Idea kunena idea to move forward into the future

I understand the nature of the development of kunena and am really grateful for the effort by all who contribute their time and skills to the project. That being said, i would love to see more regular releases with improvements and new features.

So, obviously for this to occur, the kunena projects requires more people involved and for this to happen would generally mean more money.

Seeing as though kunena is one of the top extensions of joomla, as seen in the JED, im sure kunena could do a campaign on one of those crowdfunding websites to achieve a level of funding to continue development, or introduce an option to commercialise support for kunena. There are numerous extensions to facilitate this, to only provide support to paying people. This could free up developers to work on the project, or if they are providing support at least they are getting paid for it. Could help provide more incentive for mods/developers.

anyway, just my thoughts as a way to keep the project moving forward into the future.

Well, I'm going to give you some insight why things have been a bit slow lately, because of I feel bad that I've not been able to work on Kunena during a few past months.

At time to time I'm suffering from cluster headaches and about 4 months ago I was hit the worst headaches that I've had during the past 7 years. That basically stopped almost everything I was doing (including work and even prevented me from driving a car) for about 2½ months. I'm glad that it went over, but I'm still playing catchup on everything I was supposed to do months ago, but was never able to do.

That said, during the past few weeks we're been able to resume to normal operation, meaning that my lack of involment doesn't prevent others from doing what they need to do -- and I hope I will have some vacation, too, to fix the architectural issues on K3.1 where I'm the best person to do those.

Croudfunding is a great idea, but I have a feeling that it's not going to help in fhort term as most of the team members aren't students anymore and have their own jobs (and personal lifes) to take care of. But as I personally still care about the future of the project and want it to succeed, I've been planning the best ways to archieve our ambitious goals.

So even if it has been silent, it doesn't mean that the storm isn't coming. I agree that we were further along with our plans, but unfortunately there have been some unfortunate events that have forced us to push our plans back.

Right now we are targetting to get Kunena 3.1 (version number is still open) out as fast as it's possible and it will bring a fresh and well planned template for those who are already using Joomla 3.3 as well as numerous smaller improvements under the hood.

All good

I was more suggesting, that if making support available through subscriptions it would bring an income in that would help with covering the costs of the project. There are so many support posts on kunena that waste alot of time, that could easily be sorted by the person searching, or are very particular to a user's setup. So having paid support would reduce the support posts and so free up time to let those that have the skills to keep working on the project.

Other ideas is to make some of the plugins commercial whilst keeping the core free, similar to how AUP do it. Could also mean that you could introduce a few more plugins with new features that people can add if they want to pay for them.

By introducing paid support or commercial plugins it would hopefully create a pool of money that might help induce more people to get involved or could mean that for certain features you could outsource the coding and then check it over before implementing in the project, resulting in possibly quicker turnaround of features and releases.

Anyway, just a few ideas i had that i thought would pass on. keep up the good work

Thanks for the feedback.

Over the time that I have been involved with the Kunena project, the question of "how to obtain income" - at least, enough income to continue the work of developing and enhancing the product with new features, etc. - has been a frustratingly difficult one to answer.

Please understand that I am not advertising my own personal business here - that would be very wrong for me to do - nor am I advertising any other business here, but there are many of us who would like to do that "paid support" as you describe it, if there was a real demand for it. I understand what you are saying - that you would like us to introduce an option for people to obtain support by paying for it - but the facts are that (a) we do not have to resources to keep people on a support payroll, which means we would have to devote our own time to this task, and (b) people seeking support are not using the services that already exist. If we were to add another layer to the Kunena support framework, one that involves subscriptions, I have my doubts that people would make use of it.

So, you see, this is a particularly difficult task for us.

It may interest you to know that the donations button (seen on the right side of this page) is rarely used. I believe that total income (over the past 6 years) from donations has been less than $100. So, while crowdfunding ventures and donation-seeking may be good ideas, in practice we are stuggling to use these things as significant streams of revenue.

If it were not for the generosity of members of the Kunena team (who have dug deeply into their own pockets to pay the substantial costs of a dedicated server that runs this website) and our loyal advertisers who contribute in very real, substantial ways towards supporting our operations, we would not even have this website where we can have this discussion.

Thanks again ... and cheers

Matias, I am sorry you have been feeling so unwell.

Have you thought of maybe "Kickstarter" to raise some funds. People give money for the silliest of things (potato salad) - this is a well needed funding and I think it would do well on Kickstarter .

Paid support would only work if you have the time to answer. I left the other guys because of the slow paid support that was subscription and the wonky forum issues.