I quit my job as moderator of the Prestashop forum

It's been a year since I took over the moderation of the French part of the official PrestaShop forum.

I had resisted for more than 10 years before accepting, because, being a professional working with the PrestaShop solution, one could very quickly find a big conflict of interest in my position. I will break the suspense very quickly, I reassure you, it did not take long before I was accused of taking advantage of my situation to silence the competition.

But, as the initial mission of cleaning up the forum by calming the discussions and bringing people back on it was important to me since I had enjoyed a quality forum in my early days, fully justified my taking the risk of conflict of interest.

I believe that I have reached my goal and that the forum, if it is not at the same level as 10 years ago, has been able to find a calm discourse and many new actors come to answer the questions of new users of the solution.

The task was difficult, I had to make very unpleasant arbitrations to achieve this result and especially I had to take a lot of time to achieve it, often more than four hours a day of presence to control this forum.

This time came to replace my professional activity and therefore, in the long run, risked to put me in difficulty. This was the first reason of my choice to give up this position of moderator of the PrestaShop forum.

But there are also other personal reflections, such as the fact that I do not have a flexible enough character to support humanity as a whole. You may not realize it, because you quickly browse this official forum to find an answer to your question, but if, like me, you had read during a whole year all the posts of the forum, you would have discovered a less idyllic landscape of the world of French-speaking open-source ecommerce.

What is the most difficult to bear when you moderate a forum on an open-source project is that users don't know that you are a volunteer and therefore call you as if you were representing the PrestaShop company, which is not the case and when I had the audacity to point this out, I received in return a volley of aggressiveness against me quite unpleasant.

So, between the time wasted trying to help against their will users willing to become rich without effort and the Prestashop company that didn't seem to be aware of the effort made by its community on this forum, there was no reason to continue to suffer just to satisfy my values of mutual help and transmission.

The final blow came last Friday in the form of an email from the PrestaShop company's legal department asking me to stop using the PretaShop trademark on my prestatoolbox.com site because I don't have the authorization. Not that I think I should be treated differently from other members of the community in terms of copyright law, but a minimum of respect with a contact other than through an injunction from the legal department could have allowed me not to slam the door of the PrestaShop forum and leave the French forum without a moderator.

Conclusion

I would say that this year has been a personal frustration regarding the management of its community by the Prestashop company which prefers to court paying partners than to involve an active and happy community. I hope I'm wrong and that this analysis is just my recent frustration, but know that I'm not giving up on PrestaShop users.