It's a problem that Paul doesn't appreciate his "soviet friends" too much. In my view it's nothing for Paul to organize at least support for Russians, because he knows language perfectly. And what happens?.. If there would be a Russian that doesn't know English, Paul will refuse to help him in Russian... And that man will use the greatest evil in the world - Google Translate to provide English version of his request.

What a cheap trick! Do you have to raise your self-esteem? :)
Paul you are doing good work, but it's just your hobby, nothing more. If you want you forum software be popular you need start from minibb not from Google or Wikipedia. It's just free market and minibb doesn't look too good among its competitors... it's not for mass consumers/users.

So stop complaining and go on in doing your hobby perfectly as always ;)

I'm not sure how language of support would be a decisive factor. Unless there's PHP and server coding in Russian or Chinese (I don't think there is) that doesn't make much sense. This software is interesting to webmasters/programmers only; and if someone is more than an amateur it's quite obvious he should know English which is the 'national' language of WWW. It looks funny sometimes there's a comment in Russian or Chinese and then 400 lines of code in English ;-).

Most people here don't understand Russian so it's not a good overall when someone posts in Russian and other people cannot understand it. There could be a dedicated forum in Russian only, but mixing it with the main forum is a no-go. Not to mention Chinese, it's quite complex too ;).

Overall, though, if I was to choose I'm more with "Russia" than "America" or "EU" so if anything I would prefer it to remain a 'Slavic' product than 'americanized/westernized garbage' ;).

My suggestion would be to create a stable and complete English language version (possibly proofread by a native English speaker). Then have a translator professionally translate the whole package, including addons into: Russian, Polish, Chinese, Arabic, German, French, and Indian/Hindu (if there's a common 'Indian/Hindu' language). Later other languages if possible.

I personally spent years on trying to improve miniBB (because I know the better miniBB, the better my own forums) and I can tell miniBB is a star among competitors. IF it was for mass consumers, it would have been full of errors and would load twice as slow because of unnecessary code resulted from imaginary wishes ;).

That's exactly what we have for now, English-support only, and forum rules clearly state that it's not a welcome-action to write in other languages for a while. Because then forums won't look smart. That's the only reason. I want everything looking smart in this project.

Truly, for Russian support, we need the Russian version of the website, and all manuals in Russian, all language packs, and update them all when the English version is updated. That's a huge work to complete. Double work. Providing English-version only, we just tried to reduce our expenses.

Sergeusz, it's not true that I don't like my "ex-soviet friends" as you say, or if I have something against Russians. Of course, not. Half of my current constant customers come from Russia or speak Russian. Biggest miniBB communities are there. You don't have to doubt my experience with Russians before you didn't try. I never refused support in Russian, in general. That only affects the English support board.

"It's not for mass consumers/users" - c'mon, how many users on your forums do you instantly have? We have forums where there are 200-300-400 users per second, with thousands, millions of messages stored! Isn't it for masses? I think you're wrong.

The problem is that I don't have enough of time to do everything on my own for free. And on another hand, people who know Russian and may be would like to help to create a Russian-support version of miniBB, can not dedicate enough of their time and patience to this. This is the main problem. So far I didn't find a person who would make the same way dedicated work on this project as I do, thus for many years. There were only some weak temporary attempts.

And if we need to hire professional translators, who will pay out their service? Our attribution links are in 90% removed, other coders are stealing our ideas with no reference, there are premium add-ons distributed for free in pirated networks, if we talk about minibb.ru, it's taken by a cybersquatter who wants $3000 for it - so, what do you want? It's the fault of those who are doing all that. That doesn't make us any profit, so what kind of investments could we talk about? Only hobby stays...

So, as usually, for everybody is easy to blame, but not to suggest something really practical. What, in your opinion, miniBB lacks comparing to other software? Just tell us from more objective side.

Keep on the good job, men !

The last thing I would want is a full stop on development of miniBB. After using mininBB for over 5 years on my site and trying few major brands out there, I just can't imagine myself going for another forum software. Once you have used miniBB, I'm sure nobody would ever want to switch back to another brand.

Going back 5 years, I was apprehensive making the switch to miniBB from phpBB. What about support? What if development stopped on miniBB? were some of the questions that came to my mind. However, the awesomeness of miniBB just made me dump those questions aside and go ahead. And I never once regretted my decision.

Keep going Paul! miniBB is the best.

I see no problem in making the forum and in Russian and English languages. I already wrote that he is ready to help. Can free transfer, a certain amount from English into Russian. I should miniBB, I like. Paul tear down barriers in his head.

By mass consumers/users I meant not those who use forums for communication, but those who install them on the sites.
In my view mass... ok let's call them "webmasters", but they aren't... are people who even don't know basics of html, they just want to show themselves to the world, to show their interests and so on. And minibb is not for them, it's for professionals who understand what to do with all this code.
So the question is for whom you want to produce minibb further? You see I'm not against minibb, I just don't want this topic to be some kind of praying Paul not to stop working on minibb. It would be much better if we discuss what minibb lacks and what direction of its development should be.
Paul, has you ever asked community for help? It seems that you are intentionally trying to do everything on your own. May be there are some people who can help you.
What about ru.minibb.com? It would be much cheaper, easier and that would be enough for local support.
When I suggest something, you usually don't like my ideas :) Ok I will try to suggest something... But all my ideas are about how to make minibb popular with these "mass consumers"
The idea of other languages support and localizations is rather good. Really why not to try to start from Russian?
As I said it's hard to use minibb for amateurs , because they don't undestand what to do. It's nice to see Compiler now there. But what about for example settings? You need to edit txt file full of code. Why not to make special panel or smth like this?
Then speaking about me why I don't use minibb now. It's all because there is no integration with CMS I use. And when I had needed to provide more functionality for members, I decided to stop using minibb, and preferred it to another forum software which was easily integrated with cms and even had some paid in minibb functions for free. Ofcourse it has bugs, but there is really nice community now.
So why not to make integrations wiht some other CMSs except Wordpress (I don't know what are the most popular, may be Joomla or Drupal). There will be much more people using minibb. And in my view it will be even profitable from financial point of view. Much more people using minibb -> More money for premium addons (it's seems more than you have for providing integrations by one).
So it seems that all :)

I guess, 3-5% of the total mass is not such critical to take it into consideration...

We never denied it. Like in any other area, I personally prefer to use professional services. Visiting professionally build websites is the same pleasure like visiting a professional dentist which will fix your teeth with no pain. Visiting same-driven-engine, ugly looking website build by an amateur always mean you will never come there again.

But... again, this is a question for a specific audience only. Most of users have absolutely no idea what stands in the background of the thing they see on their monitor. They just click the buttons and prefer to wait as less time as possible while the page loads. Intuition + speed. An easy successful Internet formula.

I am doing it right now :-)

Anyway, it's not the thing I should ask. I don't know everybody's wishes. If you have a wish to work on the project in any case, just do it. For example, all these language packs we have. I never asked users that we need 40 language packs. They came on the way themselves. If something is not going on the way, I suppose it's not required. That's what I know.

So, could you program such kind of panel?

I understand we might have this, we might have that... But who will program all that? I guess this mad moron Paul should do that, again.

It's because you're not a coder. You wasn't able to program the bridge with miniBB and CMS, and you tried to save your money to take the weak/buggy solution for free, instead of hiring the professional do the work for you in a couple of hours. miniBB CAN BE INTEGRATED in almost any system. At the non-destructive, upgrades-planned level. I did tens of various integrations for my customers. I know miniBB stands perfect in that case comparing to others.

I don't know, too :-) In my opinion, CMS is the most imperfect thing in Internet world. Specially Drupal or Joomla. I have seen their functions and code. Blowing.

I already explained it many times on forums: if 3rd party developers would keep their databases and authorizations stable, there would be no problem for me to develop such things. It's pretty easy, really. But they always change their programs, so it means, we also should support these integrations all the time, i.e. share our time to support their programs. Sounds silly, no?..

I have seen it many times with other software. There are kind of bridges, which are supposed to work. But as soon as you begin installing them, you see they all are expired. As to repeat - I still didn't meet a person who would support something for a very long time for free. It's an utopia.

If that's all... you see, they are all questions to the community. I am not able to work on everything on my own, specially on that everything I personally consider wasteful.

Other than that, I didn't find anything useful in your advices, something which I don't know about yet. Maybe that's why

Just my two cents Paul: The blog excerpt and the sponsor links on the home-page looks quite unprofessional. For a forum software evaluator, that could be a deterrent. How would you feel if you found that on wordpress.com? May be those unrelevant links on your home-page could have turned off the giants?

Also, I think you should have a dedicated testimonials page, instead of random excerpts and a forum thread. You have so many good reviews that they can be easily capitalized. You know and we know that your forum software is great but for the rest to know, I feel you must highlight reviews more.

Hmm, well, my reply would depend on what do you mean by "deterrent".

I don't think we could be compared to Wordpress at this stage. Wordpress is sponsored/supported by quite a big mass media company or even few companies. Open source application can't get easily into such a bush of popularity for such short time without massive advertising. I know it from my experience ;-) May be it was thought that way intentionally. I think about it when reading their website's literature. Amazing texts. I am personally very weak to write in the same manner :-)

I was already thinking about "irrelevant" links and still suppose, that this is just a SEO theory without deep knowledge of how Google interprets such links. In all times there were sponsors, and in Internet a sponsor means a web-link. If we kill all sponsors and just put "relevant" Google ads, that means, Google forces that way to place their ads, not our own. This doesn't go with my own view of things.

Here, we have a freedom of investments like anything else in the project: if somebody would like to place links on our page, why not to provide such opportunity? Specially if it costs us nothing (oh, of course, if your theory works, it costs us everything ;-) It's not a big profit, not a big deal, but still, it's much bigger profit that comes from Google Adsense. On the other hand, I could give you tons of examples when Google ads do not look relevant at all. But you probably know it...

So answering this question:

I would suppose few links won't make any sense... We also have links in our Manual to Total Commander and Notepad2, the favorite software. Not really related to miniBB or forums. There could be hundreds of links on our forums, related to website who use our software, but not related to the forums building and so on. On any website there could be links not related to the subject of the website. These attempts to make Internet standardized do not look promising for me.

What's next? Where the line between relevancy and irrelevancy starts? It can't be determined by a program. No exit.

Now, if somebody pays for our links, we are giving the offer to our visitors: these are cool guys. They have paid our lunch and hosting, so we could keep the project alive. Just one click to visit their website means you support us, too. What is bad here? Why anybody major could be against it? Only because of their own profits... may be...

And, by the way, why we talk about Google only? On Yahoo or Bing, when you search by "miniBB", they show our website first on top... it means, for them "irrelevant" links some way do not work, don't you think? ;-)

Yes, such page is already available, but still not to public :-) The reason is: it is very hard to let customers to write even few custom words about the work. Overall, it's very difficult to find a proper review, because "objective" reviews are rarity nowadays...

Anyway, thanks for suggestions. It seems now we build a collection of miniBB cons and pros in one place, that is good :-)

I suppose few members know, but at one point miniBB was the official WordPress forum software. I guess that should be prominently listed in testimonials too :)

minibb is still listed on bb press forums "about" section, as their history part :-)

BBPress - The Story



well, they say limitations and slow code. when it was started then? may be in the minibb 1.x era? ;-) And they add "miniBB is one of the lightest and fastest bulletin board scripts out there". that's for your testimonial. choose any part :-)

truly, the first layout of their forums is taken from minibb. other than that, i think minibb could be tweaked a bit to achieve the same layout. but it has much more options and functions to work out than bbpress. and version 2 of course says it all. madly deeply thought.

p.s. i'm lazy to use caps, sorry ;-)

Paul, you want an idea? It is probably as old as the world :-). You can make an addon torrent tracker. And the popularity will increase once many times ;-)

p.s. For this addon does not mind paying 40-50 usd. And if you turn out a very low mass addon-tracker does not require a lot of resources and 100usd. (albeit for less than 100usd to buyers)

why not put donate button here paul, i bet there alot of people who will made donation for this free minibb. for example: put text on donate button "consider for $1".
btw sorry if you dont like my idea.

If Mr. Paul agrees to do tracker, I think you can put the button to donate 10 wmz "then I'll be the first who regularly will support the development. (Although I think this idea is hardly feasible) ;-)