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4 months ago
10
Hello everyone!
Thanks to everyone that chimed in on this issue until now. I am going to start by giving some background information on this project, which most people don't know. I started this project back in September 2015 (first commit: b06a0e2). That is almost 10 years ago. At the time, I was just 15 years old, which likely explain some of the (questionable) decisions I made at the time.
It all started as a plugin for Caddy web server, and then evolved into its own project. In 2018, I got more and more busy with university and work and did not have time to maintain the project, hence #532. In the last 7 years, the number of stars triplicated, which likely means that the number of users also increased greatly. I never expected this project to blow up the way it did, and I'm very glad there were maintainers along the years that, in one way or another, kept the project alive.
Looking at what has been said, it is clear to me that there aren't many technical people interested in maintaining the project. Therefore, this is what I suggest:
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Feature freeze: the project enters maintenance-mode only. New issues and PRs for feature requests are not accepted. This would be made clear in the README, and the issue and PR templates would be updated to reflect this information. Perhaps remove the feature request template completely. This would help reduce the burden from the maintainers, considering that there is no active work on this project. Add a note to the footer of FileBrowser to indicate this.
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Alternatives: provide users with a list of alternatives in the README to projects with active maintenance and accepting new features. This could be done by linking to https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#file-transfer---web-based-file-managers for example.
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Triage issues: go through the current issues and PRs and see what's an actual issue and what's not. Feature request PRs are closed, and issues too. Close this as not planned. Maybe closing isn't the best idea. Maybe tags are better for this. Open for opinions. Make the status of the project clear and do not give false hopes.
In a few months time, revisit this. If it turns out that there's someone interested in further maintaining the project, revisit this issue. If it still turns out that there's lack interest, work towards archiving the project. Yes, I know it's not what the most desirable solution, but it's still better than giving false hopes. I think it's very important to understand how this project has been born, and that maybe some of the decisions were not the best, and there are maybe better alternatives.
Open for ideas.
