Question To make things clear

Hey great work guys I have been worried about FB's future Im glad someone stepped up to the plate to bring us a bad ass forum

My story is similiar to fxstein's one. I was following FB close from the summer and slowly moving my site to Joomla!/FB. I was waiting for 1.0.5 with the new moderator tools. When I got everything ready and upgraded my site -- surprise: FireBoard didn't scale up (200 000+ messages) and my site crashed (out of memory, it couldn't serve all the requests) after five minutes of being online.

I had two options: either to go back or see how could I make the site fast enough to be usable. So I optimized MySQL and Apache settings for the new site and tried again. It helped a bit: the site didn't crash the server, but it was barely fast enough to serve my users (load 100-200% at rush times).

People complained about the slowness of the site and many of the features didn't quite work for all users. Some of them even thought that I should close the site because it was in a bad shape. So I started to look through and fixing bugs. After two weeks my users were not complaining on daily basis, but the site was slow even after updating my VPS.

Because of I didn't get any replies in the BOJ forum (except from Johnny, who was going to ban me at those times) I decided that I should do everything by myself. So I fixed bugs, optimized SQL queries and made my own improved theme, which is designed for user experience. I also tried to find a way to contribute back, but nobody in BOJ were interested in my work. So I just posted them to the forum. Soon after I was contacted by fxstein, who wanted my changes into 1.0.5.

After talking to fxstein (who was very busy at those times) I noticed that BOJ/FB was a joke, at least what comes to developing a software. So I was forced to make a fork. After announcing my fork in BOJ forums I talked with many people including Johnny, blakey87 and fxstein. They and many other people were sharing my thoughts.

The situation got worse when BOJ admins started to moderate threads by removing most of them. They also removed (accidentally?) some contributed work. Most of you know rest of the story: people got very angry and the forum was soon closed together with a message.

Closing the forum didn't stop us, but made us to rethink our position and what should we do in the future. I believe that it's more important to serve current users and community than make a new forum which will be published in 2 years -- if we are still interested in the project.

You will hear more from me soon.

Matias wrote:

(except from Johnny, who was going to ban me at those times)

Banning, even if I had wanted, that didn't , I COULDN'T :laugh:

More or less the same, followed FB for long time, about to drop just before FB2.0 was announced and fxstein started his 1.0.5 branch, and as I'm a no coder, helped as much in the little tasks I could, support , and a bot of mod to give time for the guys to come up with something

So here we are, fresh start, and comitted people

Thanks guys...really appreciate this thread. Many of us have faced a locked forum over at BoJ for a while and spent a long time sitting wondering what, if anything, might happen. It's great to get your background on that story, as it fills me with more confidence as to your intentions and the future of Kunena.

Two things...

1, How do you say it? Is it koo-nee-nah?
2, slap a donate button somewhere please...I don't have the ability to contribute, but I have a credit card

Cheers,

Phil

I don't know the answer for the first question, fxstein?

What comes to contributing, it's currently more important to get a stable version out than getting some money for the project. Opening up PayPal account that accepts credit cards takes some time, and it is not in our top priority. There may also be some legal obstacles, which need to be taken care of.

Our main vision is to be open and give every user the possibility to contribute. So there are a lot of things where Kunena users can help us. Here are some:

* help by testing new releases
* use Firebug and W3.org Validator to report/fix html/css/js bugs
* report bugs and annoyances, tell us how to make it better
* fix and improve translations (including English)
* make some nice icons, pictures to be used in Kunena
* write some tutorials, documentation, howtos (forum is ok too)
etc, etc..

So is there anything you can do?

Philip Roy wrote:

1, How do you say it? Is it koo-nee-nah?

Cheers,

Phil

However you like is good with us. I think you got that darn good anyway.

Maybe one day, I can write a post (hmm - need a blog around here...) about the big question: 'Why the heck did you name it Kunena?'