What happed with the old godot forum ?

[duane]

I can't believe what's become of Godot lately. It's like a shit story of betrayal unfolding right before our eyes.

To me, this sounds like a lot of unnecessary drama. It's a free software project, not a way of life. Betrayal of trust is not an issue in free software -- if you have a problem with a project, you fix it or make your own project and fix that.

I like Cybereality, but I didn't understand his complaints at all. I figured he was just stressed out from taking on too much responsibility.

I stopped using godot for a while, because all the changes in 4.x overwhelmed me, but I'm back to working with it again, and I really don't much care what the developers do as long as I have the source. If I was really concerned about the project's survival, I'd be making more contributions on github, but that would require work.

It's possible that godot has reached the level of complexity that makes it impossible to maintain with the existing manpower. I posted a crash bug yesterday, and in the few hours after that, I watched eight more issues appear. If I was being paid to maintain that, I think I'd be working on my resume instead.

[Owen Lloyd]

Cults? Scams? It is open source software, those with issues can fork off and build their own. Or just fork off.

[Lethn]

What seems to have happened with CyberReality and I am trying to be fair here, the guy misunderstood how Godot's finances worked, blew it out of proportion instead of just asking some simple questions to verify information and then decided instead of cool off and come back later like a normal person would dug his heels in and proceeded to throw a hissy fit. I do think people are right to call out not just his political biases on the forum but others as well because he was doing some sneaky behaviour and deleting threads when he got into arguments with people too. I write threads, because I saw one thread where he definitely did that and I suspect there may be more which will have probably driven people off that site.

Going by what I'm seeing on that forum I will not be taking part there again and going by their ruleset I can only point out what I see and that a bunch of politically motivated squatters have taken hold of that domain and forum and are have been trying to hijack the Godot project with it as these types of people do. Very annoying, If you think I'm exaggerating, reddit's a great example of how bad this sort of thing can get and people in the background have even performed quite fun and very telling social experiments on these places to see what they would get banned for or what specific bent they have. Sometimes there were specific subreddits that would be targeted and they would do copy-pastas just flipping around certain situations and it was ridiculous seeing how predictably people reacted.

I bring this up, because I suspect that's how bad that forum is going to get, hopefully with the back end devs getting that site listing off there won't be too many noobs who are unfortunate to come across it. Something I will definitely attack CyberReality on over the way he operated that forum just from a programmer was when he added an AI bot clearly for his own amusement and yeah okay haha funny but the thing was giving out gibberish answers and bad code ripped from other sites which was confusing the hell out of the poor noobs that went to that site clearly wanting to learn.

Just a bit of an update for people on the stuff that was happening there because it seems to me like people are picking up only CyberReality's side of the story which will of course be louder because he's the one wanting to start the drama. I definitely won't have anything to do with that place anymore because they annoyed me taking that site down when I had written so much to help out people learning. It really is a good thing that Godot is open source because that means the devs have only lost a forum and domain rather than the whole software.

[DaveTheCoder]

Going by what I'm seeing on that forum

What's I'm seeing is that people are asking questions about Godot and getting solutions. Occasionally a "Godot politics" discussion gets started and gets out of hand, but that's a small part of the activity, and only a tiny number of people contribute to that.

their ruleset

The rules look very reasonable to me.

he added an AI bot clearly for his own amusement

I had requested that before Cybereality began administering the forum . I don't recall if others did too. It might have been useful if it were configured to only reply to direct requests, but that wasn't an option. It replied to every new post, which made it annoying.

I've actually gotten useful information from ChatGPT, about Godot and other topics, and thought that a ChatGPT bot inside the forum could be useful.

[Tomcat]

a ChatGPT bot inside the forum could be useful.

It can be useful for those who can sweep away a priori wrong answers. That is, for those who already have sufficient experience. For beginners it is misleading. I think it is generally more harmful than helpful.

[DaveTheCoder]

You just have to be aware that it's a bot, and shouldn't trust it 100%. It's the same as doing a web search, but it can be much better if you ask the right question.

[Lethn]

That's the problem, he didn't even really properly label it as a bot, so you had newbies who were trying to talk to it like it was a real human being and going forward any AI experimentation needs to be labelled as that clearly, otherwise it's safe to assume the person using the AI is being deceptive.

[megalomaniak]

You just have to be aware that it's a bot, and shouldn't trust it 100%. It's the same as doing a web search, but it can be much better if you ask the right question.

The right question and the right way.