Update README to state that this plugin will not be maintained

[michaelwayneharris87]

Work isn't being done on this plugin, and it's unclear whether work will ever resume. Judging from the issue queue (and from my own experience), this is confusing to a lot of folks.

Relatedly, the documentation has disappeared, even though the README still links to it. See #137 for more info.

Last month, I emailed Brickfield to ask @brickfield to ask what was going on. Here's the relevant part of his reply:

We were paid by a client to do work two years ago for it. As it had been aba by someone else. It did not cover ongoing maintenance upgrading it to 4.0 etc. We can see if that client wants to update for 4. But I doubt that Part of the challenge is half its features are external ATbar which is not maintained at all by its writers and at some points had lost lots of docs. We will see what we can do if client engages.

I don't blame @brickfield for the above — this is client work that was open sourced, and the client isn't engaging further. Fair enough, not saying they should continue to work on this for free. But, it would be nice to be up front about those facts, so users could have made a more informed decision about whether to use this plugin.

[learningtechnologyservices]

Hi Michael,

Fair point,. We are currently awaiting a "go or no-go" on covering off cost from a client on outstanding issues, or at least the ones they are interested in.

Will look at updating the readme and plugin database entry accordingly.

If of course your organisation want to help fund it, let us know.

Regards

Gavin

[normorea]

Could you guys update your SSL certificate? :)

Maybe we should look at self hosting the plugins and prepare this plugin to go into maintenance mode? It is fairly mature, has worked on every Moodle site I've worked on.

[learningtechnologyservices]

HI normorea,

Do you mean the atbar site https://www.atbar.org/ ? and https://core.atbar.org/atbar/en/latest/atbar.min.js which has its SSL cert out of date.

This is nothing to do with our company, and is a 3rd party system which was included in this plugin years ago. That site is managed by the ECS, Faculty of Physical Sciences and Engineering, University of Southampton.

We have reported it to them, however its out of our control.

We have offered before to host the files there ourselves in the plugin and will discuss internally to remove the external dependency.

Thank you for the heads up.

[taymossimc]

Gavin, just wondering if there has been any further movement in this project? And how much resourcing would be required to update to 4.x and fix outstanding issues, etc?