Description
Hey there my dear WLED community,
lately I must admit that I became a bit overwhelmed with the project.
That is not because I wouldn't like coding it any more, that is as awesome as always, but as you probably know, the userbase of WLED has grown about 5 times since a year ago, which I am truly happy about.
Naturally, more users means more people who are looking for help and submitting issues, posts and e-mails.
I don't like writing this, but I feel like I have to in order to be fair to you.
In the last few months, the quality of support I was able to offer each individual has declined dramatically and I reached the point where I feel bad for many, because I wasn't able to reply for days, weeks, or even months.
The Github issue section is always at 250, even though there is an admittingly annoying bot that closes older issues automatically.
I always have 150 e-mails in my inbox, be it direct, a Github notification, or Discord messages. As I reply to one, another one comes in.
I would have wished to stay away from this point, always wanted to be the dev that responds to every single question their community might have, but I need to say that I possibly can't help you anymore.
The level of support from me you are used to is easily possible when your project has 100 users, but it becomes humanly impossible once your community grows to 4.000.
When you write a message, please do not take it personal if you don't get a response, if yours was the only message, I'd spend two hours just to help you.
I promise to still read everything, so your valuable feedback is not going to waste.
The time I can spend on WLED is very limited in my opinion. I still am a full time college student with other responsibilities.
The progress I was able to make in WLED and in parts of my personal life were far below what I would have hoped for the past few months, which I mostly attribute to spending more time interacting with all of you than actually coding.
Often I spend late nights getting the message backlog down a little, just to be too sleep deprived to do anything the next day.
As much at it hurts to potentially let some of you down, I need to change that.
Don't get me wrong, I am eternally grateful for your bug reports, feature requests and of course code contributions,
especially so to the members of my community who tirelessly offer their own time helping others!
It's just that my day only has 24 hours, like yours.
I NEED to spend my limited time bringing WLED further and making it better, which everyone will benefit from.
Chances are there's an update just around the corner that will alleviate the issue you are having as well.
Please let me get to it.
Thank you so much for reading and for your understanding!
Christian