Many of my peers are well aware of the voluntary role I serve for a web software organization that I provide much of my free time for. Those that do not know me so well probably aren't so likely to be aware of this, which happens to be one of the primary things I commit my available time to.
The role I serve is a team leadership position for a message board software called SMF. SMF stands for Simple Machines Forum, but it is virtually always referenced by its abbreviation when brought up in discussion. What my primary function for SMF is to write documentation and maintain the primary place where official documentation of SMF is stored, the Online Manual. I am the Documentation Coordinator for the currently very small Documentation Team of SMF.
A screenshot of the new SMF 2.0 Admin Panel.
Now, SMF is a free software, period.
Yes our organization has had some heat thrown at us by a small group of minorities that go around advocating an Open Source license called GPL, with an attitude very much akin to that those who do not use a GPL license but release software for free are 'evil'. That at least is the impression I get, from what I have understood, these people aren't necessarily so against commercial products, but they feel all software that does happen to be free as in 'free beer', should also be 'free' as in complete freedom. What this means in our context is that currently we do not allow others to modify our software and redistribute it under a different name ("fork" the software) which is one of the key components of what the GPL license would allow. We have had legitimate reasons for not allowing others to fork our software. SMF traces it's roots back to a predecessor message board software called YaBB SE, which was released under a GPL license. Sadly YaBB SE had a fork, and while I know that I wasn't around back during those days, I know that the fork hurt the software. Granted SMF is a much more of a mature product than YaBB SE happened to be back in the day, so SMF would most likely survive a fork of itself without leaving a big wound, but we still have many reasons to be against completely going with a GPL license. Reasons that I either feel I am not an expert enough to discuss, or are internal matters that I would not feel comfortable providing to the public without permission first. Mainly the former, although we have had some bad experiences with some people trying to fight us over the 'GPL battle' that I will not discuss.
Now let me be clear that I, am by no means, anti-GPL. I think for instance GPL is really great for Linux. I think the problem is, GPL just was not designed for web scripts. I will save the argument for another day, but essentially the GPL was not made with the idea of web software in mind. I admit that I am again no expert on this, but I have had colleagues who are very experienced in the programming and licenses who have explained to me before as to why the GPL does not fit in well with the web.
Now some of you may wonder why I spend a lot of my time with SMF and how I discovered it for that matter.
First of all, SMF was not my first message board I ever used. I believe phpBB was, and at the time I didn't mind it. But the version at the time, phpBB 2 was quickly becoming obsolete as it wasn't at the time able to catch up in terms of development with its main competitors. Now, I have a huge amount of respect for those behind the phpBB Group, like SMF, phpBB is also a free software. However phpBB 2 just did not offer a lot of the features I wanted for my own message board that free competitors of phpBB did offer. I eventually found my way to Invision Power Board, another quality forum package and was quite happy with it until the whole huge thing of IPB becoming a paid only software occurred. I will refrain from mentioning the circumstances as I still have respect for SMF's competitors and don't want to make this blog post into a bashing post about other software, but I will leave it that I, like many other users, was upset over what happened, and had no other choice but to find a free forum software alternative (I just did not have the money at the time to pay for any of the software that I used, I was younger back then for one).
So eventually I crossed paths with SMF, and almost instantly fell in love with it. Now I do not want to turn this into a post praising all the things that I think are great about SMF, I may want to save that for another time. But in general, I was impressed with all the administration options and the user interface of SMF.
I think what inspired me so much to contribute to SMF was the friendly user community behind SMF. I was essentially a young "newbie" member when I first signed up, but the community really never made me feel this way, or made it easy to forget that this was the case. I remember being impressed with how many ordinary users would go around helping other SMF users, providing support for using and installing SMF among many other tasks. I realized then that I found something that made me feel good. Sure there is the sentiment about feeling good about giving back to something you believe in and that has helped you out, but I think more so than anything else, I found a place where I could help other people that had to do with something I enjoyed very much and at a place where I felt comfortable and welcomed by others.
But, really what do I do? Do I just get my head in writing documentation?
The truth is that documentation is only one of the many things I do for SMF. The list can get quite extensive, but I will try to keep it simple, highlighting what I do the most.
Documentation would be the number one function I do for SMF. I write documents, and update documents. I also maintain the Online Manual, upgrading it every once in awhile so it uses the latest version of SMF, as well as write some code for it so that we have some special features specially needed for handling our documentation, since obviously SMF was not designed to be a wiki-type piece of software.
In the past I have written a few modification packages. For those who are not very experienced with message boards, modifications (often abbreviated as 'mods') generally are third party packages of code that either directly modify code in the software (in SMF's case), or provide find and replace code instructions to modify the software. The modifications I have written have provided some additional features and functionality that SMF currently does not have by default. One of the modifications I have written has been made into a default feature in SMF 2.0, but was not available as a default feature for the version I wrote it for, which was SMF 1.1.
A long time ago I even released a few themes, but my theme designing skills are not the best and in general the themes I released essentially faded away to a point where they stopped being updated for more recent versions of SMF.
A huge thing I do with SMF when I have the time is provide support for using SMF to the community. I often like to focus in on areas where there is high demand for a certain type of support, but low supply of those able to help. Such examples often include people asking for minor tweaks that require editing SMF's code to achieve a certain functionality or feature. Many users are not that skilled in regards to coding, and these questions usually take a lot longer to answer, so I try to hop in and help with such questions when I can.
Of course a huge aspect of my involvement with SMF is providing advice and my opinion to the team behind SMF. I also beta test the software and report bugs that I find in SMF so that they can be fixed. There have been some events and concepts that would not have taken place if I hadn't been the one to initially come up with a certain idea. I take pride in helping SMF move forward and making the community a more and more friendly environment. I have often suggested ways of getting the community more involved, through contests and other ways. I think maintaining a friendly community that is able to connect with the team behind SMF and feel welcomed is virtually the most vital thing for SMF to remain a strong message board software.
