I'm probably kicking in an open door. But if this is such an issue, what is keeping the community from starting "the unofficial freenas forum"? The only thing stopping it, as i see it, is ix wanting to keep control over it ?
Quite honestly, the only thing that stopped us was the fact that nobody wanted to pay for a license of the forum software, nor had the hardware to host it. It had been presented as an idea loooong ago right after xenforo rolled out. But it was something that, without money, nobody could do.
IX seems to want a community to support their product without any effort or investment from their side.
That is, quite literally the most accurate way to possibly describe it.
So why not let IX deal with these users themself ( or not and see how that works out) in the way they see fit, and simply put a vbulletin out there where the community can give support in a way they deem appropriate using rules the mods think reasonable ?
Well, we ('we' being the mods and probably the regular users) want FreeNAS to succeed. FreeNAS really and truly relies on TrueNAS to survive. Giving away the OS costs money for bandwidth and such. Someone has to pay for all that bandwidth for plugins, the jails templates, the developers, etc.
When I first got started on FreeNAS in March 2011 the primary posters were a handful of volunteers and a couple of the devs. The devs didn't get paid to post. In fact some devs downright hated users and were sometimes just as abusive (and sometimes more abusive) with users that were clueless and demanded answers (sound familar?) than we could ever be today. I can pretty much guarantee you that if I blatantly told off a user where there was no way I could have been taken out of context, I'd probably be banned from the forums or worse. But that was the norm, and the mods didn't do anything about it, and neither did iXsystems. Being a moderator at that time meant "delete this post that has an IP address" and "correct this post that is illegible because of forum code". Anyway, I can't write C code for my life, but it was discussed that if the forum regulars could pick up the slack and help people in IRC and the forums, then the devs would be able to focus on the important stuff.. fixing bugs and adding new features. Win-Win right? We were in 8.0.4 at this point. Jails didn't exist. There was no encryption, no webshell, no footer, the CLI was a PITA to use. FreeNAS was totally different from what it is now, and far less stable than it is now.
Isn't that what open source should be all about instead of politics? i've seen this type of thing go down time after time in other projects where ultimately, if the initative for this was not taken, and the "parent company" simply did what they wanted, the community would die ( and with it , the quality of the product).
And that's where you and I differ from the point of view that has been presented by iXsystems. The mod's point of view is that we are providing a service that we are capable of providing (time) because it helps us out too (we end up with more developers working on actual code and not telling the um-teenth user in 24 hours that 2GB of RAM is
still not enough RAM). The problem is that it quickly morphed from a symbiotic relationship to one of hatred for one another. iXsystems attitude was that we didn't provide a great value (or at least not a good enough value), we were free to leave any time we wanted and "we wouldn't be missed one bit" (sound familiar?) and that was that. The mods of course totally disagreed and felt that they would not only be missed, but they were very important to the project and without their continued support the community was dead in the water. Some people have gone so far to say that if I had chosen NAS4Free instead of FreeNAS that FreeNAS may not exist right now in the same way that it does. I did have over 2 years of basically totally uninterrupted time spent here (I was unemployed and had little better to do). I literally lived to learn all that was FreeNAS, and had no life except to hang in the forums and IRC. That's a lot of free manpower to devote to a given cause.
I firmly believe that if the mods leave, this community is in for a major setback and as a result TrueNAS (and the money supply) is in for a major setback. Developer's don't work for free. Very, very little code is generated by volunteers. iXsystems has wanted developers from the community to get more involved with working on FreeNAS code, but with the hostility between any one group and any other group, why would someone stick around? We've had quite a few people that did some amazing stuff since I started in the forums. They come, they realize what a mess this place is, often they are treated like scum of the Earth, and they bail out as fast as they can once they see how bad things really are.
Protosd ported FreeNAS 8.x to be based on FreeBSD 9 before development had even begun by the iXsystems devs (or so I have heard). He was shot down and told "thanks but no thanks". Why would you shoot someone in the face like that after all the work he put into it!?
Protosd used to maintain the FAQ that we used to have. He was constantly adding stuff and tweaking it to make it better in his spare time. His FAQ was removed one day without warning and replaced with some really silly questions that had no answers actually written. It took something like a year to get answers added because iXsystems wasn't going to pay someone to fix it and Protosd had no intention of doing more work after his previous work was just up and deleted unrecoverably, on purpose, without anyone asking permissions or if it mattered. Even when the FAQ was finally retired with the new doc.freenas.org website, it was nothing like what it used to be. Who would ever consider spending time on it after seeing what happened to someone that had spent what was probably 100s of hours on it only to watch it all be removed in an instant?
Protosd also had this really awesome webpage for permissions. It gave some really awesome examples of how permissions worked, how you could figure out what was going on, how to fix it, etc. Someone at iXsystems took his website and plagiarized it (typos and all) without warning and put iXsystems name on it. Protosd told iXsystems where to go and to stop immediately or face legal consequences, and obviously iXsystems deleted the info and instead provided a link since they effectively stole the blogpost and claimed it for their own.
When I became a mod the first day he told me something like "dude, quite the forums right now.. you'll be treated like me and it's not fun being shit on at every opportunity". I refused to believe him. But once the forums migrated to xenforo that's when he did the "go screw yourself" and left. He deleted his permissions guide, he changed his profile picture to a guy giving two middle fingers, and the signature said something very inappropriate.
I had heard that iXsystems had talked to him and tried to smooth things over after all of this, even going so far as to offer him a part-time job since he was unemployed too. He not-so-politely declined the job.
Obviously, things are different from back then. I think iXsystems would have a major problem on their hands if they plagiarized a document written by some mod today. I think that if I were to be caught today plagiarizing a document I'd probably find myself unemployed very quickly. That's to the credit of the people in charge and the change in the morals of the people in charge now. But it was gruesome and bloody for the mods, and still is to this day in many ways. The sting of trying to help people out with detailed threads explaining detailed aspects of FreeNAS for end-users just being lost because of a forum upgrade and no intention of restoring them really hurts. Just look at the stuff between jgreco and jkh recently. I can't remember the last time jgreco was called out for being rude, obnoxious, etc and there was some there to back him up that wasn't a volunteering moderator. :/
Sometimes I wish that iXsystems would host some big shindig and offer all-expenses paid trips for the forum mods along with time to seriously sit down and have an honest one-on-one face-to-face discussion about
everything. No topic is off-limits and no attitudes allowed either. I've talked to every mod here on the phone and/or skype. I'd say that all of the mods are pretty level headed and reasonable. They just don't trust iXsystems anymore because they've been lied to so much that it's easier to assume they are simply being lied to again if a mouth is moving. I've obviously met Jordan, and while I don't agree with everything he says I do find him to be a very reasonable person and generally open to hearing new ideas and opinions. The problem is that nobody is willing to actually realize that most of the iXsystems employees and mods are all level headed and reasonable and are too busy back stabbing each other, trying to defend our own asses, or flat out telling people to go to hell and die a horrible death by a thousand bee stings on your penis. I think that some role-reversal should definitely be in order too. I want to see some of these people that have inflicted this misery that is xenforo be forced to log in every day and make 20
useful posts a day for 3 month, read every thread that comes in, have to handle the spammers for themselves, oh and not get in trouble either,
and see if they are particularly happy with the state of affairs here when that is done. I'm betting they'd be just as fed up as the mods have been and wouldn't volunteer to do that for another yet, yet us mods are virtually expected to. I also bet they'd be more understanding of the point of view that the mods are in and way more open to implementing the recommendations that mods have been making for years..
And truely cyberjock.. i got the uttermost respect for being in the position you are in.. "employee by day, craptaker by night" is a pretty bad place to be :s
Thanks. It is a pretty precarious position to be in. Not that I think I'll be fired as soon as I cross the line (and I've made a pretty ugly mistake or two). I definitely have to watch what I say sometimes because some of my information about internal things at iX is 'privileged' information since I know more than is generally made public. But I'm also held to a higher standard than the other mods because I am an iXsystems employee and it is not good for business if I'm bashing users that paid for our hardware (and therefore my paycheck to an extent). Believe it or not, we do have a few TrueNAS users that do have accounts and do post their problems on here as they are brainstorming for the best solution to their problem. It is often easy to pick them out because I'll see a thread here by someone that has the *exact* same problem as an iXsystems support ticket. When I do see them I cut them
a lot of slack because I realize they may not be a professional with the hardware and software, that's why I have a job. And the least I can do is help them out via every faucet available, within reason.
While people like jkh are aware of
potential customers that are also quick to tell iXsystems they didn't buy our product because of our forum mods or a particular user or two, I also talk to lots of
current customers that use FreeNAS solely because of the active forum. They want answers that are not sugar coated. They want to know how to do things right. They want to know what is potentially a big mistake later. One particular customer just bought quite a substantial amount of hardware from iXsystems recently. I've pretty much been their support guy since day one, and they always ask for me when they open a ticket on their TrueNAS systems. It does give me pride to know I'm providing a service they value and like so much they left their old vendor for us. It also makes me happy to know that they decided to build their first FreeNAS machine after reading my noobie guide. They said that without it they'd never have even tried to use FreeNAS because ZFS was too confusing to understand.
Anyway, I'm gonna get off here. Gotta figure out how to upgrade this stupid Juniper switch (zero experience with Juniper gear until about 3 weeks ago) so I can play with my TrueNAS HA server some more. ;)
