The FIRST Alliance - A whole new way to play

[mobilegamer999]

Wow, this thread exploded a bit overnight. I'm going to lay out certain responses as I see them from my point of view.

Why did we make our own site?
There were quite a few reasons why we chose to make our own website. One reason was for the enjoyment/practice it takes to plan, design, create, debug, launch a website. It was something I had never done before and I felt like it would be a good project, and post-launch, if it got a good rep and people were using it, I would have no issue continuing to pay for the hosting. The second reason is that we wanted a site where anybody and everybody in the FIRST community could submit an idea and have it seriously considered as a new feature to the website, because, in my personal opinion, TBA is a website that is there and does not change unless the developers want to add/remove something, regardless of if that is their model or not, that is the feeling that TBA gave me personally.

Why not just build upon TBA's codebase?
The main reason is that its not THAT simple, TBA would not let some random outsider start modifying their code and pushing it live to the website. Even if they let us help them with their code, every time more people are added to a project, the slower changes become and the less often changes can be made.

Open Source?
I can almost guarantee that we will not open-source the website. Our biggest reason for this is that we made the API public and extremely easy to get started with so that there was no need to open-source the website. While we wont be open-sourcing the website, we WILL be providing very simple/easy to read code example for how to do just about every feature on the website in many common languages (C#, Java, Ruby, PHP, etc.)

How do we know the site is going to stay up?
I am going to say that as long as people are still visiting/using the site, I will continue to keep it up. You do not need to trust me on that, but that is what I'm sticking to.

How do we know that the API is going to stay compatible?
This is a very simple one. All versions of the API will be kept and stay accessible. The second version of the API will be requested at api/api.v2.json.php and so on and so forth. This is the easiest/cleanest way to implement a multi-version API.

Why use TFA over TBA?
There is no reason that you have to, its simply a matter of preference.