[Freaksken]

So I wanted to say a few things after reading your replies in this thread. I had a think about how to word my thoughts for a while, so here goes.

I'm glad that you're finally communicating with people, because the absence of that leads to speculation, trolls and people just behaving shitty. What bothered me the most is that it feels like we can't have an intelligent discussion between people with different opinions, without suffering repercussions. Yes, there will always be trolls that just try to stir things up for the sake of it, but I'm not defending those. I'm defending the people that try to have a discussion because they want to help improve this mod. Yes, not all ideas are reasonable, but that's what discussion is for. And I get that you can't reply to everyone, but that's the reason why most organisations or projects have a hierarchical structure, so that the project leader doesn't have to deal with the huge amount of ideas and requests.

I get that you don't play the game anymore and that's fine. Over the years I've played less and less. However, my interest in the programming side has increased and increased. This has happened to a lot of people in this community and isn't necessarily a bad thing. For me it is one of the signs that people mature and that other things about this mod interests them. To give an example, I just have to look at myself. I got into this mod the way most people did. When I was young, I played the single player game and I wanted to see if there was any multiplayer functionality for it. And guess what, I came across this mod and started playing pretty much nothing but this game. After long playing sessions, I wanted to know how this 'server' thing worked and got into reading tutorials on how to create one. After a while, I got my first server up and running. This was not only my first introduction to server scripting, but my first introduction to programming, period. And look at me now, I'm a professional programmer. I owe this mod (AND YOU!) my career choices and oh boy am I grateful for that, because I probably would've never gotten into programming without it. I am very sure that lots of people in this community have a similar story. Yeah I'm just a nobody, on the other side of an internet connection and you don't owe me anything. But I'm a part of this community and have been for years and I am proud of that.

Yeah, the game is getting old and so are all of us and I get why there is less motivation to develop the mod. However, there are other people that are still very motivated to do so. Just looking at the amount of great GitHub repositories: the community compiler, YSF, streamer and FCNPC plugins, just to name a few. Or the 'unofficial official discord' has tons of posts in it every day. This shows that there are a lot of people still very motivated, not only from a programming point of view, but because many of us just love the memories and the game. Many projects are kept alive, because of the people that are still interested in it, after all those years. I love watching videos of old retro machines from the '80s and the people that restore them or even develop new games for it. That only happens because there are still people that are willing to keep that part of history alive. I don't see this mod or the people involved as anything different. Y_Less said it perfectly and I share his point of view. There are respected members of this forum that are capable to take over part of the job. I'm not talking about making it open source. But if we just could contact a selected few, that are appointed to fix bugs or handle feature requests, that would be great. There's a list of little things that are easy to fix, but way to much to let one person do this. I get it, but you don't have to take the huge task of managing a community on yourself. People want to help, so please let them.

You mentioned that the SA-MP forum is not the mod SA-MP, but just a part of it and I agree. However, I see the forums as some sort of archive that documents the progress of this wonderful mod through the years that it has existed. Sometimes I just come across older threads and I just smile at the how this mod and the people involved have changed. It's nice to look back at how it once was to see how much has changed and improved. The Screenshots & Videos forum was one of the subforums I visited regulary to see people's creative side and what they are able to create with the limitations this mod provides. I was frequently impressed at what people came up with and were able to show off. When you deleted this 'archive' and the memories that came with it, I felt (I can't find a better word for it) disgusted. Even though I don't agree with it, I understand your reasons for blocking certain sites and that's your choice so I'm not going to try to convince you otherwise. But deleting all these memories felt like removing that part of the history of this mod and all the memories that came with it. I don't want to boast about myself, but I invite you to watch the following video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zU3U1rLJsoQ) as an example. It shows my creative side and what I'm able to do with limited resources. There are lots of people like me in that subforum with amazing projects. Now we have no easy way of showing of those things. Yes I now it's on utube and that's not on purpose. I would've shown you the related thread instead, but I can't now, since it has been deleted.

It took me a while to write this and I know this post is a wall of text and will take some time to read. But please understand that this is not a critique to ridicule you in any way. I mean this to be part of an intelligent discussion. I just want the best for this mod, that's all.