i am resurrecting this thread to complain about a thing i am enduring right now
i pay for a fairly beefy server ~in the cloud~ that i use to host some software i need, some personal projects, and some game servers/other things for friends as a kindness. i just like doing it, it's nice to have a whole bunch of digital horses that are on demand to throw at a problem. i generally find it rewarding.
some friends of mine recently started a forum-based RPG with this tool, lorekeeper, that is one of the worst things i've ever interacted with. i'm in deep on being its admin at this point, but if you could imagine a laravel/php app built by 16 year olds with a fairly deep amount of complexity, this is it. config randomly scattered between environment vars and php config files. randomly laid out nested menus for managing the software that puts the upload for the css override under "image management," for example. every css class is highly specific so as to make styling it a nightmare, with liberal use of !important. tons of bugs. so many bugs. terrible documentation. no unit tests. it is an unholy nightmare.
the most demeaning thing, however, is how i get support. i am going to come here and say that i am a fairly experienced Technology Man with some knowledge of how to do a code or two and i've been at this for easily 25 years, 15ish years professionally so far, so i kinda know the lay of the land. i have to be nice to these kids, because they're kids, but also tech support. i say stuff like "the configuration values seem to be caching in a weird way and i can't flush the cache" and they say "yeah, configuration is very susceptible to caching" or i will say something like "this configuration value is not being read" and they will say "well are you committing it to git?" initially i solved all my problems by just reading the code, but as you can imagine, it is a nightmare and i will not be doing that.
i genuinely want to scream it is the most frustrating experience ever but i love my friends and will persevere.