Lack of communication

[Azurago]

I feel as though this plugin team has lost touch with the community. Lack of communication and updates are becoming very frustrating. If this comment section isn't looked at by the dev, than disable them here and tell us where to go. If the plugin isn't being supported as heavily, tell us. I rely very heavily on this plugin and its sad to see these pages with no change every week I check.

Its unsettling to have to use dev builds on my bigger plugins. All I ask is a little more clarity on whats going on. Sorry to have gone on a little tangent, but I am losing faith in an otherwise great plugin.

[fernferret]

This is because a lot of the developers have other things going on right now. I can say a fair number of us have full time jobs, and I'm not going to lie to you, when I worked on Multiverse last summer/winter, it almost killed me. I would come home from work, hop on IRC, help users, and write code. It was a second full time job. I know the other developers supported as much or more than I did.

The problem comes when the support/feature requests start flowing in faster than we can handle them. For a while, I tried to keep up with all of them, but that was piled on top of the additional work. This is an open source project, we've taken our time and put together code for all to enjoy, fork, issue pull requests and so on. The problem with the community that has surrounded us is that we lack members like @dumptruckman and @main-- who have stepped up out of the blue and helped with support, development and just being awesome. The Multiverse team, despite what a lot of people think, has relatively high coding standards, our plugin is not simple. We get very few pull request, and more complaints.

If the community of users would give back, updating documentation, commenting on issues etc, it'd make the project as a whole much easier to maintain.

As to your inquiry, I can't speak for the other developers, but I've been out of touch with the Minecraft community for about 4-6 months now. I got super burned out. It happens. Why haven't I left the project? Because I still love it. I just need some time to get away from people who simply demand and give nothing back. I understand that these folks are usually in the minority, but regardless if they are or not, they stand out like a sore thumb compared to the quite, kind and helpful folk.

Its unsettling to have to use dev builds on my bigger plugins. All I ask is a little more clarity on whats going on. Sorry to have gone on a little tangent, but I am losing faith in an otherwise great plugin.

Why? Is a version number really so important? It's just a revision of software that we think will run well for most people. In theory, its features are documented, but sometimes we document ahead of release to try to keep up. I'm more curious here. My guess is you want the peace of mind that the software has been tested adequately. Honestly, we were (hopefully aren't anymore) one of the first plugins to have tests and mocking along with a successful user base of people who ran our software on non-production servers. This allows us to produce software with minimal bugs.

Multiverse is not the easiest world management plugin, but it's definitely one of the most full featured. The big name it's drawn for itself (you have @Rigby90 to thank for that, the father of MV) has also drawn the masses. The problem came when I saw how many people came into our IRC channel not having read manuals, not understanding basic concepts. I understand some people would prefer to just have the information spoon fed, rather than read through the docs, but the documentation is rather comprehensive, and if there's something wrong with it, it's a public wiki! Yay!

This is probably way too much information. If it's any consolation, I plan on coming back to the project soon (winter-ish time) after another project cools off.

Cheers,
--FF

EDIT: Whoops, forgot to mention how awesome @lithium3141 is. Seriously.

[EyMaddis]

As a simple idea: maybe you could advertise (e.g. on the bukkit dev site) that you need teammates to keep Multiverse on that quality level, secondly maybe developers can't find an easy way to get into multiverse development and to send pull request. Not tested that, just came to my mind. Maybe there could be a wiki for developing multiverse itself, just an idea.
;)

[krisdestruction]

All I can say is that I agree with what you said about a second full time job and the above post. As a server admin, I'm lucky to have a great staff team to back me up when I can't be there. As well, I firmly believe a strong staff team using the ticket system will help with this issue.

In fact, I'd honestly go as far to say that you guys should get a base moderation team to deal with incoming requests for basic help and a coding team for bugs and more advanced feature requests. This is how I structure my staff team with an in game admin in between, but really it's worked well for us for the past 19 months :)

[main--]

I feel as though this plugin team has lost touch with the community. Lack of communication and updates are becoming very frustrating. If this comment section isn't looked at by the dev, than disable them here and tell us where to go. If the plugin isn't being supported as heavily, tell us. I rely very heavily on this plugin and its sad to see these pages with no change every week I check.

The issues section is looked at. I get email notifications for whatever happens here and I read every single issue. But unfortunately the majority of these issues are either duplicates and/or can be answered with a link to our wiki. Searching the link to the FAQ page and adding it to the phrase "Take a look at our FAQ" on my iPhone or reading the "per-world-plugins" feature request multiple times a month and explaining why that won't work every time is tiring. And just like @fernferret I didn't play Minecraft or test our plugin since months. So I'm relying entirely on our unit tests (they are definitely worth all the work!) and the issues created by users. However, these are often incomplete and sometimes even impolite. I can't even count how often I have answered an issue with simply a link to the "Submitting a bug" wiki page, wondering why so many people are unable to read. So without proper issue reports, finding and fixing bugs is hard. And the moment came when I stopped replying to such issues. Today, I see that @fernferret is "back" and working on getting our issue counter to zero. I have to admit that this feels like a revival of a formerly (almost) dead project.

@Multiverse/core-development-team Let's fix those bugs!

[Azurago]

Thank you for the informative responses. I am sorry if I upset anyone. My concern with the build number was that it seemed to be consistent until now. I am using dev builds with .5 then a release build came out with .4 and I was worried about seemingly going back an update and breaking stuff by using the release build. Also, the addon plugin pages don't show correctly in Chrome. It is showing the tags.

Again, sorry for being critical, it was out of place. I don't need to be 'spoon fed' I was just looking for some more clarity.

[fernferret]

@Azurago you didn't upset anyone, we're all just a little touchy.

Also, the addon plugin pages don't show correctly in Chrome. It is showing the tags.

Curse changed the way that Markdown is parsed, thus breaking our pages :( I'll fix it sometime.

As a side note, I'm proud to announce that: http://multiverse.github.com is up and operational! From now on, this will be where we post news, releases and other things that we don't want people deleting on the wiki! Huzzah!

--FF