Your wakeup call

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1

Braces yourselves.
This is going to be a long post.
In this post I will try to give the people behind Sponge their much needed wakeup call.
Let me explain.

The core issue is that the Sponge team has completely lost any connection to the outside world. They’ve engulfed themselves in their own little bubble. Their own micro universe. And it shows. It shows dramatically in essentially all decision only being made from the perspective of that team. So instead of making decision for the community they are making the decisions for themselves.

The goal to make a viable Forge compabtible plugin platform alternative has long been forgotten. Which is evident by the fact that something as meaningless to players and server owners as an API update has pushed back the 1.13 release by over a year (and counting). It makes sense to overhaul your API. It’s especially important to the people maintaining it and somewhat important to the people coding the plugins. But it is utterly irrelevant to the people that want to run server and those who want to play on them. All they care for is that Sponge still is stuck on 1.12 with no signs of ever leaving that state.
So instead of catering to their most important asset, the community, the staff is busy glorifying themselves with their new shiny API, not giving a single damn about everyone else.

Another shameful point where the utter disconnect shows are the GitHub repos. Which are filled with well over 50 open Pull Requests. Many already outdated because no one felt responsible to make sure they get merged. This has happened to way too many of them.
What kind of message does it send to volunteers that you’re inviting them to make PRs but once they’re submitted you don’t care enough to even acknowledge them (it takes days to weeks before a PR or issue even gets tagged)? This is yet another sign of the staff having enclosed themselves in their bubble. All that matters is moving the project forward in their way. And all those pesky PRs do is push the project off course. Simply unacceptable. A great way to drive people away from the project.

Next example is Ore an their policies. While the Sponge itself should cater to the server owners as much as possible, Ore should cater to the plugin devs. Imposing crazy, arbitrary rules and guidelines, promissing change and not giving it (cough reviews cough updated policies in regard to plugin stats and external binaries cough) is off putting at best. If a new plugin dev gets presented with a nice API but also a platform that essentially prohobits anything (direct monetarization, indirect monetarization, linking to monetraization, no external binaries, no plugin metrics (the current system is a joke if not an insult to plugin devs), no external communication in general (unless explicitly allowed (it’s not 1999 in case you missed it. Let’s stop being prudes about it))) do you think they’ll stay? Also any attempt to have a discussion about those rules ends in 3 ways:

  • “We already talked about it. Stop the stupid discussion.” (When it was talked about years before when 90% of the current community wasn’t even there)
  • “No. End of discussion.”
  • “We’ll talk about it.” And then nothing happens

Now please. Please get your heads out of your butts and wake up. At the current pace this project will have faded back into obscurity within 2 years.
And I don’t want this to happen. I want the project to flourish. It means a lot to me and many many others.

Now while I know that many will come to defend themselves, please don’t see it as a personal attack. It is not a personal attack. This post is meant to show you the error in your current way. So before you type your answer that boils down to “WROOOONG (In trump voice)” think about what I’ve said. Take a step back and take a look at it from another angle. Be aware that the project is not for you. But the community.
Thank you for reading.

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So much false information you are basing your statements on and in a tone like you are owed anything.

Let’s start with the first claim, Sponge somehow having forgotten its core? The main reason Sponge has been pushed back is because we rely on Forge… there is no Forge for 1.13+ that is in any way usable for servers right now. And the time waiting was spend on improving mod compatibility on 1.12, the issue count for SF has never been this low in the past three years.

Second claim, pull requests have always been an issue we are aware of, hence why Morpheus joined us this year(? or was it last) to clean those up and merge new ones quicker. Pretty much the only PR’s left open now are by the staff team…

I’m not gonna even start on the Ore topic, you know exactly through countless discussion how much changed and was communicated. But I think you will never be happy about whatever happens to Ore.

Now I would really like to hear what changes you propose? This reads more like a misguided rant, based on alternate facts than “Feedback or Suggestions”.

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Well, I find the quantum entanglement with Forge to be quite interesting. Depending on context Sponge always cannot live without it (1.13 update for example) or it is as independent from it as it can be and might as well be kicked away like a beach ball when the opportunity arrises (renaming discussion on GitHub for example). So please pick your poison. Either it is inherently linked with Forge or not.
And to be honest I’m very salty about the whole thing. Sponge can be updated without Forge. And it should be moduluar enough that it’s possible. And according to most devs it is. They just don’t want to spend the time doing it. Which is as I’ve pointed out not in the interest of the community. I dare you to go around and ask server owners if they rather want a polished API or a working server.

I’ve never said there wasn’t anyone responsible. Just that apparently noone feels responible enough to do anything. This being the lowest point is true. But I think that’s embarassing.

My issue with ore is that change gets promised, promised change gets changed, that change gets implemented, nothing has improved. And I will not shut my mouth until it becomes a dev centered platform that doesn’t contort the devs into ancient rules. And when the reviews that were promissed over a year ago finally start happening (or at least the warnings disappear until it does).

Now what changes to I want?

  • Get someone that takes care of the issues and PRs. It can’t be that issues and PRs lay around stale for months to years!
  • Behave like a plugin platform and stay up to date. No “Forge is not ready” excuses. Server owners (that don’t run modded) don’t care about it. And they’ve been thrown under the bus so bad you can’t even tell they’re still there
  • Give Ore some guidelines that encourage devs to upload their plugins there.
    What’s especially off putting to me is the “absolutely no monetarization”. It’s fair that you can’t sell your plugins on the platform. I personally disagree with the idea that you can’t link premium plugin to your lite plugins (but that rule is understandable and fair). But not even being allowed to link to any page that allows any kind of montetarization is insane. Why hurt devs in such a terrible way? Why couldn’t I link to my plugin page where I sell some of them?
    Also leave those ancient rules from 1807 behind. Communication is our live. I have suggested before and will suggest again, that all communications need be documented. And that’s it. And if they transfer data away, then they need to be able to be toggled off.
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It’s not an API overhaul that’s the big slowdown, although that certainly helps. It’s the fact that literally everything broke on the internals’ side too and a lot had to be rewritten. Hell, a not insignificant part of the wait was waiting for MCP to update too, without which development could not even begin. The API has undergone heavy development, but there is more than one person on the Sponge team. The two have been evolving in parallel, and the internals are still far from any kind of stability. And the evolution of the API is just as important as the evolution of the internals - this isn’t Spigot where we can just not change anything and fix it in post. Most Sponge interfaces are directly implemented by Minecraft objects, and so when the Minecraft internals go haywire, the API must change to catch up. Developing a compatibility shim to work otherwise, especially in the face of The Flattening, is pure silliness.

They’re not exactly sitting around with their thumbs up their asses. Lots and lots of work is going into Sponge every waking minute and they are doing it all for essentially free since their Patreon nets them $38 a month. PRs need review and testing, and that’s time that could be spent getting the implementation to stop crashing instead of adding a new shiny thing. Don’t get me wrong, PRs are the lifeblood of a FOSS product, but they require work even to use. If you want that to go any faster you can do some of that work yourself by reviewing PRs for mistakes and testing their code; Sponge staff still need to review your work but it’s far faster just as making a PR itself is faster than filing a feature request issue.

Monetization, IMO, is a cancer on a plugin community. There is a reason that the Bukkit forums are still active five years later; the Spigot community is such a toxic hellstew that not many want to be around it and a lot of it can be traced back to the marketplace-oriented nature of its development community. I make enough from development commissions that I don’t need to sell any of my plugins; the same should be said of any plugin developer. Hell, even the way you approach it is indicative of the problem - "new plugin dev"s should not be thinking about selling in the least. Half the paid resources on Spigot have copy-pasted example code in them. As for the other complaints, they are not crazy and arbitrary. External binaries are code Ore can’t review and there’s no reason you can’t package it in your plugin. External communication can be a security risk and should be off by default - but also a tool for good, which is why it’s not banned as you imply but merely off by default. I agree 100% on metrics but they’re barely even used for their intended purpose - I use them more as a more useful download count than for actual research on use-cases.

The most damning thing: All of this flatly false information is easily discoverable. Ask anyone and they’ll tell you. This tells me you did zero research before composing this. Rail on the flaws all you want, but make sure they exist first or you look like a tool.

Can Sponge be tone-deaf sometimes? Yes. Can discussion be slow or shut down swiftly? Yes. Do I excuse these things? No. Is it bad enough that I’d trade it for Spigot? Not in a thousand years.

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To my knowledge, no Sponge staff are paid for their work - largely we contribute as we see fit for our own use of Sponge. Sponge is run like a business, there is no open-governance (as I’m sure you would like) - though, that doesn’t mean we don’t try to make decisions that will align with our target market. Sadly, we can’t satisfy everyone :frowning:

How so? Sponge is Forge compatible, and is a plugin platform - not that there are any alternatives to that, bar perhaps Cauldron back when we started.

I’m sure you know that this isn’t true, but I’ll elaborate anyway. Sponge relies on a number of external projects, that it must wait upon to begin work on such updates - traditionally these are MCP and Minecraft Forge. Though we do now have a vanilla implementation, it has become practice to wait on Forge.

Minecraft 1.13 is the largest and most significant update to Minecraft since 1.3, and finalises stuff (the flattening) that has been years in the waiting making. Minecraft Forge took the opportunity, given that so much has changed mods would be unlikely to settle on it, to overhaul many parts of their codebase - from modifying and launching the game, to their mod loader. Not to mention the many, many changes that have been made to MCP’s mappings.

What we have, is the combination of many many external projects making our update far more time consuming, and given the size of our implementation the undertaking is huge.

Now, if you’d like to help there are a number of ways in which you can do so:

  • It’d be great if we had a way to automatically update the MCP mappings used across our implementations (bonus points, if such a solution could handle Mixin too) → this would reduce the manually work of the implementation update substantially.
  • Provide input to the many pull requests across our repositories with the ‘version: 1.14’ tag → this would help us to make quicker decisions and merge things faster.

This is an unfortunate reality of our size, we get so many pull requests and to my knowledge we don’t have anyone responsible for triaging pull request to the right people, so many do fall through the cracks. Some pull requests however, are stuck indefinitely as they require changes to be made - while I’ll admit in the past some of these changes have been trivial and could have been made at merge, this should no longer be the case.

My recommendation for pull requests, is to discuss them with us (on IRC or Discord) :wink: That should help with some falling off the map.

As nobody is paid for their contributions, most contributors are much the same as yourself working for themselves - some take the role above-and-beyond, but not all. Being a Sponge team member is a lot of just, you work well with our team, you’ve done a great deal of work, how would you like to have a higher position within the community?

Unfortunately, this makes for a scenario where open-governance (think the Fedora Project, or Debian) might be a better fit - but that’s a decision that was made some time ago.

However, when we review we take the holistic view of our target market (as best we can) - the project serves our community, even if not all individually - we collectively do so.

Unfortunately, this does mean that review can take longer - but it does maximize contributions (as things that are wanted are done), and worthwhile things are implemented (typically, many of our team have servers that they contribute to / run).

I don’t want to get into Ore - what I will say is that we had essentially opposing views on the matter, and neither of us was satisfied with the result. To maximise the support of the changes, it could not satisfy everyone and had to go for middle-ground in many places.

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Hi,
I’m one of those who takes care of the issues/PRs.

Triaging issues is a bit difficult since we often receive report with a modlist of hundreds of mods and it’s likely we try to fix other issue to maximize the little time we have. (This is something that the community could help with)

On the other hand, your vision on PRs is something I disagree with.
Anyway, if you (or whoever is contributing) feel like your PR is taking too long to get merged/reviewed, feel free to ping me on discord (hope I won’t regret this).

To give you more context:

Note: I’m going to ignore SF and SV since the open PRs there are specific counterpart of SC PRs.

This is the situation on SC: https://github.com/SpongePowered/SpongeCommon/pulls

As you can see, half of them are targeting API 8 (which is not ready).
Here’s a better perspective of the situation: https://github.com/SpongePowered/SpongeCommon/pulls?utf8=✓&q=is%3Apr+is%3Aopen+base%3Astable-7+

In case you didn’t notice, https://github.com/SpongePowered/SpongeCommon/pull/2239 is (literally) the only PR opened by someone who is not part of the Sponge team.

That’s because (the few) PRs opened by community members get merged quicker:
https://github.com/SpongePowered/SpongeCommon/pull/2295 (5 days)
https://github.com/SpongePowered/SpongeCommon/pull/2274 (8 days)
https://github.com/SpongePowered/SpongeCommon/pull/2327 (same day)
https://github.com/SpongePowered/SpongeCommon/pull/2326 (same day)
https://github.com/SpongePowered/SpongeCommon/pull/2311 (1 day)
https://github.com/SpongePowered/SpongeCommon/pull/2299 (3 days)

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The one thing this entire discussion is missing is that there’s a demographic of people that doesn’t give two shits about it. And these people are the most important ones - the players.
I do understand that it’s one hell of an update. I know that over half of MC’s code changed. The thing is, that doesn’t change that as of right now I can’t offer my players a 1.13 server. Unless I switch back to Spigot. But I’d rather not run a server to be honest.
This issue has also forced me to stop advocating for Sponge. I was a vivid defender of Sponge. Claimed it was going to be the future. That it was objectively better. Though now I can’t do that anymore. No one in the vanilla world cares for 1.12. The vanilla community is one that you have lost essentially entirely at this moment. Which really hurts me, as I thought it we help improve that community.
And yes I do absolutely think that a semi stable shim would have been the right solution.

Regarding the API, it was also terrible timing that even before 1.13, the API 8 would have been a giant overhaul. That’s why I think it should have been finalized before 1.13.

Never claimed that.

I’m aware no one is getting paid. But so aren’t most large projects of the MC scene.

That doesn’t explain why reviewed and tested PRs are rotting to death.
Also I am helping out where I feel comfortable enough to talk about. See my recent PR about the properly handling espaced SQL passwords.

I’m not saying monetarization needs to be allowed directly on the site. What I’m saying is that it’s crazy that I couldn’t link anything that let’s me make money in any way but donations.
There is one crazy idea I’d love to propose in regards to that and that is reviewed paid plugins on Ore. I absolutely agree with you that the SpigotMC plugin page is a mess. The premium plugins are coded by 12 year olds and the good ones are free. The issue there being that essentially everyone can sell their plugin. No review process. Now if Ore were to implement a strict review process with strict requirements for the plugin and the dev (like refunds within a reasonable time span gurantueed support times, etc), then that would get rid of the core of the problem while allowing people to sell their work. Now I am aware that right now there aren’t even capabillities to review normal plugins, so that is unrealistic at the moment, but I think this could be a long term goal that would create a plugin heaven.

I may have exaggerated some issues, but that doesn’t make them not exist. And nor have I done zero research. Accusing me of that is quite offesive and frankly unfair.
And be aware that many of the things I’ve said are subjective. Meaning there’s nothing to be researched about.

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Never claimed it was. Though I’m also not paid to develop my plugins. And my users still should be able to expect me catering to them.

RIP Vanilla Sponge community. RIP

I think I worded that wrongly. I see Sponge as a great alternative plugin platform. With the added bonus of Forge compatibility. But note my stress on plugin platform.

That’s cool and all. And I do understand that. I really do.
That doesn’t change that users don’t care about it. And neither do vanilla server owners (mod owners wouldn’t care either if Forge 1.13 was out but Sponge wasn’t for over a year)

Have you tried contacting the MCP team? I knew there was a tool for literally just that back in the 1.7 days.

What is up with constantly bringing that up? Where did I mention that I think staff gets paid? I know they aren’t. The thing is they chose to be a staff member. Which comes with responsibilites and expectation from others. It’s the same principle as signing up for voluntary work. While what is expected of you is no where close to that of a paid person, there still are expectations and responsibilities.

You did mention that earlier. The question is what is preventing that change? What’s stopping you guys from changing the internal structure?

While I agree that it does, currently a at least notable portion of the community has be ostracized. And I think while it never was the largest part of the community, it’s the part of the community that will ulitmately bring your overall success. (Vanilla community)

The thing I’m dissatisfied with the most is the fact that whenever something is brought up it never goes beyond the “we’ll talk about it” phase.

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I believe the large reason getting paid is brought up is because of this:
Think about how many hours we put in… I did the math, if I got paid my hourly wage for all the hours I put into sponge, I would be making over 30,000 USD a year. Now take into account that Sponge takes away from my actual work time - I’m effectively working with Sponge for a loss of income.

Not going to comment on the other things atm, but want to bring up why this is a big deal to a lot of us. I don’t ask to get paid by sponge, however it is going to restrict my performance a little bit - sadly I have to pay expensive rent living where I do, and I live alone, so all bills are my own, if I do not work my actual job well enough and lose it, I’m screwed… I know a fair few on the team also have full-time jobs that take a priority, or are/have been full-time students in recent years.

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You bet I will.

I was gonna say that I’ve never even seen you do anything on GitHub, but then I realized you’re @ImMorpheus there.
And admitteadly the situation in terms of issues (especially untriaged ones) is not ideal. Though I think the majority of dissatification may come from the past where issues were untouched for months and even bringing attetion to them on Discord did nothing.

Though there are two things I say that need improvement. Triaging speed and the lost and forgotten ratio.
I mean on the SpongeAPI repo the first page is 50% untriaged.
And the lost and forgotten ratio should be as close to 0 as possible.

Now I’m not saying it is your fault or that you need to put in more work. I’m blaming anything on you. In fact you’re the number one reason it has become so much better. But there’s still room for improvement.
And quite frankly I’ve though about helping on GitHub for a while. So I might start it soon.

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I am aware of that. I know that just to well myself.

But my volutary work comparision stands. You knew what you were getting into. (So was everyone else) Why are you complaining about it?

Reading that out loud makes it sound very offensive and aggessive. That’s not what I want to bring across. It’s supposed to be a genuine question. And not target at you but everyone brining that up.

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I understand that they don’t care. But that doesn’t change reality; just because something is unimportant to someone doesn’t mean that it’s trivial to overcome.

That’s because you haven’t seen what would have been involved in creating such a shim. Spigot is already a giant compatibility shim and when presented with the problem, md_5 was still so strapped for options that dynamically rewriting plugin code at runtime was the easiest solution. The development work that would need to go into creating such a shim would likely double the time until release of any 1.14 support.

Lex and md_5 make enough in donations for this to be their full-time job. Sponge doesn’t have that.

There are six thousand things to do and for every one that gets completed five more get added to the pile. If stuff gets updated it will get pulled eventually; not everything needs to get pulled within five seconds of its completion as long as it makes it before the API’s release.

You weren’t talking about long term, though. You were talking about right now. The summary of your Ore-related complaint is all the crazy and arbitrary rules that apply to prospective Sponge plugin devs looking at the project. If paid plugins are three major versions down the road then it’s functionally identical to them being absolutely never in terms of documentation, of a head-on view of the rules, and of current debate.

Everything I have said is something that I have been able to inference from working with Sponge and its people, or something I had a question about at one point and asked. Most of the things you are saying are flatly false or ridiculous, and though there is a grain of truth to some of them, if you knew the things I had said before you would have approached them from a completely different angle. Meaning you have not attempted to discern the reason for these things, nor ask Sponge staff about them, and instead decided that the only reason can be deafness and insularity. For that matter, ‘research’ includes searching the forum - you are not the first to voice these exact complaints, and I recall having responded to at least three similar topics before yours.

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In the past this has been something that has been we may as well wait, the difference won’t be too great - obviously that wasn’t true this time around. Though, this is actually an example of where waiting on Forge is rather important - we have to follow there lead in a number of areas, and given the many many changes made to Minecraft, we would have been remiss going too far ahead without seeing what they’re doing.

Sadly for you, the vast majority of our community uses Sponge for modded servers - we never took off in the vanilla space :frowning: Initially we simply considered vanilla support to be a by-product of Forge, nothing more, nothing less. Yes this changed when Granite was acquired, and became SpongeVanilla - but our developers still in large part contribute for SpongeForge (as that’s what they use).

Well actually, the only things that really needs to be written here is the Mixin updater. Mercury (written by Minecrell, and using libraries from myself) or Srg2Source could be used to modify the actual source code. Its just writing something to handle the workflow.

The reason I’ve brought it up a few times, is that you expect a lot from staff - more than we do.

As far as developers are concerned, its essentially just keep doing what you were doing to be invited to the team. A Sponge Developer is really just someone that’s contributed significantly over time, works well with the team, and given access to some internal chats. They can choose to do additional roles, but that is entirely up to them

Honestly, Sponge’s community is too small for it to be worthwhile - it takes a substantial amount of bureaucracy to work. There would also be the issue of funding, for that sort of structure to work everything really has to be paid for (e.g. Fedora has Red Hat) - Sponge does have sponsors, but its an ongoing matter and one that sponsors probably don’t want discussed openly.

In short, we’d be even slower to get anything done.

We differ on this, personally I think that Sponge’s greatness is with regards to modded. We never really penetrated the vanilla market, with SpongeVanilla.

Like I’ve said we all joined to continue with the status-quo essentially, just with an elevated community position. Some take it above and beyond, but many of us are either students, have jobs, or both - much of us have our time limited.

I also think you may not be clear on how small our developer team is → see Staff — Sponge 8.0.0 documentation and look at the Issue Managers too (for your specific statements). I will also mention that those lists are greater than the actually people working on Sponge (as you can see from our repos) → many are on hiatuses of sorts.

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As someone who has chosen to volunteer to help out extremely within the Minecraft community, hearing someone say “you should have known what you got into, why complain” is quite a spit in the face.

I deal with MinecraftForums, PlanetMinecraft, #minecrafthelp, directly working with Mojang on several things and writing my own server management panel. And now Sponge. And I get 0 incentive to do this. I do this because I like doing it. And hearing this kind of stuff makes me think you’ve not tried doing that.

I do it because I want to. I have 0 obligation to do it, nor anything else I choose to do.

You will have no idea the amount of work that is put into any community. And how much they pour into it, to hear things like “you should have known better”.

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The thing is to my knowledge (which is public announcemnets and discussions) it was never attempted to overcome. It was ruled out right from the beginning.

I’m not talking about minutes, hours, days, weeks or even months. I’m talking about years. The Forge permissions API implementation is a great example of it.
My favorite part of the discussion is the part where Lavitan essentially say “We should have done it from the beginning”. Which I do agree with. The question remains, why is it not merged then yet?
The code is ready. It has been reviewd several times, it has been confirmed to work and it bridges a gap that never should have been there in the first place. Now this carries special significance with me because I’m on the other end of the issue. I as LuckPerms support get constant complains about that exact gap.

Yes. That was suggestion for the future. One that I came up with right there and then. I’ll properly suggest it on the Ore repo later.
Though I’ve also brought up more than enough other suggestion for the current situation.

The only thing where in hindsight I evaulted the past and not the current state is the PR/issue discussion. The rest remains. And while you think that shimming 1.13/1.14 support is a bad idea for your reasons I’ll say I think it’s a good idea for my reasons.

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All I expect from staff is that the community is put above themselves in terms of where the project goes. I don’t think that’s too much to ask for. I find that to be a perfectly reasonable expectation, why I try to fulfill in my community.

I see. I might actually be able to do that. Though I won’t promise anything. Currently I’m way to short on time.

That’s a region that really needs to be tackled. Hear me out. Sponge in itself is better than Spigot. It’s just unpolished and has the flaw of regularily dropping their vanilla community. Now I know that Sponge is being polished. Now if you mange to provide a reliable vanilla platform that you allow to grow, then it’s only a matter of time before devs start switching for the better platform and ultimately the community itself. All it needs for that to happen is the vanilla platform being reliable. And I think with some future precautions that can be achieved (assuming there won’t be another 1.13 knocking on the door soon).

That’s what I meant. If you manage to consitently push out a decently working Vanilla build before Forge is ready, then that’s all you need to get your footing back in the vanilla market.

That’s not because people don’t want to use it for vanilla, but because as it stands right now it is impossible to do so.

I know it’s small.

A greater general community inclusion, especially in terms of decison making would still be good idea.

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Again. Not my intention. I am also very involved in the MC community and do a shitton of work without payment. I’m really talking about the payment thing. Why complain about not getting paid when you chose to?
I mean you chose to help out in the community. Eventually you started getting staff ranks. Now why is it spitting in your face when I point out that doing that is accepting reponsibility and expectations?
I know damn well, why I’m not joining the Sponge team (or not trying to). It’s because I don’t have the time for responsibilites it brings. The thing is I’m aware of them.

And heck complaining is fine. I do it all the time. I just find complaining about the responsibilities and expectations is a bit out of place. Especially when they are reasonable.

As I’ve said. I’m doing it for years now.

I absolutely do know. Now there’s no nicer way of saying it other than if “you should have known better” offends you, then yes you really should have known better.
The next sentence will probably also sounds offensive to you, but if you don’t like the responsibility of being staff, you don’t have to be staff.
And before you start ranting about that I have no idea, I do and I do live by these standards. Which means I have way less staff titles than I’d like but I have responibility and expectation levels I can fulfill without getting upset and butthurt about it.

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There’s literally only two status updates to look at and it’s smack dab in the middle of one of them:

And yet more work gets done, even after your comment. If it was as cut and dried as you say it is, it would be pulled, and I note that you have not waited around to hear phit’s elaboration. Meanwhile, this is an isolated phenomenon. I’ve never experienced slowness like this with any of my own PRs.

Your reasons are ‘because it would be faster’. You do not seem to grasp that Sponge’s reasons are ‘no it absolutely wouldn’t’. The majority of the work is in updating the implementation; the shim would take development time away from the implementation and so it’d end up taking even longer.

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You keep talking about this but not once have explained it any further than ‘staff can be a bit deaf at times’. What on earth about Sponge’s processes has been to advance the goals of the staff over those of the community?

That’s what’s going on right now. Vanilla will absolutely come out before Forge because Forge will take even more work. Again, where did you get the idea that it’s in any way a simple and quick process?

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People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. You accuse us of not getting on with 1.14.x and claim “expectation”, but you then suggest you’re too busy to help. There is the old adage “put up or shut up”, and while I don’t want to silence the community, I am insulted that we have all this back and forth going when this time could be used constructively. Ask how you can help us make 1.14 a reality. Comment on PRs to help us see how we might not have accounted for your use case. This are all things that we need to see. Even better, write PRs for us that fix long standing problems. I wish I have time to do more of all of this, but my job and my health have prevented this.

We’re a volunteer OSS project that needs all the help we can get. I would rather not waste what precious little time we have blowing hot air around when we could actually get some decent feedback from people who are both developers and server owners through constructive comments on PRs. We’re always going to have internal governance, but please remember that we have plenty of ways to make your voice heard. We’re not going to accept everything, and not everything will be done as fast as we’d like. Those Ore guideline changes? Turns out that they are much harder to implement than we thought. Reviewers? They’re all busy with work and school. Me? I have a medical issue that I need to be careful with. I am flat out insulted that you insinuate that we don’t care, we don’t listen, we don’t act on the community.

Remember that we are all humans. Everyone deserves decency and respect. Remember that we are volunteers. We will not destroy our lives because someone wants 1.14 now.

You have expectations of us. Our expectations of the community should be clear, to be respectful of one another, and to pitch in when possible. We knew what we were getting into when joining the Sponge team - but I guarantee it was not an expectation. It’s trust.

I trust you’ll help us out with our issues, PRs and constructive discussion?

A note on Ore: we have a tiny team trying to unpick some of the spider-like code to ensure Ore can be upgraded more easily. Want that to move faster? Please go help them. They are crying out for the help. Then we can make sure that we can implement our revised guidelines to the fullest.

We care. Help us to help you.

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