Collective history of ADCPortal

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Toast

Collective history of ADCPortal

Post by Toast » 03 Sep 2010, 11:02

Toasts Part

Back in 2006 I (Toast) wanted to make a new project that revolved around ADC and all its various aspects, I didn't have a clue of how much info was available or where to get started but luckily Crise the author of ApexDC++ did since he had been working on a CMS for the AirDC++ site with phpBB2 and was now ready to move on to phpBB3.
Crise (from system manual) wrote:The original system was created on 2006 (manual was written on 16th of June) and was named XionCMS after the site which it was made for (Xion++, later AirDC++). It's basic functionality was pretty much the same and was later later patched with more features and fixes, most of which were somewhat Xion specific.
So in the winter of 2007 we decided to launch and get the site running our first news ever was the release of ADC 1.0 at the time i didnt know it would be included in the ADC Project as i just wanted to supply information about ADC in general. ADCPortal didn't hit its stride until DSHub started to do interesting things that was worth writing about. As the site grew the quality of the articles grew my first really good article was about how old software effect our nets i called the articles "ADCPortals Article Series"

Complete listing of such articles
it was about this time that ADCPortal was included into the ADC Project at the spring of 2009 and after that we become a full fledged development community with most of the new developers joining in and showing us their projects and hopes for ADC Development

Pietrys Part

I (Pietry) first heard about ADC from Johan who was at that time really enthusiastic about it ( not like now !). So, as a fan of DC, I tried to figure out what was going on with it. My first idea about ADC came when I accidentally bumped into some ADC*.cpp files in the DC++ source code. I tried asking around what ADC is, and all I could find out is that ADC is some failed tryout, or something that became obsolete, or some useless feature in DC++ that nobody knows and it's dusted around.
After some time, some people were mad on the DCDEV because they only had hublist.org as a default hublist and didn't want to integrate their ideas into the client. They were saying that DC++ is narrow minded client and so forth. There was even a plan to embrace me and some other potential devs into creating a new client.

I wanted to check out on my own this problem, so I tried to visit the dcdev public hub and find out more. This was my first encounter with ADC, since the public was running ADCH++ at that time.

After first contact, I tried figuring what was ADC all about. This was around 2006, and the current ADC version was 0.10.
I started working at a project ( DSHub ancestor ), in C++, which was able at that time to send SUP and some more commands , perhaps the user list. However, the project was not intriguing, it had a lot of problems, so I abandoned it in some early stage.
In 2007, however, I planned on learning Java. At the moment, ADC was attractive enough to invest the time in researching something for it. This is how DSHub was born. So I started working properly on the project, with help from the people in DCDEV ( mostly Pretorian, thanks for the time ). After some time I was invited to join the DCDEV.

After having some preliminary hubsoft, I tried making a website and forum for the project. On this forum I met Toast, who seem interested in my project. During the summer and in the autumn of the same year, the project evolved, and it became better and better. Toast started helping around with betatesting and offering support, hosting and more. At that time we decided to open up a development hub for the project, in which came the idea to open up an op hub for ADC spreading and ops training about it. However, the idea later transformed into a website & forum, which is the current ADCPortal. At first we only had a few users (3-4) and nobody to read our posts. We tried making the best we could, bringing in information about the projects we were involved ( mine were DSHub, DC++ and ADCH++ ), Toast and Crise were about ApexDC++ and AML, later on other devs joined in like BigMuscle , adrian , Jan Vidar Krey and more.
The rest of the history you should already know.

This is my pov for the story :P

Crises Part

Originally for me ADC was little more than unused piece of DC++ sources... then eventually when I came across more information about that thing I started to see its benefits.

That was around the time that I came to realise that the thing known as ADC was not even mentioned anywhere on DC++ website thus the most likely way to get your hands on info about the plans for future of DC was to enter the public development hub or read the text files inside DC++ source code distribution (only later I came to know why, the strong idea that DC++ is not the same as ADC).

Then some time after that, I had a discussion with Toast who wanted to make a new project related to ADC. Unfortunately I don't remember the specifics of this discussion very well, perhaps Toast already had an idea about a website since I seem to remember him asking me if I was interested in such a thing and whether or not it was worth it.

That discussion made me remember how difficult it was to come across information on that thing (ADC). So I looked at the "website" of ADC with the protocol documentation and a shallow wiki on the subject, not to mention probably the most appealing front page ever made. So we set on a portal like website for documentation and discussion about ADC (and I took it as a personal opportunity to finish and polish the unfinished php project that had started to collect dust).

Things worked out pretty well, since if I ever have had a problem with making websites that is the inability to produce the actual content on a site (even now I am writing this after countless reminders from Toast). This explains why I quickly took a background role in making the site, transparently working on it, while Toast did most of the content.

At this point I have to say that while the changes that my work has brought about here are not the most noticeable from regular visitors perspective, aside from the header overhaul and the forums eventually sharing the sites overall design perhaps. It has been an interesting journey, much thanks to various limitations imposed by the fact that we are situated on SourceForge servers. I also take great pride in the (useless) achievement that the ADCPortal design should work all the way down to IE 5.5.

ADCPortals future
As for the future or ADCPortal well we come along way with settings standards and documenting ADC and we hope that users gets more involved in promoting and distributing software and pay attention to the problems regarding development, we hope to offer more services in the future moving to faster servers etc. but when that happens who knows atm we are kinda content on SF.

Isnt this just a friday article :P add a comment tell us how you came about finding the site if you want to :)

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