Nowadays most modules take around a month to process in the tracker, and since the tracker has been introduced the quality has gone right up hill. Betas are released at the choice of the project leader.

When the tracker has taken longer than normal it's down to a serious problem with the module, or the module is more compex than most (therefore it might have more issues to resolve) or there is an issue with the resources or availability of the team (remember nobody gets paid to do this).

Before we had the release tracker there were a lot of issues that had to be ironed out with many modules, and we had a heap of complaints. We then starting using the release tracker and quality went up but it took forever to get a release out. Lessons were learnt and it works really well now (Sebastian Leupold was at the helm of this). Over the last year we have managed to get modules out with acceptable quality without holding things up too much. I think the balance is about right. Right now for instance there are only TWO projects in the tracker.

In the case of the forums module, I don't think there has been a version submitted to the tracker for quite a while, that does not mean the project is dead though. There is also a beta site here:

http://www.dnnforums.com/

You can blame many things for the current progress of the forums module (personally I don't blame anybody, I'm very greatful for the forum teams hard work), but in this particualar case you certainly cannot blame the tracker or the release process.

I don't think anyone wants you to leave Matthias.  You do a great job and your efforts are appreciated. 

I think the biggest issue is that the current version is now 1 year old and none of the bugs in that release have been fixed publicly.  There is a new version in the pipeline with new features and bug fixes for the old version.  Waiting for a year for the new features is not the issue but rather waiting for a year and still not having any fix for the existing bugs.  Other projects typically fork the code to have a maintenance branch for a release and a new dev fork for the "new features" version.  Then the maintenance fixes are implemented quickly and updates released as the bugs are squashed.  It is better to have 10 maintenance releases to squash existing bugs then to wait a year for a version with everything in one.

My own case is one that illustrates the issue.  A year ago I tried to implement the "new" DNN core forums module onto a site that was coming online. The forum was broken, you tried to help me for a while to get it working but I eventually had to give up to wait for the next version which would implement the bug fix from Gemini. Here we are a year later and There is still not even a patch version released so I can get the forum running on my site.  I was forced to continue using yahoo forum for now (already established on the previous website) while waiting for the DNN forum to come out... still nothing a year later...

I hope you can understand people's frustration.  We do understand that this is being done by volunteers but there needs to be some prioritization to make the current code work rather than spend a year on new features which will have its own new bugs.

Keep up the good work and I hope to see the new forum module soon.

Matthias Schlomann wrote   I am very worry about some posts here.  The Froum project is not a commercial project !  It is a open source project and one with the complexed code.  Also it is a very little project team, that spends there free time to code, testing and support.  The only way to get anything faster will be if there are more contributers that valontary his knowledge and time to the project.  I can understand that some users are afraid about some bugs.  But the module will first release a new version if it is stable and not a version with more bugs!  You will get information on blog and in this forum if we have news about a new version.  At time I am thinking to leave this team, about I spend a lot time in unproductive discussions here. I try to help where I can, and spend time I have free for all your guys, but we are not magician.  I have understanding that you are frustating for waiting so long for any thing it didn't work for you. But there are a lot we have to do and this in a good quallity.

Looks like the release of the 4.5 Forums module is imminent. 

http://dnnforums.com/Resources/Forums/tabid/53/forumid/26/threadid/1625/scope/posts/language/en-US/Default.asp

I for one can't wait to thank the Forums team for the past year of hard work.  Lets cross our fingers.  Solving the notification bug alone will dramatically make this Forums module better for driving traffic to a website.