chai-spies needs immediate attention or new management

[and...@shellscape.org]

Hey folks,

I know, I know - inflammatory subject to start with to say the least. I go by @shellscape on Github; I want to assure everyone reading that I have complete and full appreciation for the time and effort that people put into open source projects and what it takes to keep one going. If that's at all in question, please take a moment to browse the projects I'm an active contributor for. All that said, chai-spies is in a death spiral. I truly mean no offense to the two folks active on that project, and if you could see me face to face I have legitimate sad eyes saying this - it's one of the most poorly maintained and managed high profile project I've run across. I've no doubt that it's a time and attention issue more than anything. However, given its current state, chai-spies is a failing project.

An outline of the issues facing this project:

1. Extremely out of date
2. Very slow review process by the lone maintainer
3. Lone developer contributor
4. Contributions by the lone developer aren't properly vetted (radical changes with little/no community or peer feedback before merge)
5. chai-spies is the first plugin listed here. It's arguably the most high-profile plugin for that reason alone.

I offered to help out as a collaborator 20 days ago after the maintainer stated he'd welcome additional help. Maybe I'm too abrasive and turned the maintainer off to the idea - that's entirely possible. I mention this only because that's the pattern the project is presently in. The currently published version is already hopelessly out of date, their build tool is so old and broken that I was forced to link the module and repair it just to get a forked module version with an error-free client script published to NPM that we could use. The project has been blocking it's users on Chai@4.x since the release of 4.x while they wait for a change in their build env, rather than fixing it and releasing. It's honestly baffling.

I'm clearly passionate about seeing the chai-spies project be a success. I love the API patterns (that existed prior to recent unreviewed changes). To that end I'm begging, pleading for the folks running the greater chai organization to step in and help get this project back to a functional state. It desperately needs new ownership and direction. If [you] don't already think that I'm a crass punk or rude angry internet guy, I'd really honestly love to help out.

If everyone thinks I'm just bananas I can totally accept that. Should that be the case my next step would be to properly fork the project altogether and release as an individual module as an alternative.

I really do hope that this will spurn some sort of sustainable and continued action for chai-spies, however.

Cheers,

Andrew

[and...@shellscape.org]

So I'm not sure if changed by a rebuild, caching, or whatnot - but my point issue 5 seems moot now as chai-spies is no longer being displayed first in the plugins list.