The SimpleMachines Forum (SMF) project is a project team under the umbrella of the Simple Machines NPO.

The SMF team

The SMF project has a project manager and several sub-teams. The heads of these teams, along with the project manager, constitute the projects's steering committee, which is responsible for developing plans for the project and leading the project toward achieving its goals.

Moderation Duties

The purpose of board and post moderation is to maintain a friendly environment where community members can get the help and support they need.

It is the duty of every SimpleMachines team member to patrol every publicly-viewable boards, review every post for inappropriate content, and move, remove, split, merge or lock topics as required to maintain civility and good order. Language Moderators (not members of the SMF team) are responsible for patrolling non-English language boards.

When deciding what to do with a slightly-misplaced post, please be careful and extra-friendly. New users are often confused and frustrated when they make their first post. A simple message like "I hope you won't mind that I've moved your post to the XXX board, where I hope you'll get the help you need", goes a long way. Similarly, when users have double-posted in different boards (often because they were unsure where to post), a friendly post explaining the move, merge, or deletion will go a long way toward helping the new user feel welcomed.

Project Manager

One Censored Name
We have one forum user whose name was censored from the site. The reason for his ban and subsequent censoring was that he aggressively broke the site rules and abused team members verbally and in writing.

• Arbiters and negotiators for community/user issues
• High-level representation
• Reviewing license issues
• Maintaining the vision & spirit
  • set goals and direction for the future
  • Provide leadership to the team
  • encourage and support Team Members
• Running meetings

Team Leads

• Keeping their team motivated & on task
• Helping team members stay involved
• Watching for new team members and recruiting them
• Mentoring new team members
• Reporting progress during team meetings
• Participating in Steering Committee discussions
• Keep the other teams informed of important changes or events

Developers

Did you know?
The “SE” is YaBB SE stood for “Splinter Edition” after Splinter from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Ninjas are cool, and we wanted YaBB SE to be so as well. Additionally, it was a developed by a small splinter group from the original YaBB Team.

• Maintaining the development roadmap and plan
• Develop SMF applications
• Maintaining the changelog
• Monitoring the bug trackers
• Fixing bugs
• Assisting with support in special circumstances
• Reviewing & selecting features for inclusion
• Liaising with the beta testers
• Address all security reports and CC [email protected]
• Ensure other teams have sufficient information to perform their duties (ie: Doc Team should know about new features so they can be documented)
• Manage CVS (including user accounts)
• Review current and coming technology and make sure SMF stays current
• Provide leadership to the team and to the community as a whole

Support Specialists

• Helping our users have an exceptional SMF experience
• Providing special attention to the Charter Members
• Monitoring the help desk & getting tickets to a “closed” state
  • Check HD first
  • Check CM boards
  • Check Support boards
• Revisit your old posts and mark as solved when they are.
• Perform upgrades and installs for CM’s
• Support the core software by answering questions, suggesting fixes, etc
• Act as a filter for bug reports, reporting legitimate ones to the bug tracker
• Look for common problems/errors and suggest documentation or code changes to reduce them

Customizers

• Watching for feature ideas that should be put into mods
• Updating SMF's official mods as necessary to maintain compatibility
• Designing new themes
• Updating SMF's official themes as necessary to maintain compatibility
• Theme Site maintenance
  • Approving community-created themes
• Mod Site maintenance
  • Approving community-created mods
• Graphics images (i.e. Buttons & smileys)
• Other graphics as requested/required
• Give support to people trying to create themes and modifications
• Suggest changes to make theme and modification create easier and more powerful
• Write mods that follow the coding guidelines and as though they were writing a default SMF feature.
• Provide support in the Coding Discussion and Graphics boards

Doc Writers

• Maintaining the Online Manual
  • Write clear, accurate, and easy to understand documentation
  • Review and update update text as needed
• Work with localizers, site, and dev teams to enable document translations
• Review/proof other SMF team publications
• Spelling/Grammar checks on the site and in our public postings
• Maintain Team Manual

Localizers

• Coordinate the activity of Translators and Language Moderators.
• Validate new translation team applications.
• Manage the [email protected] correspondence.
• Add /remove new translators.
• Enhance accessibility to translate the wiki docs.
• Informing community regarding language related topics of interest.

Others who contribute to the SMF project

These individuals also volunteer their time on behalf of the project, but are not members of the team.

NPO teams

The SMF project depends on the Simple Machines NPO for Marketing, and to maintain its site and its servers. These teams are not part of the SMF project. The site team is responsible for upgrading SimpleMachines.org and re-installing necessary modifications. The server team is responsible for specifying, configuring, and maintaining all of the NPO's servers, and have all the account access required to get these tasks done.

Forum Administrators

Forum administrators take care of routine tasks like banning and deleting accounts, as well as less-common tasks like creating membergroups and adjusting membergroup permissions. These tasks are generally handled by site and server team members, by the SMF project manager, and by other SMF team members.

Friends

Former members of the SMF team, some of whom are still members of the NPO, often share their experience with the team. Some Friends may re-join the team when they again have time to commit to the SMF project.

Community Helpers

Many members of the community contribute in one way or another without holding any title at all. Others may join, or be invited to join, community support groups. These include

• Language Moderators -- moderate and provide support on non-English language boards
• Beta Testers
• Documentation Helpers
• Support Helpers
• Translators -- with their work SMF is available for many languages.