[OpenFontLibrary] The future of OFLB development

[Barry Schwartz]

Dave Crossland <dave at lab6.com> skribis:
> Continuing to noodle on this, I suppose we (I) should reach out to the
> users and ask them what they want out of OFLB.

Quit trying to be fancy and do so much at once. If you cannot provide
easy, editable uploads and easy, straightforward downloads with a
_usable_ font display in between, the rest is garbage.

Somehow OFLB has managed never to achieve any of this, or even come
close to it, while instead pursuing the next trendy framework or
advanced functionality, which is just as quickly abandoned.

Also you must never, ever, ever again delete everyone’s work and make
them re-participate from scratch.

Furthermore, uploads need to be managed, whether or not you like it,
or OFLB is a trojan horse site. Users need to be trusted people, or
submit only through a moderator. Likewise, wiki needs to be managed,
because we know already (based on experience) that OFLB will not get
the attention needed to deal with spam as it occurs.

In short: have extreme patience when it comes to doing anything other
than the basics -- don’t even think about it too much until you have
the basics firmly under control -- and never do anything badly.

If none of this seems attractive, an alternative is to move to other
projects. There was a need for a free software clipart site, but free
software fonts are easy to obtain already. Other sites may not have
the features one wants, but see what I said above about ‘the basics’
and ‘patience’.