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I'd like to invite everyone to the Neverside IRC, join EFNet, channel #neverside. Myself, along with a lot of your forum favourites are always in there. Now that there's no discussion forums, it's the only place to talk, so if you feel inclined to, there's the info.
Hopefully this new Neverside will be everything that the original wasn't, I also hope that Dave bringing down Neverside means that he is getting close to a release, or serious about production, and we'll be seeing something sooner, rather than a "Soon to come!" page for 4 years.
Noel contacted me to clear up confusion about his previous comment, which in the midst of abusive comments from other sources was misunderstood and deleted. What he said (for reference since the original comment is gone) was: "Neverside is dead, long live Neverside!"
I believe he won't mind me posting his clarification:
Thanks Noel for clarifying. I understand your comment now and appreciate it :)
To everyone: I know NS is no longer what it once was (as TF), and I know the process of remaking it into something new has been long, and put on hold for even longer periods at a time. Having found a gap of time in which completing things is finally possible for me, I am doing my best to do so. As I'm not a programmer, customizing things to meet my personal UI/usability requirements definitely takes me longer than it might otherwise, but I've come a long way (I've gotten the hang of template_preprocess() functions and have even written my first module to customize various aspects of the site without hacking the core system). Though I'm pleased with how the new site looks and functions, I don't for a moment imagine it is anything at all without the community members behind it. I want you guys to be able to voice your feedback so that what is made will meet your needs. I hope as many people as are willing will lend a hand with assessing the details I post (such as the proposed forum categories), screenshots as they are posted, and later a (hopefully quick) phase of beta testing. As mentioned before, the screenshots being posted are not design comps (as the old ones were), but are screenshots of fully functional pages in the browser. It's closer than it's ever been, and I'm not stopping. After the initial version of the site is made live, I expect to expand development to a wider group with SVN access. There will still be a lot to do to bring the site up to its potential and make it a current and useful tool for artists and other creative professionals. I'm looking forward to sharing the ideas I have for the site, as well as hearing other ideas from the community.
Again, thanks Noel for your clarification, and thanks everyone for your ideas and feedback.
Hey Dave! Good to see my favorite old site is making a comeback. Who says you can't teach new tricks to an old dog? Haha, well check it; I'm in the United States Marine Corps and I have an unexplainable amount of time on my hands for the most part. If there is anything you need me to help with or give feedback to, you can contact me. or, if you still have my old number, throw it away and email me to get the new one. I personally like the new look (try to look forward to "Web 3.0" and not get stalled in 2.0) and think once you release this beast, NS will rise again.
Brandon
[Dave: email address noted and removed]
Have there been any further developments on anything? Any idea when the phase of beta testing will be?
Neverside coming back? No way :0
Look forward to it, when/if it comes back.
Any updates there Dave? Screenshots? Complete back burner?
Hey guys, apologies for the gap in updates.
I'm back to working on it actively now, however for a while I had no choice but to push the site's priority back. I had dug myself into a bit of a financial "problem" after spending so much time on this this year (combined with a few non profit projects I did this and last year for low or no pay... which all added up to bad news for me when the economy tanked). My part time IT job had to stop giving me any work as well (and had almost half a year of unpaid invoices too), and all combined I managed to get myself into a pretty dangerous financial situation. I was barely able to pay uncle sam this year... had to put half on my credit card :P
I've been working on several Drupal-related projects for hire, and writing code that I should be able to re-use a good portion of for our own needs (as they fortunately coincide with some of what I've done on those sites). Those projects have strengthened my module-writing abilities in Drupal quite a bit too, so I've been writing some cool "glue code" to more smoothly draw together some otherwise disparate contributed module functionality. Drupal gets you pretty far without writing any PHP, but if you want it to really be exactly how you want it on a complex site, PHP is required. I never thought I'd be able to write PHP, though I'm gettin' it now.
If I could ask you guys (if you're willing and want to be ready to help on the development end of things once I get this to beta)... if you have time, please get some exposure to Drupal terminology and some of the key modules, so we'll have an easier time getting rolling on the same page. I have some very well received articles to start off here on my site (particularly this one)... or feel free to catch up with me in Drupal's IRC #drupal-support (nick is Keyz_) where I help support the Drupal community (and will gladly help any of you become Drupal ninjas as well if you wish hehe).
Talk to you soon.
Hey Dave! I thought I'd share my story.
When you put these Drupal/NS pages up, I remember I had only briefly heard of Drupal and was skeptical, fearing it was another one of these CMS/framework fads. I then had a long and tedious PHP project I worked on, after which, some months later, I came back to your Drupal guides and had a closer look.
Although I was initially also tempted by Joomla, I decided to try out Drupal for a small site. It was refreshing to work with such a well-rounded CMS, but the idiosyncrasies and peculiarities of Drupal were kind of a chore to get my head around. I still haven't hacked any modules or done much theming, but I'm proud to say I'm putting the finishing touches right now on a second, full site with an Ubercart store and lots of views and panels.
I've concluded that 80% of my time with Drupal is dealing with problems and looking for documentation which is often sparse or unclear, but when it all finally *does* work, it's really quite a thrill. Your guides have helped a lot, and I think they might be the best introduction to Drupal I've read so far.
Next, I'm going to start diving into the Drupal API and learn what's under the hood. Hopefully I can eventually be of some development help with NS.
--Marek (nano)
I will grant that you are a busy guy, Dave, but surely you recognize that a major cause of the failure of Neverside was removing TutorialForums before Neverside was 100%. Yet here we are, waiting on yet another incarnation of the site without anything to go on, nothing to hold us together as a community - those of us who even care to check back from time to time. I know we cannot turn back time and change the decision to take down the forum until Neverside was completed (or rather, until it was evident that Jeremy and Shawn were full of shit), but surely we can learn from that lesson and STOP PROMISING SOMETHING THAT YOU CAN'T DELIVER WITHIN THE WEEK.
For fuck sakes.
I miss everyone. Get something back up!
What ever happened to Jeremy and Shawn, and their new project 'Audoptic'?
I too am eager to participate in the new Neverside. I have to agree that these transitions are what killed the community though. It's like updating your DNS and dropping your old servers before the information has propagated. At least if the old Neverside was still online we could hang out in the forums like the old days (the same could be said for TF).
I'd be willing to spend some time working on the new development. I was just as eager to help with the development for Neverside, but Locke seemed so eager to stick to his clique and unwilling to take advantage of the horde of volunteers, I hope you don't make the same mistake.
I was trying to keep an eyeball out for Audoptic but it too seems to have disappeared. I wish I could get a hold of all these people that I used to spend so much time with, everyone is gone and living their lives, and the one thing that held us all together is gone.
How do you verify your account?
I can't say I'm entirely surprised that nothing came out of Audoptic. But, it nevertheless had some solid beginning work done on it. Too bad it vanished without ever fulfilling its potential...
Audoptic was a failure from the start because of Locke, it should be of no surprise, as he is also responsible for the destruction of TF and Neverside. You can go ahead and mingle about that being untrue, but remember how the attitude of the TF community flipped upside down once Locke started on a power streak. No wrestling bit sound bytes are going to support Locke's innocence in this argument, just look at how quickly TF went down and moved over to an incomplete NS. 3 strikes (Audoptic, TF and Neverside) and you're out of the game. Hopefully no one makes the mistake of giving him any sort of power again.
I want to be very clear about this: This is not true. Audoptic failed for two reasons. One of them is that I personally was not able to hold the development team together over the years. I accept complete personal responsibility for this as a development lead. The main issue, however, is that our ideas were pretty immediately implemented by other sites. If you remember correctly, YouTube was launched in early 2005 and got popular pretty soon afterward; Audoptic had little chance of succeeding in the face of something like YouTube, and audio/video stuff + community was going to be our primary outlet (check the name: "AUDio" + "OPTICal").
We decided to make a very radical paradigm shift after we realized that we had little chance against the likes of YouTube, Deviantart, last.fm, etc., and it just didn't hold up. We didn't have the time to dedicate to it; people slowly dropped off the project.
Anyway, I just want to emphasize that this wasn't the fault of Shawn in the least. He tried really hard to keep Audoptic going and I'd been in contact with him until late last year. Please don't discuss these things that you have no understanding of, it makes the entire community look bad. Misplacing blame and spreading rumors is very unwelcome.
Thanks for your understanding,
Noel
Noel,
I wasn't placing any sort of blame on you, I knew you were also involved with the project. However, given the "losing" streak that Locke has with ideas/project involvement and how he angered the masses, it is only safe to say what I already mentioned in the initial posting. It doesn't give a community a bad name nor does it give it a morbid image. It shows there was an enormous speed bump in the history that broke up a once thriving community.