PS : Good luck Christian. You’ll be allright 
I must admit … sometimes I tune in to the forum here to learn things and other times I just tune in for the pure entertainment value of it all! And here I thought I knew my “ABC’s”! ^^
As for advertising pre-release plug-in info, I’m all in favor of it. I personally don’t give a flip where it shows up as long as I see it. There aren’t too many plugs that I don’t own and I rely heavily on them for saving me time and money. Knowing whether or not a particular plug-in with a particular functionality is being developed can (does) easily affect my planning for upcoming projects. For every plug-in that someone else develops that I need, that’s one less task I have to take on and can focus instead on the remainder of the coding involved in the app. It’s a key to my individual productivity. “Time” is my most precious commodity and I can’t think of an “awsh*t” that would be any bigger than to spend an inordinate amount of time figuring out something I have to do and then finding out that someone else had been developing the same thing concurrent with my efforts. How else would I ever find out about these development efforts that are underway unless I saw them here in the forum where I spend most of my time with “all things XOJO”.
I think it’s wonderful that we have XOJO users of all kinds (commercial and non-commercial). I applaud and respect those that doggedly work at figuring out everything by themselves. I truly wish I had the time to do that … learning new things is always rewarding and gratifying to me. But the reality of the matter for me is that I use XOJO as one of the tools I need to create things for my customers. As “mercenary” as this may sound (I can hear some of the ‘purists’ gagging already before they even reach the end of this sentence), although I would love to be known some day as the “smartest” XOJO user ever because I could figure out anything and everything, I would much prefer to be the “wealthiest” XOJO user ever. Plugs will help move me in that direction … attempting to figure out everything on my own (as sweet a thought as it might be to my ego) will only result in limiting my output … and last I checked, that won’t do much for the income side of the equation.
Maybe I’m oversimplifying it, but I still see the “plugging your plugs thing” like a commercial on TV … if it’s something I have (or will have) a need for, I watch and listen … if not, I simply ignore it, change the channel (look at the next post), or better yet, go to the kitchen cabinet to get something which will not make me any thinner. ^^
Brad, I don’t think there is any confusion or bad blood. I think the issue has been that every query that is posted in the forum has an MBSSolution and they are told so. It can be quite irritating getting an answer which is commercially incentivised when there are pure Xojo or simple declares which are free and that is basically what you are after.
Christian, I would say yes fire away in the add ons channel about whatever you like, that is what the channel is for. It shouldn’t be policed it is the add on channel and you are plugging add ons. If i was selling add ons I would be in this channel. Don’t ask if it ok, just get stuck in. On other channels if someone asks if there is a plugin which solves their problem again jump in.
I think the big gripe with a lot of people is that this is a forum for discussion and not a commercial advertising channel.
Brad, dont shoot me down on this as it is the view of many and I am only saying what many think.
Right. He’s been at it 13 years. MBS solves a lot of problems. MBS is part of the landscape. Your so-called free solutions have unique costs as well, such as they’re typically posted by some dude on the forums who may or may not have a track record of supporting snippets or xippets or pippettes or whatever they’re being called. The contention that free is magically “better” is malarkey. Just as the contention that “paid” is magically better is malarkey. All part of a landscape.
We have a bunch of people who wine and complain about seeing any commercial solution, or how much is appropriate and where (scroll up). When they whine and complain over time, the Xojo people brush the commercial providers back rather than telling the whiners and complainers to chill out and appreciate the landscape. The effect is that a whole bunch of useful discussion is chilled.
[quote=91328:@Mike Charlesworth]Brad, dont shoot me down on this as it is the view of many and I am only saying what many think.
[/quote]
Right. We’re calling them Cs now. There are plenty of Bs who are annoyed with them for asserting too much of an open source closed mind influence over the forums rather than letting it be the landscape of solutions it should be. This isn’t shooting you down, Mike, but the problem is people like you. Christian shouldn’t have to ask if discussing his plugins here is appropriate. There’s a large audience (he estimates 1/3 of participants) that’s obviously interested. Compare that to the number of people who care about Xippets (nowhere close), and nobody is whining about them being mentioned all the time.
I’ve never understood how anyone could get irritated or offended over having to ignore a 2 or 3 sentence post about a fully tested, commercial solution that is almost always relevant to the conversation. We are such a small community, the few vendors we have that make a living out of providing tools for Xojo users have very few places they can reach out to their very narrow audience. I’m willing to skip over the posts if it would encourage more developers to build Xojo tools. Takes just a couple of seconds to skip over a post. Personally I say post at will, wherever, and be thankful these same guys are willing to repeatedly and graciously help the less talented among us.
Has to be a two way street, and even with that — these guys are giving a lot more than they are taking.
And the penny drops. Sorry, @Brad Hutchings, I apologize for pooh-poohing your suggestion on the other thread. Perhaps it was the dramatized presentation that, although entertaining, put me off. You were absolutely correct. There should be a separation of channel between commercial add-ons and freebies. The C’s can subscribe to the latter and keep their heads in the sand with regard to the former.
That’s only because I try not to complain about either side. But you’re right, they are worse.
One big problem with the “free solution” is that there is no quality control. I’ve seen some that are just plain wrong, if not dangerous.
Perhaps I’m missing something but I only ever see Brad complaining about this supposed outrage.
If you say something often enough, people start to believe it. Old politican’s trick.
I’ve seen plenty of it. (Did you read Mike’s post?) If I were an addon developer, I’d be complaining too.
Yes, I read it. He says that Christian should “fire away” in the Add-ons channel - i.e. post as often as he wants. He also expresses concern that questions are sometimes immediately answered with a plug for a function that MBS has, when Xojo often has such functionality built-in. That seems a reasonable concern, no?
I don’t know how many times this thing has to come up. Norman has clarified the desired forum etiquette several times now.
It’s a stupid concern, because there is a landscape of solutions. This landscape includes built-in Xojo functions, Xojo coded routines, declares, plugins, etc. It’s also a particularly stupid concern in some cases, because MBS does some “built-in” functionality without crashing all over the place. Take the database plugin mess as a prime example of that right now. Or take how horribly slow built-in XML stuff was a couple years ago. Mike’s approach retards the discussion and hinders progress for those outside the C camp.
Norman listens to complainers too much at the expense of solutions that many here benefit from. Norman, for example, has said (in private conversation) that Christian needs to post his pre-release announcements to his own forums. A good third of us benefit more when the discussion is here and we don’t have to go looking all over the place for it. Xojo benefits from that by keeping the interesting discussion in one easy to find place. It’s really hard for me to get my head around Mike’s or Gavin’s view on this. If you don’t want to hear about commercial stuff, just tune it out. That’s what I do with Xippets and 99% of the “let’s do an open source project” threads, for example. Why complain and make people feel unwelcome?
There’s a landscape of solutions but if the simple answer is “it’s built into Xojo”, why plug a third-party product? If I was Xojo Inc, I’d be a little annoyed that potential customers of my product were being told that they’d need another product on top of Xojo, to get the functionality they want, if that wasn’t the case.
[quote=91354:@Brad Hutchings]It’s really hard for me to get my head around Mike’s or Gavin’s view on this. If you don’t want to hear about commercial stuff, just tune it out.[quote]
I do want to hear about commercial stuff. But first and foremost, that commercial stuff is a product called Xojo. That’s why I’m here on Xojo’s forums; to talk about Xojo.
Sometimes I can use a third-party product such as a plugin but sometimes I have a project that dictates I cannot use a plugin and sometimes I’d like to have a discussion on those grounds. As I’ve said repeatedly, I am glad to have the option of purchasing plugins and third-party items, and I use them where I can as they save me time (money).
Every time you bring this subject up, you raise a “them and us” feeling, as if there’s some big conspiracy against plugin developers. I think that’s a very negative thing to portray to people new to Xojo and people considering producing their own plugins. And I really don’t see it happening. Again, if I’m missing something, I’d love to hear from a plugin developer (even a private message if you want) who has such concerns. But it seems to be just you, Brad, who raises it over and over again.
Damn, I messed up my quoting in that post and I can’t edit it. I also said the following (which the quotes made look like I attributed to Brad, sorry!)
“I do want to hear about commercial stuff. But first and foremost, that commercial stuff is a product called Xojo. That’s why I’m here on Xojo’s forums; to talk about Xojo.
Sometimes I can use a third-party product such as a plugin but sometimes I have a project that dictates I cannot use a plugin and sometimes I’d like to have a discussion on those grounds. As I’ve said repeatedly, I am glad to have the option of purchasing plugins and third-party items, and I use them where I can as they save me time (money).”
Gavin, the discussions here are not just about you and what you need. They’re about all visitors who may lurk, ask, or participate.
I gave you two examples where discussing third party offerings that directly compete with built-in Xojo facilities is/was important to actually getting stuff to work. No comment on those? Specifically, under your “I’m here to talk about Xojo” standard, how would you deal with this issue? Please read entire thread.
https://forum.xojo.com/12212-we-standalone-fatal-error-with-ssl
Frankly, I think we’d all be better off if Christian put up a posting about why the MBS SQL plugin is just better than the Xojo Database API. It would save people a whole bunch of uncertainty and work, as this isn’t the first, second, or third person here in the forums to have stumbled on the database plugins crashing badly since Novemberish. But no, that would violate the “I’m here to talk about Xojo” standard.
How about if we all just talk about what we want to talk about and if you’re not interested or it’s not applicable to you, just ignore it. It’s probably applicable to someone else.
Great insight, I thought it was all about me. Here’s the thing though: discussion threads have to have some boundaries. They’re normally set by people simply being reasonable and respectful to each other. For example, I am also an Objective-C programmer. Should I keep suggesting Xcode solutions to people who ask a Xojo question? That would be considered odd behavior, probably a little rude. Normal conversation has boundaries.
[quote=91366:@Brad Hutchings]Specifically, under your “I’m here to talk about Xojo” standard, how would you deal with this issue? Please read entire thread.
https://forum.xojo.com/12212-we-standalone-fatal-error-with-ssl
[/quote]
I read the whole thread. Looks like you offered a good solution with a good explanation. If the OP had said “my workplace prevent from me using a plugin” then you would have been offering no solution, you’d just have derailed the conversation. But he didn’t. I don’t see any problem.
We’d end up like Reddit then!
OK, so here’s a summary of this conversation:
Someone proposes a restriction on what a plugin developer should be able to say in the forum. I find an example where such proposed restriction is “broken” and a community member is served. Proposer replies, “That’s OK because elephant.”
Tolerance of the whole landscape is what’s needed here. And no, we won’t devolve into Reddit if there aren’t rules and boundaries. Such silliness. The C group just needs to get over itself.
See what I mean by “because elephant”? Dude was already using a plugin (Xojo’s MySQL plugin), and it crashed his app. And even if he says he can’t use a third party plugin, several people are running into this obscure issue, and MBS is the only working solution to it right now. Regardless of what the OP desires, it should be part of the discussion because others are going to run into it. How you don’t get the value in that is beyond me.
Reddit is a fun, friendly place, so let’s end up like them 
To go back to what the OP was actually wondering before it became about Brad (maybe you are, as you speculated, just special Brad?), it would seem odd if Christian couldn’t post in the Add-on sections when he has a new plugin. Xojo created the Add-on section with the description “This is the place to discuss 3rd party add-ons for Xojo”.
So far it only seems to be only Brad who has been told to do otherwise. Any other plugin developers? Bueller?
Brad, I am on your side of this debate, but this is the EXACT argument I made about having to use real names on the forum. I was pretty much told it will rain cats and dogs and the sky will fall if we allow handles like “Pixel Crusher”.
If we’re ever allowed to use handles again, I’m totally going with “Pixel Crusher”.
All yours…