I was eager for the release of Elgg 1.0, and when it eventually showed up (late) and in poor condition, largely unsuited for popular adoption*, I was annoyed and disappointed–all the more so when I solved a few problems and had no good way to centrally disseminate them to others.

Having wrongly assumed there would be an upgrade or migration path from 0.9x, I was also frustrated by that. It seems there is still no such migration system.

At the same time, the rise of the usual fan cult responding to criticism and noob questions poorly was perhaps extra annoying, given all these other things.

I was also concerned about what would come from the lack of clear version notes and changelogs plus the apparent separation of developers from general users before the general user base had a chance to cohere as its own community necessarily interacting with devs.

* * * So I figured wait a few months, see if Elgg fails or grows. * * *

1.2 came out fairly soon, and next time I looked there were lots of templates, plugins, and an active community site. Excellent!

Well now I see the community site is broken, none of the alternate logins work, and if you forget your username you are SOL. When I got in, I found a bad search facility, generally difficult navigation of groups and discussions, and seemingly the loss of ability to post and start groups. This is not what I recall last time I looked at the new community site.

Am I to understand now that the main problem has been trolling and flaming over the Elgg team’s true intentions relative to fees and copyrights they may or may not be trying to slip in at some point?

It reminds me of the early days of Joomla too.

Except, in this case, we are dealing with commercially backed FOSS which does indeed garner and deserve some suspicion as to how long it will be providing FOSS releases of its product.

There is no reason to get hysterical about fork talk. Forks either take off and are valuable to everyone, or they do not take off and are valuable for a time to smaller audiences, or they just go away and nobody cares.

A successful fork of Elgg would likely hurt Elgg/Curverider as a commercial venture, but that threat is good for them and the much larger open source community. It should motivate them to produce quality and maintain credibility. If they can’t, let the chips fall where they may.

For a commercially backed FOSS product which has and may wish to have more investors, image means a lot. I wonder why they have failed so miserably in this department.

The Elgg team should be able to police its large community sites and knock off abuse. If that has not happened without basic features getting shut off or broken, without the air of lost credibility and trust, then they had best bust their butts and address their lack of moderation features and/or diligent, effective human moderators, or both.

In the end, all I care about, and all most people care about is whether the product works well and will not be abandoned. All the noise is making it really hard to assess those things.

*”largely unsuited for popular adoption”–core package with some stock templates, solid tutorials and docs, a real forum, and maybe a wiki. Also the 1.0 installer and .htaccess settings + lack of documentation set up a lot of shared server woes for novice to intermediate users of mysql/php applications.

http://classic.elgg.org/news/weblog/1754.html

This only happened after a few whistle blowers found out the plan to scrap Elgg and for the commercial Searunner to emerge. After a big stink, Curverider was forced to turn Searunner into Elgg 1.0, thus the current Elgg.

I was around and saw all of this going on. So, when I see ugly attitudes still present from Curverider, you can bet I am unhappy.

P.S. Please keep deleting troll’s comments. Tiring to have that BS

„Don’t feed the trolls!“

I do not want to have to moderate things here. I think you all know that.

Please do not overrun my blog with your comments. It is not the tone I want to have representing this blog.

Ro, I am not an apologist for Elgg. To be honest, I doubt I am their favorite person at all.

@ Ben I regret Ro’s series of comments here. You need to know that they do NOT in any way represent my thoughts on the matter, not those of the vast majority of those reading and commenting here.

I appreciate your commenting here and trying to clear the air. I do regret that you will not comment here again. I do think that there are a lot of good thoughts here that I hope you consider. I don’t want you to perceive this thread in a negative light or as bashing you guys. There has been criticism to be sure, but I really think the bulk of this has been constructive.