As the community grows, we get an increasing number of inactive users.
As natural as that is for any social network, that also means we'll have an increasing number of outdated Forge components.
I believe that goes against the goals of helping the community with brand-new, cutting edge components.
Whenever I find a component that I'd like to use, but it's old and/or deprecated, I try to convince their authors to add me onto their team so I can update it. A recent example is the CodeMirror component, which stopped receiving updates since platform version 7.
However, that does not always work. If the author of a given component went inactive, his/her component lays there forever and nobody else can update/improve upon it.
An example is the TinyMCE component, for which I tried to contact its author asking him to accept me into his team so I can update it; since I didn't hear back from him, I had to upload a separate component named InputToTinyMCE, ultimately splitting the same plugin into two components and forcing the community user to decide which of the two should be used.
I have a couple of suggestions to overcome this situation which I expect to become more and more common in the future years.
- Disable components (so that a new one can be created with the same name) that do not have a version compatible with the latest 2 major platform versions (e.g. P9.1 and P10) -- after giving a prior notice to its author(s).
- Allow other users to join teams whose components haven't received new versions in a while (maybe taking into account a minimum required community rank or forge score for security reasons).
- If items 1 and 2 are not applicable: any other mechanism that allows new users to contribute to "dead" components that may clutter Forge in the long run.