What do I think of dolphin a couple of weeks in?

Well it's now nearing three weeks into my Dolphin experience and I have managed to stick with it. I decided that the functionality offered by Dolphin was not matched by other rivals, and despite the bugs and lack of support it has it was worthy of my time. The software is pretty good, has some nice features, some strange idiosyncrasies, but is usable and works well for the community that I wanted to create. I have had to put some effort into making it work - it was not an out of the box experience, but then I don't really expect these things to require absolutely no input.

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I decided to follow up on my previous post to pass on some views and my experiences and hopefully help someone else.

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Gripes

Unfortunately, support is pretty much zero, especially here on the boonex site, which is unfortunate - especially if you have paid for the premium 'ad free' version. There are a clique of regular users who are less than useful. Most will hijack threads to oppose an opinion, even if they have nothing positive to contribute towards solving the issue themselves. This unfortunately lets the whole idea of community support down and is my biggest criticism of the boonex community. There are one or two useful contributors but they are most definately in the minority.

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The common standard answer to most questions is 'boonex is complex software and requires an advanced server.'

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Phah - it's only PHP + Ajax - it's not rocket science. In fact it's not really anything new - Ajax has been around since '05 and PHP a lot longer. There is nothing cutting edge about this software, get a clue, please... It may be complex to the people offering these opinons, but that is because they don't really know what they're talking about.

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My response to those who make this claim is that if they actually knew anything about coding they would keep quiet - the age old addage that 'It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt' applies here.

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Unfortunately to the average punter / user - they come across as software goddesses / gods, and the pack mentality of the clique means that anyone that opposes their opinions shall be doomed to flames - even if their opinion was not actually asked for in the first place. This in turn reinforces their (mis)given advice and perpetuates the myth...

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'Caveat Emptor' as they say in Rome.

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Fraudsters

The lack of worthwhile support helps to perpertuate another problem - fraudsters - I have never in my years of programming come across a single platform so plagued in fraudsters as this one. It seems to be particularly plagued by tricksters that promise coding or development, but then take the money and run. There seem to be more threads that mention people being scammed than mention people being helped

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Positives

However, opinions aside, I generally like the software so have decided to stick with it. The bugs I have found I have fixed, and as it is open source I will simply modify it to suit.

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I am very interested to see what version 7 looks like, and to see if the compatibility issues have been addressed.

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Reccomendations

My recommendations to others... If you want a boonex site make sure you know a little about programming and fault diagnostics or have a programmer you can trust. Also make sure you have sufficient access to your servers settings, you may need to change them to get boonex to work, and it helps to be able to diagnose the problem so that you can fix the issue.

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Boonex can work fine on shared hosting provided that your host will allow you to configure certain aspects of the server - this usually amounts to enabling things such as GD_LIB or MOD_REWRITE, it does NOT need a special server.

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Remember all servers are basically the same - they pretty much all run on Linux and pretty much all run apache2 + php5, some still use php4 which requires different settings but it will still work.

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And finally...

If someone tells you that you need a special server - kick them in the proverbials (if they have them) and tell them that I said they don't know what they're talking about. And if they say it is 'advanced software' or words to that effect, turn around and walk away and be happy in the knowledge that you know more than they do.

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DM