[Rainbowportal-devel] Fwd: The Team Needs To Earn Respect of Users (OS or commercial)

[Emmanuele De A. <ma...@gm...>]

Charles has asked me the favor to forward to the list this mail.
With this I just want to thank him for all... as a matter of fact
Charles has given precious input to the project.
Before reply to this email I just invite you to browse the archives
and read again his suggestions, going one time beyond the language and
the passion.
Sincerely
Manu

Charles word follows...

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Charles Carroll <cha...@gm...>
Date: Thu, 30 Dec 2004 15:23:35 +0900
Subject: Please send to list on my behalf

subject: The Team Needs To Earn Respect of Users (OS or commercial)

As usual Jeremy, Bill Forney, et al. and the usual crowd did not do
anything to increase my respect for team. (prepare the delete key Jes
-- this is a long lecture and you and a few others are the villians in
the lecture IMO)

Read the source force reply message @
http://tinyurl.com/47asg
to see a sane response to even more team silliness like the insistence
1.4 is really just a beta for the RB project. And the false accusation
that I never shoudl have setup critical sites with RB. I setup a
personal site not a critical one (albiet a large one) and emphasize I
had clients that need things like RB but till a personal project mine
was mostly bug free and sclaes only then could I put real clients on
it. I never ever will put even 1 client on RB till I investigated it
in depth which is what I have been doing since September.

If Jeremy and others on team think I was bad for project great rise up
and TELL THE LIST Jeremy and the CHAZ critics were right .... By
posting on list and cc'ing me and Bob Lair
(91...@le...,rob...@gm...).  And congrats -- you already
have the better project without me Jeremy mentions.

But if you appreciate what my candor, persistence and tough love
brought and thats why you are one of the ones who raised this list to
252 messages a month on average instead of the old 57 messages TELL
THE LIST and cc me and Bob (91...@le...,rob...@gm...).

Jeremy's next round of cheap shots at me (the reason I hated being on
this list since September) including comments like:

" But from the start he was so obnoxious and arrogant that he
immediately upset a
number of the key contributors."
As a Rainbow user I was pretty upset that the key contributors called
this 1.4 (it was more like a .4 product) and I wasted a lot of time
building something with it hat could not even scale to 20 users with a
lot of tabs/pages. I think we all have the right to be upset if any OS
project we enter (log4net, Ibatis, etc.) claims it is in great shape
and the RC blah is an awesome release and they are in fact delusional.

"Charles did indeed make some useful observations and suggestions, if
one had the patience to sift them out of his pompous, vitriolic
lectures."
Many like my lectures which come from the heart and take time to write
-- donated time to the project. They touch on complex and simple
solutions to coding and project failures and sucess on code and
community and support level. The fact he does not agree with them does
not mean he has to call them pompous and vitrolic.  He has a delete
key.

"Nevertheless, IMHO his net contribution to the project is a big
negative: he did far more damage to Rainbow than good. He will not be
missed."

Now is where he really proves how irrational he is.  Lets look at the facts.
The list had 25 messages in September the previous max messages per
month is 148 in March. The average messages per month for 6 months was
57 messages per month.
The likely cause for such low activity was due to
1.
a mistake in the way the list was configured where replied went to
individual not list
I noticed it and demanded a fix that while the core team let it remain unfixed
2.
a. Every doc link on main page of RainbowPortal.net was broken in
excess of 6 months  so no one googling RainbowPortal copuld find out
much about project.
b. I noticed it and demanded a fix
c. a few indignant core team members started the cycles of excuses, "i
should volunteer and fix it", they don't like my tone that was my
first sign this team was really not able to focus on the basics
projects like DNN had right. And on top of that they hated lectures
about the importance of these basics.

Within 2 weeks all doc links worked thanks to my persistence of
bringing it to their attention and tolerating attacks on me for daring
to want the doc links to work.

3.
The fact that most install problems and other problems in Forums or
this list were being treated as User Errors and RTFM issues.
a. Rahul and a few caring RB users started a YahooGroup with 98%
answer ratios where the Forums had 1% answer ratios.
b. They were not thanked. They were told they should not do that in
THAT location and told most of the team were too busy to help users in
the YG or Forums and that is the nature of OS projects. A few nice
team members came over to group and helped users.
c. Rahul and I promoted the SF list, encouraged people to report bugs
in SF (JIRA was not migrated yet)
d. I made set of working Rainbow links @ http:.//www.learnasp.com/cms
to counter the fact that the first 30 pages of Googel results were to
sites that had many 404s or that used to promote Rainbow but now
promote DNN. I made sure the RB links there were good so if someone
googled Rainbow and found my site they would get to this list and
other goodies for Rainbow.

These changes increased list activity to 1006 messages in the 4 months
since I joined and promoted the SF list an average of 252 messages per
month up from the sad 57 messages per month.

THAT IS A FACT. This high volume was even achieved with Nov/dec
usually being slow times for lists.

"Furthermore, I am pleased that he is going to annoy the DNN community
now: it's only fair that having damaged this project he should now do
the same to our market rival."

If annoying means demanding our DNN passwords are not stored in
unencrypted form, that any site I build with DNN better not leak 20
ways to sunday, and that showstopoping bugs others politely said once
unresolved for months get done next week, etc, sure I will "annoy
them".

=> Others savvy teams may
=> consider it the conscience every team needs
=> to have the best product (not an annoyance)

Jeremey and other the members of the team who are privately annoyed by
me and attack me by email just do not get it. A user who cares about
rainbow having showstopping bugs and enumerates ones not filed
anywhere and helps fix them and helps drag others into the community
(EasyListBox, Bob Lair, etc.) with the strong belief  that the team
will fix the showstoppers is an asset.

I am not a moderate industry player. He can think I am or not. It is a
non point.

My role here was to build a site with Rainbow based on Rahul and
team's statement it was a great tool to do so. And I held feet to fire
to ensure it was and when it was obvious they hated their feet in fire
port my site and move on.....

As I found severe problems I had no idea existed until I built 1 site
with it and encouraged friends of mine to build a dozen sites with it.
And encouraged Bob Lair (IBS creator to join) os he could volunteer
but Jeremy and oithers scared Bob off -- he ain't as thicked skinned
as me nor as patient.

As Bob Lair said "Charles sugarcoats the problems".  That should have
been wakeup call to Jermeny and team they might not like the way I say
it but here a major industry figure says I am being laid back about it
the problems are very bad. Of course Jeremy and others ignore Bob
Lair's post -- wasting time attacking me again.

I am not as foolhardy as the folks who deployed dozens or hundreds of
RB sites without testing it thoroughly for usability and scalability,
and without looking at its UI and scurity issues objectively. I made 1
big site and WAS UNWILLING TO BUILD A SINGLE SITE FOR REAL CLIENTS OR
MORE SITES FOR ME until a a list of issues that were quite severe I
assumed the team would love to solve to make the product better - many
of which were met with some demands I fix it, some of which met with
attacks on the way I said it, personal insults, very few of which met
with any sucessful prompt effort except from Manu to genuinely fix the
problems.

It won't make me come back even if many side with my approach (that
ship has sailed) but it may make Jeremy and others more wary of
scaring off the next person who is brutally honest to get the project
into great quality shape and a player against DNN to get you guys a
great Rainbow in 2006 instead of the mess you have now the team
overestimates the quality of and many put clients on before they
realized how severe the perf and UI problems and scuruty problems
were.

I will be on
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/agitkomisiono-sinsekvigi
where we all still are deciding what CMS/portal system is best.