Read this when opening an issue

[michield]

First of all, welcome, and thank you for engaging with the phpList project. It's great to get more people involved in making phpList better.

phpList is Open Source and has been around for more than 20 years now. It is being maintained by a very small group of developers, who do this all in their spare time.

Open Source software has often erroneously been called "Free Software". This has caused a lot of confusion. Many people consider free to be "not costing anything". That is incorrect. Free software is about the Freedom to make changes to it. That may still cost money.

When you open an issue, the existing developers will try to engage. If the issue is a major blocker for most users, they will probably try to do something about it. However, that's up to them to decide. If they don't action your issue, it doesn't mean your issue isn't a valid one, it mainly means it's not a priority. Don't despair if you don't get a reply, but consider how important the issue is for you and act accordingly.

The developers have their own priorities, and it is quite possible that the issue is not that big a deal for them. So, if you want to ensure progress on an issue you raise, you have a few options:

• if you have the skills, work on it yourself and send a Pull Request. This is probably the most attractive option to engage with the project
• see if an existing developer is willing to work on the issue. This will incur a cost, based on an hourly rate, which will be different for each developer.
• find a developer who can sort it out for you and send a Pull Request to the project. If you want to find a good value developer, you can consider services like "upwork.com"
• hack away at your own copy of phpList and sort it out that way

The last option is both the power and curse of Open Source. You have the Freedom to make changes, and nobody will stop you. However, if you do that, you have to realise that it will become harder in the future to keep your version of the software secure, as it will be time consuming to try to update your version with the changes that the main project has made, which often includes security fixes.

When you send a Pull Request, there is unfortunately no guarantee that it will be accepted by the core team, as it may conflict with the direction the team wants to go, or there may be any other reason that your PR cannot be accepted. In general, we will try to include your PR whenever possible. Consider using constants to "feature flag" your changes.