Let's just say Ganite was complimenting Tom and Lummox JR for persisting even with less-than-ideal revenue.

When the 2 person company I work for (I don't count our contracted guy as a real employee), gains more pre-sales on our expensive medical billing app, then I will start to donate the thousands a month to BYOND.

But like you said Tom, don't bank on the future (though you meant features).

But I won't know shiznit about that til July.

You are 100% correct about "serves em right" because the business success/failure is correlated to our (my) decisions. I am not trying to convince you guys otherwise or ask you to donate etc-- I'm just telling you the truth of the situation, that we need to make a certain quota to realistically progress here, and since it's not happening, BYOND is largely a maintenance project. I do not doubt that with some better decisions about the direction we could have done better, but those are a lot easier in hindsight, especially in the world of technology where the tools that exist today may not have been around a week ago.

I don't want to give people the impression that this is a guilt trip to goad you into donating or feeling sorry for us. I am proud of this product and think it's pretty good that we've managed to keep many users around for so long. I think it may have seen its best day (actually that was probably ten years ago) but that doesn't mean people shouldn't use it if it meets their needs, and we haven't wholly given up either because a small (very small) delusional piece of me believes that we could be more successful.

My main message though is that I don't want people waiting on these kinds of updates; I make the announcements just to give you an honest idea of what we're trying to do, but because there is a whole business side of this that isn't doing well, and we aren't funded, there's a lot more to it than just trying to crank out technical improvements in the hope they will save the day. That would be more along the lines of an open-source freeware project, which may be what we become down the line.

Tom wrote:

and we haven't wholly given up either because a small (very small) delusional piece of me believes that we could be more successful.

Thats all you need and how I feel with my business (Music Videos mostly rap.) Though my ego is a little bigger I honestly believe I can go further and will and thats all you need and ever need.

I don't see how we pushed anyone away. We had to reorganize because the ratio of drama (= maintenance) to productivity was very high. We weren't making any more money then either. Bottom line is that no one really has the answers as to how to make this a viable business-- everyone just has an opinion-- and it may just be an intractable problem the way things are setup, which OK too. We had to take things in some direction and this is what we went with. I can tell you that the software now is definitely better than it has ever been, but so is the competition.

MDC wrote:

I would definitely be donating tons if I felt everyone was actually listened to.

Tom and Lummox have listened to the community to the community's detriment. Tom hasn't pushed the competent people out of the community, the community pushed the competent people out by itself.

Guilds and the like were so filled with hate and drama that we lost most of our reasonable folk over the course of their existence. After their removal, the forum was a horrible mess and the moderators were overwhelmed by it all.

BYOND is moving in the right direction for the first time in years if you ask me. The addition of an HTML5 client, the new VS2013 builds, moving toward a platform-independent approach, etc. Multithreading was a bit of an unnecessary kerfuffle, but the recent updates that have improved the string tables and the object reference tables have been huge.

MDC wrote:

till I move and get married haha.

you really won't have time lol.

Ter13 wrote:

MDC wrote:

Yes of course I agree that the software is moving in the right direction, I was referring to the site. All the drama is still here that's for sure and no one really likes to come around and post on the forums anymore because of the big changes, just the same old group of people.

I really think the mistake we made was putting so much focus on the site as a portal, and not focusing on the software. So really, complaints about the site seem to me, to be extending the problem further.

I actually think the exact opposite. I think coming to the site and being able to chat with people is the main reason people stick around for so long. There's only a few people that actually get games released, so something else must be keeping them here, and I personally think it's the site that does it. I rarely login to the pager anymore, but I visit the site daily. Might be on my own there, but I think to attract the new generation of possible game developers, the site should be modernized.

The point is that everyone has their own idea of what is important. Since we really do need to be making money, I've tried to look at things that could help in that direction but those have mostly been unsuccessful. For example, we put a great deal of work into this "credits" system because some users convinced us they would use it within their games, but really no one has. A lot of our technology and site changes go the same way. I don't think people really understand what a tricky business keeping this all together is.

Well said.