Status of this project

[Splines]

Hey there 🙌,

thanks for this awesome open-source project. We're using it at the university of Heidelberg at MaMpf, our mathematical media platform, and it's working like a charm so farm. It was especially useful during the pandemic when courses took place online. We're using thredded in combination with commontator to achieve a full-scale comment system.

Given that the last release of thredded dates back over a year ago, that thredded.org is down and that #979 is an issue when upgrading from Rails 7.0 to 7.1, I just wanted to check if this project is still maintained and what the current status is. This is essential for us to be able to continue using it, especially since we're dealing with sensitive student data and need safety in our systems.

All the best,
Dominic

Edit: And please note my post should not come across as demanding. I know how hard it can be to maintain an open-source project and I'm not entitled to have any demands here whatsoever. Just wanted to check the status and maybe consider alternative solutions for our software in the case thredded is not maintained anymore.

[timdiggins]

Hi @Splines - it's a hard question to answer exactly. It's fair to say the project activity has slowed down significantly from when the original README was written. But I wouldn't say this project is totally abandoned - it's just very slow and people are contributing what makes sense to them. (and to be fair there's a bunch of issue cruft that we need to address). I tend to do work on thredded when I need something doing for myself and @glebm also does some heroic fixes despite (I believe) not using it at all any more. (I think I'm the only project member who still uses Thredded in some site or other). So it's unlikely that issues with feature requests or even bug reports are going to get addressed in a timeframe that would be effective for a critical software project ... but:

If you're interested / able to help out on the project (to fix things you need fixing), I'd welcome it. It's a complex project to work on, but I (and @glebm too I would think) are willing to review PRs and merge them if they have tests and make sense. Also willing to give help if needed (though I'm a bit drowned in notifications these days and open source isn't at the top of my to-do pile).