In Memoriam: Developer Shed Forums
In late-2003, I was a high school junior loving every second of my AP Computer Science AB course. While researching something for homework one day, I found a neat little forum on the internet called Developer Shed where people helped each other to solve programming problems, talk about algorithms and problem-solving strategies, and generally just chew the proverbial fat in a mostly-friendly setting.
I was a fledgling hobbyist LAMP developer at the time — hey, it was a phase — and I enjoyed helping others through simple problems such as fixing logic issues, rudimentary database usage, and the like. In so doing, I found (as any novice programmer probably would) that by working through those problems, I was learning more about programming: both PHP and SQL specifically, but also generalities of debugging techniques, and how to think through problems more methodically. Yes, we had a lot of hands-on projects for the AP Comp Sci AB coursework; but this was yet another outlet for my code creativity. And more practice meant more programming perfection. I soon became an avid member there, averaging an hour or two and multiple posts daily for what would be the next several years.
The following April (2004), after a few months of posting, I was nominated into a moderator position for some of the forum sections that I actively visited — such as PHP Development and the Dev Shed Lounge (the off-topic forum). I eagerly accepted, of course. Being an active community moderator enabled me to directly act against many of the personae non gratae including trolls, spammers, and belligerent users; while also promoting the beneficial posts of more well-reputable users, and working with the rest of the moderation team to write needed FAQs and other such guidelines to keep the forums running smoothly.
In fact, it was this initial foray into community moderation that gave me the confidence I needed to properly fulfill my duties once I became a moderator of the Gentoo Linux forums the following December — a role I held for the nearly two years that I was an active Gentoo user.
My activity on the Dev Shed forums declined rapidly once the combination of full-time college, work, and extracurriculars started consuming most of my available time; but I still checked in on weekends and such for many years. Ownership of the forums changed hands a few times with no apparent significant impact; and my semi-regularity continued until about 5 years ago (?), when the original owner of Dev Shed sold it to Jim Boykin, CEO of Internet Marketing Ninjas.
With their new administrator team running the forums, many of the outstanding problems were resolved — such as creating more responsive templates — and we had very polite and quick feedback to ensure that the forums continued to run smoothly for a long while. They were incredibly supportive of our community, and especially of the moderator team whose efforts kept it running day-to-day. We even got a nice gift box from them that holiday season which included some t-shirts (two of which I still often wear to this day), a signed team photo, and an Amazon gift card. Cool!
Because of their responsiveness and general benevolence, I found myself on the forums a lot more over the past few years: not posting as frequently so much as just helping maintain everything: removing spam posts, banning troll users, etc. However, even this became an extremely-infrequent occurrence in recent months because my time would be so often better spent elsewhere: Dev Shed was pretty much the only decent programming-focused community back when I first signed up those many years ago; but that has long since been superseded by communities like first like OSnews and Slashdot, now Reddit and others.
And so, I found myself perusing Dev Shed maybe once or twice per month — a far cry from the near-daily I had formerly been. Because of my inactivity, I had been pondering retiring my moderator status for the past year or so; but something kept pulling me back. On one hand, it felt a bit unfair that I should stay a moderator for a community that I wasn’t as much directly a part of anymore; but on the other, I couldn’t just suddenly stop being such a significant part of this developer community that had itself been a significant part of my online life for over a decade.
So I persisted, and kept checking in very infrequently to keep up with site news, moderation queues, and some Lounge chat. But I never returned to posting much in any of the programming-specific forums. I just didn’t have the time or patience that I once had to write those would-be responses with the necessary due diligence.
Then, in late 2018, tragedy befell our once-thriving community. For whatever reason, the forums stopped being actively maintained: the administrators became far less responsive in fixing issues; many of our moderation team were online much less frequently, and people were generally not posting as much on the forums anymore. Rumor had it among some of the then-moderators that the administrative team was trying to rewrite a lot of the database and vBulletin backend stuff from scratch because the original owners had implemented a lot of fancy things as layers of kludges — a software house of cards, so to speak. But it seems that was never quite accomplished.
…Which brings us to the present. This past week, the entireties of SEOChat and Dev Shed forums were effectively scrapped after months of effort by Brett Tabke (from Webmaster World, also owned by Internet Marketing Ninjas) to try to modernize them; but unfortunately there were simply too many flaws in the old systems to reasonably fix. I do wish Tabke could have kept the old archive of posts if for no other reason than as historical reference; but I very much appreciate their months of effort to keep that archive, as futile as they seem to have been.
And so it is with a simple goodbye that I leave my Dev Shed past behind. That said, I cannot bid it adieu without mentioning several of the users there whom I befriended during my time as a moderator, and who helped make my stay in that community a pleasant one. I know that I am certainly forgetting many so I apologise that this list must necessarily be incomplete, but the handful that first spring to mind are:
- SimonGreenill
- ChiefWiggums1982
- Sepodati
- Scorpions4ever
- B-Con
- Nilpo
Perhaps our paths online will cross again; but until then, goodbye… Hmm, it seems odd that a short “goodbye” should suffice for something that was a part of my online life for such a long time (15+ years); but so be it.
So long, Dev Shed, and thanks for all the fish.
(Also, yes I will try to post more here; apologies for the long bout of inactivity.)
