An open Brief to Gavin Smith

Since you believe that Xojo Forum is not heavy moderated I have a news for you: it is more moderated than Stalins Office.

For example: if there is a Forum of Volkswagen you can not write Ford, BMW, Audi, Peugeot or Fiat in it. That is the Fact of the Xojo Forum. That is censoring on UDSSR Niveau. There is no “we want our community to be…”.

There is no Truths beside the Truths. You like others also are deciding what’s true. If you got what was meant or written or not. YOU decide it. There is no way of a democratically decision and no way of a community decision. It is always a decision of the MVP or Xojo inc.

And, looking on the MVP who they are I can see: Professionals and Add-on Sellers. Hmm. Commercial interests are not a private time happiness. It is so that, when ever, somebody has a commercial interest it is not private time and not private, it is commercial interest driven.

So, as long Xojo is not changing it’s policy and you also believe that you are always right I have to tell you: No. Stop it. Stop telling this. YOU ARE NOT. It is censoring at High Niveau.

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Wow… Gavin really posted that drivel and expects it to be believed? It is just more of the same BS that Xojo and yes, the MVP’s have been spouting this entire time.

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Ah, and YES. There is a place where you can also be critical. Here.On IfnotNil. The place where the banned People stay.

I am so happy not being a moderator :slight_smile:

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And honestly Christian, you are about the only MVP I still trust to be on the Xojo users side. In fact, you are probably even a bit to nice when making (y)our concerns over to Xojo. Without your plugins, I would not have been surprised Xojo had long ceased to exist. That even you, with such profound impact on the capabilities of their software, is ignored so much by Xojo Inc. says a lot about the reign of paranoia Xojo Inc. is surviving under.

Please, stay who you are and keep being your typical German goal-oriented self! :wink:

Alwaysbusy

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I haven’t thought about how it’s really not the community banning and closing threads. It’s Xojo Inc under the guise of the community.

IF moderators & staff flag the same post then it appears like “the community” has flagged the post
But its really not
Its the same echo chamber team

Totally agree with this! If it weren’t for Christian’s plugins, I would never have used Xojo. It just doesn’t have enough functionality without them.

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Great decision! I wouldn’t be one either.

The problem, as I see it, is that the MVP’s spend more time protecting Xojo (i.e. forum moderation) than advocating for users. I realize that’s pretty cynical but that’s the way it seems. But what’s weird is that the MVP’s are not the ‘typical’ users that Xojo is supposedly trying to lure to the language. So I don’t get what the end game is for Xojo and for the MVP’s. The two entities seem to be diametrically opposed.

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Who do you think the typical users that are targeting are? It’s certainly not clear to me by their actions!

With removing things like the listbox Cell border methods it does not see like it’s the hobbyists…but I thought new to coding was supposedly what API 2 is about…

-Karen

I don’t know either. I see a lot of change for the sake of change with no clear objective.

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VAR made no sense to me
That ONE change to try & appeal to JavaScript users isnt seriously enough
There are TONS of things that in JavaScript have no counter part in Xojo
Closure , anonymous functions, and so much else

The rest is all framework changes to make things more consistent and better named across web, desktop, console & mobile
And IN THEORY that should allow you to write more common & portable code
But the prefixes throw a monkey wrench in there since you cant create something like

sub mymethod(extends c as Control)
   // code that manipulates "a control"
end sub

something I’m dealing with my self right now
instead it was suggested you do

sub mymethod(c as Variant)
   // code that manipulates "a control"
   #if TargetWeb
   #elseif TargetDesktop
   # ... and so on for each target
   #endif
end sub

which means

  1. its no longer an extension
  2. you wont get compilation errors - instead you get runtime errors

OR you do something like

sub mymethod(extends c as DesktopControl)
   // code that manipulates "a control"
end sub

and set the compat flags and write several version of this

all those options rather suck

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Um…yeah. Decisions made by a person that doesn’t spend 100% of their time writing code in a project of any reasonable size.

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I think the Xojo forum is a great place, with one of the most knowledgeable and helpful online communities I’ve ever encountered. There’s amazingly little snark and condescension from people vastly more expert than those asking questions, and a great willingness to help. I appreciate Xojo’s efforts to maintain civility; it can’t be easy. It’s a shame some people have been banned, but it’s a blessing that some others did (Brad Hutchings comes to mind). I’ve criticized the performance of the product and the company’s decisions openly and vocally since RS days and have never even had a warning. Just keep it civil and respectful. I believe the Xojo team works hard and does their best.

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Julia, sadly I must disagree. The knowledge base (from what I have been able to see) has dwindled substantially in the past two years. And of course there is no snark and condension, they delete/censor/ban any such comments… so what remains looks all rosy

If TOF was such a fantastic place (and years ago I would agree it was), then the need for THIS forum would not exist

And while you may be right that the Xojo Tead works hard and does their best… That “best” is no longer close to being good enough. They concentrate their efforts on tasks that add no benefit to the product (name changes) and put little effort into creating a stable product.

These are MY OPINIONS (shared by others I’m sure),

I think that the forum WAS a great place. But noe, With part of the the historic knowledge rendered useless with the changes in keywords plus many of the more active users now not even in there…

I’m talking about snark and condescension from experts to less expert users, like you find on StackExchange, where if you ask a question not posed in just the right way you get slapped in the face. This doesn’t need to be censored or banned (Brad Hutchings aside) because the people there are civil and it doesn’t happen.

I agree, and it’s frustrating, yet I still make a good living in large part thanks to the tool; it works fine for me, even if I have to keep closing the damn Inspector 600 times a day.

Keyword changes are annoying, but they don’t change the fundamental principles of OOP, or the language, or render anyone’s historical knowledge less useful. And in any case, most API 1 syntax still works, for the moment.

As long as Hare and Tekinay are there, it’s still a good place. Norman is missed.

Just a few days ago I saw a post: “Im new, I saw a video and read a post but CODE DOESNT WORK”.

So, maybe the people who went throuhg the API2 stupid changes knows the difference and how to work with old code, but for all those new people testing Xojo for the first time following along an old video or copy pasting forum code… “will be Just another tool that promisses a lot but its own examples wont work, O well, uninstall, try the next one”, code will not only be useless, it will be a mortal trap for newbies.

Yes, so ironic, because Geoff’s oft-repeated goal for all these changes is to make things easier for newcomers.

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It isn’t ironic. It is pure reality that he believes that. And Xojo isn’t interested in the existing Customers at all like I wrote long time ago Julia. Xojo was changing it’s strategy away from the Pro users even with the ProPlus Account to the new citizen user.

The entire point is that there is not that big potential of new users anymore. Instead of learning Xojo people can also lean B4x or Java for cross platform programming. And many people are doing that. While this solutions are presenting cutting edge technology there is no question: Xojo has successors. And this successors are more reliable, stable, powerful…and so on.

Even for IOT and electronics Java became more interesting than Xojo.