I was all excited about the project the "SMF Friends" (I prefer ex-patriots) had in the works.
We all were, yeah... But it was interesting to 'build', if only as a confirmation that democracy is great on paper, but in any serious real-life project it can kill it very quickly.
That's why our fork is really just Arantor and I. Just the two of us as bosses, just the two of us as developers. Because we know the game. We've played it before -- sometimes we won, sometimes we lost. Put one and one together and you get a project that has now been under active development for the last six months and a half, with 652 commits so far, making for an average of 3+ per day. The SMF svn often remains silent for weeks, in comparison...
Also note that ever since I stopped all communication with SMF, there has been no single flamewar on my side. Interesting... And they said I was too unstable to join a team, eh. It was definitely not a problem on my side. *They* were too scared of seeing me join them, then end up leading them after a while. People with a vision scare them. Why do you think they've been stuck for the last 3 years on betas and RCs? Even SMF 2.1... They've started work on it. One would think that they would use the opportunity to put in all of the features they were prevented from adding to the SMF2 codebase in all these years, wouldn't they..? Well, sure. They did absolutely nothing. SMF 2.1 is already dead before it was even born...
Now, all we're waiting for is for them to release SMF2 with the BSD license and then we can officially take over. Problem is, they know how much work we've put into our project... The same way they were scared of taking me in, they're probably now scared of allowing our fork to go public. Because it will only show the incredible gap between the SMF team's work and ours.
The concept of it being a core code to which everything else would plug into seemed perfect to me. Unfortunately that project seems to have died almost as quickly as it started. The project site was down more then it was up which led to me losing my interest in it and last I knew over half the people that were initially committed to it did as well.
Yeah... It was born in January, 'democracy' was brought in around early February, and by late February the project was dead. By the end of March, everyone had left -- either to rejoin SMF (ah ah), or to completely leave these kinds of projects.
It is my belief the mods, plug-ins, extentions, etc should rarely and preferably never have to modify the core code to work.
My feeling, too.
Actually, I'd really like for our fork to completely prevent the ability of modifying core code... But it's hard than it sounds. There are some changes that can't be done differently. Still, I'm set on changing the terminology to call these edits "hacks", hopefully inviting mod developers to use hooks and external files as much as possible.
It just opens the door to extra bugs and incompatibility.
Hooks are not the be all and end all of plugin programming, though. Just look at WordPress... Everytime they release a new version, some older versions of plugins become incompatible. It's not something you can 'fix' in any way. The only 'fix' is to no longer update the master software...
It looks like this project seems to hold that philosophy too. I like that a lot.
Arantor is the philosopher, the one with a vision (and what a vision!). I'm just the one who hacks into the files, and either throws the hacks away or decides they're cool and keeps it. My vision is to write the software I always wanted to use

After reading this thread beginning to end I really like what I'm seeing. After all the changes you two have made can it truly be called a fork at this point. [Unknown] may have had Yabb in mind when he was working on his "secret code" but by the time SMF was released it was truly something different. Without seeing your code, what I'm hearing/reading seems to be well on its way to being something very different from SMF.
Well, I suppose it depends on how you view it...
Technically, you could say that some themes are even further away from the SMF philosophy than our fork is at all.
So, it depends on what you're looking at. If you use our fork for a while, you'll end up noticing that some things are different -- for the better. But overall, it's still based on the SMF engine. We did rewrite at least 25% of the codebase so far, but that still leaves us with 75% of the SMF codebase... Most of which is very good and doesn't really warrant a rewrite at all

As far as those concerned about mods, they are in the end simply mods. If the original authors of those mods dont get behind this project, there are plenty of other people that would be willing to recreate the functionality of those mods.
(Or even us...)
I can already think of several that I use on a regular basis that I will be interested in porting over, if I like the finished product.
You can't port anything without the original author's approval, of course.
I can't wait to see the project once you guys make it public. I have spent enough time looking at the work you two have done over at SMF to know that this will find acceptance way beyond just the two of you.
Google may help you here... Eheh.
Good luck and thank you, from all of us who have been disenchanted with SMF for the last few years.
Wait until we go public and then you can decide for yourself whether it was worth the wait... (Hint: yes it will have been, eheh.)