. So far I've found

-Missing files (ropm_quick_reply.tpl)
-Lost password funtion doesnt work
-FAQ doesnt work properly
-CVS autoupdate doesnt work
-Add Storys doesnt work

I realize this is a beta and sometimes thats what beta is all about, but NOT ONE of my posts have been replied to either.

I would like to know how difficult it would be to upgrade to the plain old 6.8 or 6.9 from the 6.5 enhanced? Do I have to redo this all from scratch (it will be the third time)?

Thanks.

Lieutenant Joined: May 28, 2003 Posts: 203

The betaNC (bNC) site will develop, test,

in short it not for production sites

Captain Joined: Oct 20, 2003 Posts: 335

I thought the 6.5 was an official release?

That doesnt explain the lack of response to posts.

I get the jist of your message though.

I'm going to join the nuke 'club' and start all over again with 7.0. Sigh.

Posted: Sat Oct 25, 2003 8:07 pm

XEULAS wrote:

That doesnt explain the lack of response to posts.

www.nukecops.com has been WAY too busy for myself and other staff to stay regular on posts over at the beta site.

help with any beta product just gets a lower priority with me

Captain Joined: Oct 20, 2003 Posts: 335

I understand.

I've been a game beta tester since 1986. The primary priority of every beta I've ever tested is response from the developers to the beta testers. I've taken a LOT of time to test, search, and post here (including not sleeping). Your statement regarding 'lower priority' tells me much. Very well. I wish you luck in all you do. A post/announcement regarding beta testing here and priorities might be a nice addition.

p.s. My posts have been here, not over at the beta site.

Posted: Sat Oct 25, 2003 9:19 pm

ok before i get started here, lemme just say:
the priorities, opinions and comments mentioned in this post are mine personally and may not be nukecops or the bNC dev team.

i have worked in tech support in one form or another for the last 4 years so i address issues at nukecops from the support perspective.

that being said, if i address all issues from a support perspective i cant very well abandon users using a production/stable version of nuke in favor of a user using a known beta/unstable version.

this doesn't mean if i have an answer for an issue that i withhold it because the user is using a beta version? NO

another thing that you have to consider is the bNC team does not have a 'ship date' or deadline they have to meet so it will be a different experience than what you may be used to in a commercial product's production enviroment, in addition, phpnuke and the resulting bNC are free open-source products, getting free, always available, dedicated support for either is impossible.

but use whatever version you want, but remember asking for help and EXPECTING it are 2 different things.

Captain Joined: Oct 20, 2003 Posts: 335

I apologize.

A little background: My reputation, locally, is based pretty much on my ability to 'think out of the box'. I co-founded two ISP's before most people knew what the net was. I advised newspaper editors who asked me, "Do you think this net will be anything" (funny in retrospect). I've always had an ability to know a good thing when I see it.

I read what you were doing, and I was excited about what you were doing (I even posted as such), and thought you were too and that it was an active participation. I didnt understand or know that it was a low priority project. I thought it was a 'currently happening' project and you were wanting people to test it out, and that is why you posted an official release for download (I figured, 'why else post a release?"). Thus my numerous question posts in the forum, as well as my posts in trying to to help others.

Hopefully you can see what ultimately led to my dissapointment in not getting even one response to my posts (actually, there was one, a mod thought my 'Definitive CVS' post was a good idea).

I will go back to being one of the herd, and wait for a non-beta release. I do thank you for responding, and I REALLY like your nickname (I've worn a tech hat or two).

Nuke Soldier Joined: Oct 14, 2003 Posts: 13

I have to say that I concur with all of what XEULAS has stated here. Even though is quite true that one shouldn't *expect* help, this project is somewhat on the misleading side, as I stated in another thread.

Due to the way it is announced, and the motto "let NC upgrade for you" or something, with "!!" and all, I was lead to think this was a hi-priority job.

The good thing about this particular thread is that now I know that whenever a security threat appears, I'll have to manually fix it and not just download from th CVS as stated elsewhere on the site. My posts where also almost non-answered, but that's ok.

XEULAS, if you still want to go with the cvs, read my post on the News Stories parse error, I found the error and posted the solution. While I'm not a programmer, I'm glad I could give back at least a bit to the community.

The funny thing is that the solution I posted has not been added to the CVS and also, whenever I run the script to get the updates, the bad version that is in the cvs server doesn't overwrite the fixed one I have here, even though I haven't set it so it gets ignored.

I wonder if this cvs thing is working at all.

Nuke Soldier Joined: Nov 09, 2003 Posts: 16

You guys seriously need to relax.
Beta at least in the open source world means "Can and Probably DOES have errors", at least 90% of the stuff doesn't, though and since they did the roll back a few days ago (BTW what the hell was up with the crap coming out of CVS for a week and a half?) I can only complain about a couple of problems.

They are of course reading your feedback, and implementing it when appropriate, but that is not always possible. Expecting to get feedback on your feedback, is a little too much to ask, especially when something is done out of the kindness of thier hearts and not as a major source of revenue.

Look at this forum alone, there are several hundred posts each day, and at least 30-40% is just rehashing the same "I never bothered to read the manual but it doesn't matter because my issue is different from everyone else" stuff time and time again.

If you didn't get a reply, maybe you should dig a little deeper. I have been programming for over 20 years, both open and closed source projects. I have even recently started a site to help other programmers. And I can guarantee you, there are no "Magic Pill" programs that can solve all of your needs. This software, beta or otherwise comes very close.

There are also no "Magic Errors", that have no solutions. If you have a problem and can't find the solution in the forums or whatever, just look at the error, then look at the code and fix it, it's not that difficult I promise.

We are lucky to have this program and have it in PHP, the language is so simple a drooling idiot can code a proffesional application in less than a few days. But as with anything in the programming world, it is 10% writing and 90% debugging.
If you can't program and have no desire to learn, then why are you downloading a beta in the first place?

Another thing you may want to take into consideration, at least 2 of the people actively involved in this project are kinda busy getting married right now, and probably have a lot less time to devote to this, but yet I see no slow down in thier activity (Congratulations BTW), I would also gather that since this is a very tight knit community that several of the other people involved with the site are also a little busy helping these 2 get off to a good start in life Smile

So in conclusion, and forgive me for sounding inflammatory, but please don't expect a finished product from something named beta. Also please don't expect to get feedback on your feedback, I can promise that just about everything you post is taken into consideration, but I doubt that any single human could keep up with the level of posts in these forums.
Finally, before asking for help, seriously try to fix the problem on your own, it's really not hard 90% of the time.

Captain Joined: Oct 20, 2003 Posts: 335

Glad you got that off your chest... where were you a month ago? Mr. Green

Nuke Cops Founder Joined: Nov 14, 2002 Posts: 5939

Well thanks for the constructive criticism and the support both ways. Yes we're a tight knit community, and right now this week has been a real draining one of most of the staff. I'm in Cisco training all week, not to mention IACOJ are starting our lives. CS is MIA, and I found that the last update to the bundle broke it. I couldn't find CS so I had to trouble shoot it to get it working again. Now the SQL Injection is out, and we don't really have a valid exploit. So its hard to patch it if we don't know what exactly we're patching. I've tried what was in the advisory, but it isn't working.