Subj : Re: ET phone home
To   : Nicholas Boel
From : Nick Andre
Date : Sun Jan 08 2017 10:26 pm

On 08 Jan 17  11:50:30, Nicholas Boel said the following to Nick Andre:

NB> Yeah. There was definitely a lot of that. Probably moreso than real problem
NB> unfortunately. So much that the work in blocking any attempt at stupidity o
NB> the operator's part in the software would probably have required a complete
NB> rewrite in some cases.

I'm lucky that D'Bridge is essentially "idiot proof"; that unless a Sysop is a
complete moron would it ever do something requiring my personal intervention.
That and a mailer/tosser is really designed to do just one thing - toss the 
mail and exchange the packets with others. I made it clear to some people that
if you install D'Bridge and you need my help; and I find out your system is so
freaking complicated like a Rube Goldberg contraption, I'm... "reluctant".

BBS software on the other hand is far more complicated from a 
developer/maintenance point of view because the software ends up becoming very
personal to a lot of people. I stuck with Renegade all this time because I 
know every nook & cranny. I have the source code, I can fix whatever myself, 
but mostly because at heart I'm the biggest fan. Same thing with Searchlight 
and TBBS/Flame; I wrote my own utilities and workarounds for those as well.

I stuck with a particular version of Renegade because I didn't like the 
direction the developer was taking it. Changing database structures and adding
lightbars and all that... actually IMO he was copying from Searchlight and 
TBBS in how the menus work. Meanwhile, bugs I pointed out never got fixed.

So the pressure is on a BBS developer moreso than a Fido developer because the
Sysops are huge fans and if some problem takes too long to fix; the Sysop 
could end up jumping-ship to something else or just starts pestering and 
ranting... really testing patience.

NB> Unless he picked up more work recently that requires a lot of travel (whic
NB> he's been in and out of for years), I'm guessing he's just hesitant to come
NB> back to the idiocy. Usually programmers are fairly level headed, but there'
NB> no way I would be able to deal with some people you guys run into without
NB> ripping all my hair out and completely losing my mind.

:) 

Nick

--- Renegade vY2Ka2
 * Origin: Joey, do you like movies about gladiators? (1:229/426)

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