Is that we allow certain people (ahem) to dominate these forums with their idiocy. I'm deleting my link to the forums from my speed dial again. Good luck with all your bugs.

http://xkcd.com/1357/

I should print this out and hang it on the wall in my office

What is that ? Trent ? Care to elaborate a little for the uninitiated ?

I'm in the same boat as Gull.

Don't you think you're over-reacting a little Trent?

I think it would be kind of sad to abandon the Allegro library due to conflicts with members on the forums. We've all known for a long time that certain people here are rather opinionated and overly zealous for their causes but is that worth leaving over?

And besides, who am I going to get to apply my patches? Nobody has even replied to my thread - https://www.allegro.cc/forums/thread/614953. Or should I just take my concerns to the mailing list? Somebody introduced a conflicting dllmain declaration in A4.4.x and I don't know which one is right. I'm assuming the one in the windows header is right but then what was the other one for? Do they vary over Windows versions? And that bug means that A4.4 in git doesn't compile for mingw or likely msvc anymore. Who applies patches to A4.4? I know it's not actively maintained, but somebody has to have access. It's all in the same repo right, so all that's needed is to checkout a different branch?

Anyway, I think you should stick around.

The only thing I can think of that Trent got worked up over is the huge reaction (and in my opinion over-reaction) to my comments about fat people and disability. But that was week(s) ago...

But if all it would take is a sincere apology, then you can certainly have it from me. As much as I'll argue my point, I'm not actually in it to offend, oppress, or hurt anyone.

It could be some religion ranting that bothered Trent. I'm not religions and it bothered me.

At some point you have to consider if its worth it to keep toxic people around, even if they are sometimes helpful. Often their toxicity is far more unhelpful in the greater scheme of things.

Baby come back
You can blame it all on me

The off topic forum does have some theads that can be offensive, yes. Allegro attacts some opinionatd people and that may be problematic in some cases. The on-topic forums are useful ways of comunication though. I personaly feel a forum is more easy to use and more accessible than a mailing list.

All in al I see no reason to run away from the forums. I just try to avoid the off-topic forum, mostly, with the exception of Allegro-related topics. That might be the best approach for anyone who is here for Allegro itself, and not just to hang around and chew the fat.

FTFY

I remember the Off Topics being so much worse in the past.

I recall ML locking several threads due to the extreme level of shenanigans. I remember pages and pages of dick fights over petty crap. I also remember when every thread got derailed.

Definitely not a n00b-friendly community facade, but we also used to have a lot of people in and out of here.

Every thread is still derailed ^^

I miss the "Let's make a game" topics...

I'll make one in 2015. I promise!

The "Let's make a GUI API better than QT" threads are always nice too

Eh, the off topic forum is the most frequented, but it is rarely even about allegro anyway (although lately it's been full of rumors of it's demise, which I believe to be greatly exaggerated).

Back then I use to be on here flaming about religion constantly. My core values, in terms of religion, haven't changed much since then, but the Internet has evolved so much in the last ~8 years that it seems silly to argue about that anymore. There are more appropriate places, such as Reddit, where you can get better feedback (positive or negative) for your opinions anyway.

I remember 200 pagers between 23yrold3yrold and X-G on religion!

I remember one thread when I was young where me and someone else literally said "No" and "Yes" back and forth for three pages. Not even arguing, just spamming, in retrospect.

I use to love those "Is it monday already?!" threads.

<quote>I remember pages and pages of dick fights over petty crap.<quote>
Inspiration for a doodle thread?

I remember arguing with both of them about it. Stupid agnosticism..

I think I remember that too.

I believe I did the same thing alas I didn't know back then that you can't win the Internet

I used to just get too worked up over dumb shit. Still do, but not to the same degree.

I certainly am very careful when entering the minefield that is the off topic forums. The result has been that I have barely been on these forums. And it's too bad as I love this library. I just got done compiling a new version of my game in fact which uses Allegro 5 and am trying to rekindle my interest in programming. I would certainly be very saddened to see Trent leave as I have a great deal of respect for him for many reasons.

Edit: just browsed the forums and seen some posts that really disturbed me as well. I may have to look into something else for future projects. I doubt it's the same thing, but some things are allowed to go too far on here I think.

Ya, not like most of us can actually do anything about it. Other than ignore (or berate) the ass-hats.

Kinda wish the forum had a "downvote to hide" button, that after X downvotes a post is replaced with a "post has been hidden, click to show" message, and users with too many hidden posts get a temp ban from OT.

append: I don't really put up with much bullshit on #allegro anymore, you're always welcome there I'm not afraid of mystical "free speech", if someone is being intolerant, I will take care of it.

append2: I really do think its time we clamped down on incredibly intolerant behaviour.

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I guess I don't see where the problem is. The one thing I was annoyed by was Bambam's walls of text full of rather questionable misogyny. But did anyone take that seriously?
Well, I hoped his girlfriend would have cured the ... ahem ... hormonal imbalances, but the ardent manner which he now shows in indulging in atheist posts unfortunately seems to indicate that my hope was in vain.

I agree that there's some people here with very questionable and out of line views - but I think it's very wrong trying to exclude them just because of that. It's an offtopic forum after all and not some place where it matters. In fact I wouldn't want to be in a forum where only the politically correct things can be said and everyone else is banned.

There is probably something wrong with me but, in the 5 years that I have been here, nothing I have ever read has ever offended me in the slightest. When someone is objectively wrong about something programming related and defends it to the death that's a little annoying, but that happens everywhere.

If someone is spamming their religion, beliefs etc, I don't mind that at all. I bought a mouse WITH a scrollwheel .

One of my favorite parts of a.cc is the sarcastic use of this

Newcomers might not get that and think everyone here is angry and prissy, but that's part of the fun.

Life is easier if you just let everyone express themselves and if you do not allow yourself to be offended. Remember that you consciously choose to be offended by data. There is no objective way to be offended.

When I first joined (12 years ago!), things on A.CC, and honestly the whole world, were much more in-your-face and offensive. We had huge religious debates on A.CC and Matt would have to lock them down on a weekly basis.

It honestly feels like after two useless wars, the majority of people in the USA (ignore the rise of Fox News scream matches, as their outliers) have really given up on the idea that we can police the world, and even other people. As the economy got much worse everyone stopped focusing on getting in people's faces and got back to focusing on how hard it is to pay the bills as costs of living skyrocket and pay stays the same.

So as such, people here have really calmed down. My parents, orthodox Republicans, eventually stopped listening when they realized they were just being told to be angry at a new thing every day without ever actually resolving any of the previous issues. I gave up on both parties, and now call myself a "extreme moderate." ("Anyone with an opinion is probably wrong.")

I think, but I can only gauge remotely (through the internet), that the rest of the free world also has a calmer, more sober, outlook into the world. Everyone's too tired to care about things that aren't pragmatic. When I grew up, in-your-face rappers like DMX were popular. Now, less-angry, introspective ones like Kanye, Kid Cudi, and more are really taking over.

I've bought one with continuous scrolling after my drawer of old mice was finally used up and two cheap mice just endured about 3-5 months. I love it.

@Katko: Your diagnosis of the Western world could have some truth to it, but maybe it's more about the involved individuals (more or less) growing up?

Most of us are guilty of being annoying. There are a few exceptions though.

When I finally release my program called Rabbitt's (name Pete Hull game me) Image Program, everyone'll be so happy allegro will lift off and there'll be a rennaisance.

Hold on to your hats.

Atheism is just as much a religion as any other, with its own fair share of zealots and nutjobs, as evidenced here lately.

Religious debate is fine, but again, nobody should be made to feel uncomfortable in having their own beliefs, and I feel that takes place here too often.

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How many times does this comic have to be posted anyway?

There must be something wrong also with me then.

Or I might have been in other forums/communities were there were MUCH more toxic people around, dunno.

In a world where everyone and their mom is yelling at each other to use Unity because it's "so easy" to make a 2D game with it (especially since the inclusion of 2D mode), I'm still very glad to use Allegro as an easy way to actually teach people how to program and how games actually work. Some simplicity is always appreciated Trent.

Then again it doesn't seem that's what the actual topic of the thread is, but I'm sure it could be solved in a less harsh way by talking to whoever you've had a problem with.

It depends. If you want to nurture an inclusive community, you have to take care. People will leave or avoid us entirely because of ass-hats. Question is if we want super abrasive, intolerant people even if they are occasionally helpful, over more quality users and community members that don't spout hate.

And then there are other reasons nobody comes here, like the ass-hats spreading rumors about allegro 5 outside of the forums like this one :

I was googling for 'ogre3d compatiblity with allegro 5' and this is the second search result that came up -

Noob can't figure out why his programs suck so he blames the libraries he uses.

Guys! Did I Miss Anything?

Yes. Did you ever get OGRE and Allegro 5 to work together?

Edit
See allegro/examples/ex_ogre3d.cpp in the allegro source distribution.

Uh? I was talking about Trent... But yes, I was able to use Ogre with Allegro 5, Elias uploaded the example or something like that. There was a little problem with the shadows of the meshes but I don't remember if I solved that problem.

You caught me. I'm actually a supremacist. I think NASCAR is the superior race!

That reminds me of the Raspberry PI and Arduino forums. You'll never find a more wretched hive of scum and stupidity. They're "just smart enough to be dangerous." I found a thread that literally came to the group conclusion that Raspberry Pi CPU's are "meant to be hot" and "because resistance" heatsinks don't allow for more overclocking or stability, because the "mean-time-before-failure" it just means it'll last longer. 1,000 years instead of 100 years. And both are too long to care about, therefor heatsinks on a Raspberry PI are useless.

My heart died a little inside that day.

Meanwhile, on the Arduino forums, they said the Arduino has a linear regulator, which wastes power (true to an extent) so they were going to replace it with a switching regulator because switching are less noisy (absolutely insanely false).

I simply refuse to remotely believe what caused this. Please tell me it's a joke, a bad joke.

OMG, I almost regret having left engineering to pursue a career of sales.

Those are both true. The worst part about getting an engineering degree is when you realize how little engineering anyone does.

It's like feeling like an alien on your own planet, where everyone is calling you weird for using things like math and prototype tests.

People were designing a water nozzle system entirely on "good enough." I kept telling them we need equations, we need prototypes, we need data points. I said we have no idea whether we're going to have too little pressure, or blow holes through the parts. They thought I was insane for "wasting time and money." They said there was no way a prototype would resemble a real world application.

Jumping in on this derail:

I was nearly fired for planning entity relationships on a huge billing/invoicing system. I know that feel bro.

No the real reason why no one uses it is because cmake gets confused too easily and is just a hassle so 4.2 with its makefiles is the easiest version to use and the newer ones are just too hard to get set up.

It doesn't get much easier than this :

cd allegro
mkdir build
cd build
cmake -G "Your Generator Here" -DSHARED=[On|Off] -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=[Debug|Release|RelWithDebInfo|Profiling] -DWANT_MONOLITH=[On|Off]
mingw32-make install -j 2

The WANT_MONOLITH option was established in 5.X.

4.4.1 isn't that hard to build from source, even I was able to do it.

Ouch. I was fired for commenting code once. They "thought you were a hacker and don't need to waste time commenting the code". Well, see who is laughing now when they need to maintain it, maybe I didn't write the comments for my sake, moahahahahaa, dumbasses. [Edit:] To be fair they also thought the comments took up precious space on the PLC

Why did Trent leave, specifically? He hasn't responded to my PM.

Allegro is not the Linux kernel, with contributors knocking on the front door 24/7. We can't afford to be jerks. I agree there is a problem, but without Trent chiming in, I cannot say what that problem is.

All these comments about being fired for doing sane practices is scaring me

The guy above me only knows (some) Visual Basic.

Seriously. A week ago I actually had an opposite sort of experience. I thought I was supposed to be developing a rapid prototype of a new game idea, so I was ready to claim a handful of servers for the project and jump right in with code that I designed as I wrote it.

After requesting a development environment, my boss said to instead sit down and spend a few weeks working on designing the architecture. Turns out they already had interns develop the prototype, I'm making the real thing. And oh man, you should see the code the interns wrote. I was hoping that there would be something reusable in there...

At college I handed in an Excel project that I'd completely pimped using the VB back end; the tutor was forced to give me a distinction as she couldn't understand it, it was too advanced. Mind you they weren't paying me.

I never got any awards or anything. But I was offered to start a Ph.D. solely on my extra-curricular ability in EE/ECE/CS, as my degree is in Mechanical Engineering. My GPA was only 3.00.

My GPA would have been better, and I'd probably have at least a masters already if my health didn't bomb out in college.