Not a Team Player



  • So we all know my history with SMF is... interesting. Love and hate collide and all that.

    And today I was on the wrong end of a shouting match with a would-be contributor who is a little bit mouthy and a little bit short on knowledge who swears he knows 90% of the history of the project and when brain rot set in with the management etc.

    And then he decides to tell me that he's spoken with various people and that I'm not a team player, that I "fucked up too hard" to fix things and that I "ever stopped being anxious and throwing sh!t for bad coding."

    I'm trying to comprehend how many WTFs there are here, but we'll take them in turn.

    Team Player
    I don't work especially well in a team when every decision of any value is watered down by a committee of non technical people that think they know best. I don't work well when every little change is met with "but that's not how we've always done it"

    Fucked Up Too Hard
    Apparently I should have trickle-fed changes in rather than pushing for big stuff. That'd be fine and all if the project weren't already a year late on this version if not two years late. Yay open source.

    Too Anxious
    Yes, apparently now it's a sin to care about code quality. Apparently now it's a sin to actually care about the quality of code being put out and that just because it's a group effort by volunteers, I'm supposed to let things like coding standards lie. I'm supposed to not care about the quality of work I produce and that my name is on.

    The first two I can go either way on but seriously that last one. That's a WTF.



  • @Arantor said:

    So we all know my history with SMF is... interesting. Love and hate collide and all that.

    And today I was on the wrong end of a shouting match with a would-be contributor who is a little bit mouthy and a little bit short on knowledge who swears he knows 90% of the history of the project and when brain rot set in with the management etc.

    And then he decides to tell me that he's spoken with various people and that I'm not a team player, that I "fucked up too hard" to fix things and that I "ever stopped being anxious and throwing sh!t for bad coding."

    I'm trying to comprehend how many WTFs there are here, but we'll take them in turn.

    Team PlayerI don't work especially well in a team when every decision of any value is watered down by a committee of non technical people that think they know best. I don't work well when every little change is met with "but that's not how we've always done it"

    Fucked Up Too HardApparently I should have trickle-fed changes in rather than pushing for big stuff. That'd be fine and all if the project weren't already a year late on this version if not two years late. Yay open source.

    Too AnxiousYes, apparently now it's a sin to care about code quality. Apparently now it's a sin to actually care about the quality of code being put out and that just because it's a group effort by volunteers, I'm supposed to let things like coding standards lie. I'm supposed to not care about the quality of work I produce and that my name is on.

    The first two I can go either way on but seriously that last one. That's a WTF.

    -Looks up SMF
    -Finds out avast accused them of getting avast hacked 2 or 3 months ago
    -Finds out Arantor did the release they accused SMF of secretly fixing the vulnerability responsible for the hack
    -Will now troll Arantor mercilessly as "The guy who hacked antivirus"

    in other news, I have never worked on anything open source, but I wouldn't be surprised if many of the people involved are just The Worst.



  • You missed:
    -Finds out Arantor is the guy that reviewed Avast's files and concluded exactly what had happened
    -Finds out Arantor did in fact not lie about the 2.0.7 release being bug fix only and no security fixes included thus legitimising Avast not upgrading to it



  • I did miss both of those, because its less funny if I include them.

    I am just like avast, except I do even less to protect your computer.



  • Yeah, let's just say that I encouraged everyone I know to not use Avast.



  • You never quite know if they know they're in the wrong and choose to make you the scapegoat, or if they genuinely believe you to be the source of the problem.

    I find myself leaning towards the former in this case, since I get the impression they see you as disobedient. Rightfully disobedient according to your story.

    It reminds me of an employer I had in my very early days who pushed me to do things the quick and dirty way to meet a deadline I had not been able to negotiate, and subsequently accused me of being sloppy. I can't tell if I give him too much credit for assuming he must have known quick and dirty meant lower quality or not.



  • I don't dispute that. Damn straight I'm disobedient because I refuse to let myself be dragged down to mediocrity. I won't accept 'good enough' and neither should they.

    It's one thing to make a temporary script that will "definitely" be replaced be quick and dirty. It's quite another to accept mediocrity in all things.



  • I have a tiny SMF install with about 6 users. Should I be fleeing?



  • @mott555 said:

    I have a tiny SMF install with about 6 users. Should I be fleeing?

    Nah. SMF if kept up to date is generally pretty good.



  • The organizational interaction smell: You hear someone reference "being a team player". Either the guy is getting screwed, or someone else screwed up and is trying to shift the blame.



  • @cartman82 said:

    The organizational interaction smell: You hear someone reference "being a team player". Either the guy is getting screwed, or someone else screwed up and is trying to shift the blame.

    I have no sense of smell and I smelt that one.



  • @Arantor said:

    Nah. SMF if kept up to date is generally pretty good.

    Sorry if I'm hijacking a bit, but I take it you are/were a developer on the SMF project? I can't figure out how to get it to send out emails and notifications. Emails always fail and I literally see no place in the admin settings to configure mail accounts and servers. Ideally it would just send from a secondary Yahoo! webmail account I own.

    This also hinders registration, I want to open registration (but with admin approval) but that requires emailing.



  • Holy hell I've been searching for the email settings for weeks and couldn't find them. 10 seconds after posting this, I found them.

    :facepalm:

    TRWTF is the lack of a facepalm smiley.



  • Yes, I was a dev but due to the aforementioned WTFery I stepped down. I'm still active over there under the username of ⁉

    Yahoo webmail is basically a no go actually. They basically won't send it onwards not even if configured through SMTP from what we've seen.



  • @Arantor said:

    Yahoo webmail is basically a no go actually. They basically won't send it onwards not even if configured through SMTP from what we've seen.

    Well that sucks. What about Gmail/Outlook.com?

    I self-host the site and associated services (just a small private gaming community) and the ports required for me to self-host email are blocked by my ISP.



  • GMail and Outlook seem to be fine, ideally if configured through SMTP. Probably best to ask that over on simplemachines.org to be honest.



  • Open source PHP projects are the worst. Just look at the absolute shitshow that is Wordpress, or old versions of Joomla (haven't used newer versions that much, could be just as bad).

    I would run and never look back. Poor programming practices and PHP go hand in hand, and before you say it I'm not a PHP hater (I currently make a living with it..)



  • Yup. They get momentum and don't want to risk backwards compatibility breaks because it's largely put together by relative amateurs - though in some peoples' defence, PHP a number of years ago was also sufficiently turdlike to make sane design borderline impossible.

    But WordPress is a bastion of bad design down to the core.


  • BINNED

    We have a daily limit on how many times that action can be taken. Please wait 13 hours before trying again.



  • You made the mistake of caring about code that you write for someone else. It's no longer yours, it's theirs. Don't get attached.



  • @mott555 said:

    Well that sucks. What about Gmail/Outlook.com?

    I self-host the site and associated services (just a small private gaming community) and the ports required for me to self-host email are blocked by my ISP.

    You can probably relay outbound through your ISPs mail servers, even if the email isn't from their domain.



  • @oesor said:

    You can probably relay outbound through your ISPs mail servers, even if the email isn't from their domain.

    I think I almost got something working with Outlook.com, however SMF doesn't play nicely with it because it requires a TLS connection. Found a fix at http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=180532.msg1148462#msg1148462 which is for a much older version of SMF but apparently works with 2.0+. Haven't tried it yet because I don't have access to my (personal) server's file system from work in order to patch it.

    TRWTFs are software with built-in email features that don't work on any email server with security, and a known patch for the issue which dates back 7 years but still isn't in the official release.



  • Email issues are always fun. I set up a site for development at home, had to set up Apache, Perl, and Python. Haven't bothered configuring email since I haven't had to work on any email-related items yet.



  • Lack of email hasn't been a major issue but I want to transition from admins registering users to new users registering themselves. The problem we have is only the admins are ever online! Open registration (with admin approval) ought to help out recruiting a bit.



  • Well, yeah. Lack of email is a much larger issue on a production site than a dev site.



  • @Arantor said:

    Yes, I was a dev but due to the aforementioned WTFery I stepped down. I'm still active over there under the username of ⁉

    Yahoo webmail is basically a no go actually. They basically won't send it onwards not even if configured through SMTP from what we've seen.

    Your username is interrobang? What the fuck?



  • SMF lets you have a different display name to actual username and it's surprisingly generous in what it allows.



  • Modern spamfilters that check SPF (or even DKIM, now that yahoo and others are starting to implement stricter DMARC policies) will punch your mail in the gut for that. Highly effective anti-spam measures though.

    I'm desperatly trying to keep some mailing list server software which was last updated in the late 90's alive through all these measures .



  • I am a firm believer that you should have a login username field, and a display username field for all applications.



  • @Matches said:

    I am a firm believer that you should have a login username field, and a display username field for all applications.

    And it makes a surprisingly good defence against being brute-forced when they have two separate unknowns to attack.



  • @Matches said:

    I am a firm believer that you should have a login username field, and a display username field for all applications.

    Same here. Normally, for the start, the username is just a lowercased version of the display name so uniqueness can be constrained by the database, but it also allows admins/moderators to change someone's name without accidentally locking them out of the system if they're not aware of the change.

    And all kinds of fun shenanigans abuse by any admins who may have direct database access 😉



  • Like you said, it's your name on the code. Keep fighting the good fight. :)



  • @Matches said:

    Your username is interrobang? What the fuck?

    Should we start distinguishing between / giving different names to ?! and !? ? I like "interrobang" for the ?! and exclamohuh for the second.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Steve_The_Cynic said:

    Should we start distinguishing between / giving different names to ?! and !? ? I like "interrobang" for the ?! and exclamohuh for the second.

    Well since neither of them is an interrobang (since said item of punctuation has both the interro- and -bang bits overlapping thus: ‽) I suggest you start from there...



  • Several people have since called me Question Mark. FAIL all around.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @PJH said:

    I suggest you start from there...

    ?! - Query+bang -> Quang
    !? - Bang+query -> Barrey



  • I'll interrobang your barrey quang up the kazoo.



  • Quang Berry, arantor. Fuck.



  • @PJH said:

    Well since neither of them is an interrobang (since said item of punctuation has both the interro- and -bang bits overlapping thus: ‽) I suggest you start from there...

    Fair point. Perhaps we can call ?! an interroshriek instead.



  • @dtech said:

    Modern spamfilters that check SPF (or even DKIM, now that yahoo and others are starting to implement stricter DMARC policies) will punch your mail in the gut for that. Highly effective anti-spam measures though.

    SPF is run against the from: domain, so adding the ISP's mail relay IPs to the forum's domain's SPF record would validate. And I thought that DKIM was a function of the content and not relaying, though I don't have hands-on experience with it.



  • @oesor said:

    SPF is run against the from: domain, so adding the ISP's mail relay IPs to the forum's domain's SPF record would validate. And I thought that DKIM was a function of the content and not relaying, though I don't have hands-on experience with it.

    Yeah you're right, SPF won't be a problem if you're using your domain as a sender and can control it's DNS, and DKIM shouldn't be a problem as long as you sign on your server and relay that message.


  • BINNED

    @Shoreline said:

    pushed me to do things the quick and dirty way to meet a deadline I had not been able to negotiate, and subsequently accused me of being sloppy.

    Been there, bought the :tshirt:.

    Now I annoy everyone with emails of the "So, to make sure I'm understanding correctly… You want me to…" variety, and save the responses to roll up into a tube and smack noses with when needed.

    People did try not replying. But then when I did nothing and they got upset, my response of "no reponse to my email = no work started on your project because of no confirmation." Shuts them up nicely.



  • @M_Adams said:

    ... no work started on your project because of no confirmation.

    This is good practice and I support it. Unfortunately I recall attempting it with the very same employer, and within the same conversation I mentioned he told me I lacked independence. It really made all that unpaid late-night overtime seem worthwhile.

    Had I been older I would have been much more aggressively creative about forcefully explaining to him his evidently vacuous state of intellect, partly to see if he understood.

    His company was based in a barn not far from a university town high in IT graduates and low in IT jobs, so I get the impression people worked in said backwater until they could get out. The last I heard, a few years ago the company was as obscure and stagnant as ever.


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