Home » RBC Forums » General Discussion » Forum/Wiki Feedback - 6 months in (Let's discuss how things have gone for the last 6 months, and where we are going.)
 Forum/Wiki Feedback - 6 months in [message #512] |
Sat, 16 April 2016 12:18  |
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Andrew B
Messages: 467
Registered: October 2015
Location: Near Redmond, WA
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Senior Member
Administrator |
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All,
It's been about 6 months since we transitioned over to the new domain/forum.
I'd like to have an open discussion on how things are going, comments/thoughts/requests people might have, and things we might do in the future.
Any comments at all are welcome, I myself am wondering about the following things:
- Splitting the forum into multiple sub-forums - does this make sense and what sections would we have? We are just passing 1 page of topics, so now is the time if we want to do this. Maybe 'new board development' and 'existing board support/discussion', with 1 topic per board to keep things more organized? I don't know. Or we could stick with one running forum, similar to the way the legacy Google Group web interface worked
- Adding new sections to the Wiki - I think we should have a place to collect obscure datasheets, references, general links, etc beyond the user folder areas. Would a 'Tools, Tips & References' section be useful for collecting non-board-or-bus-specific information?
- Moving the forum software to phpBB or Discourse - this would be a bunch of work on my end to move the existing messages and user accounts over, but it turns out that this FUDForum software - while it has a nice simple user interface - is not under super active development right now and is probably unlikely to be revived in a big way. For the long term health/stability of the group, it might be good to migrate over to a more popular forum software.
- Creating an RBC Logo - it would be fun to have a logo that we could use to 'brand' the Wiki and the Forum a little bit more consistently. Ideally something in a vector graphic format that can also be represented as a browser-tab icon.
- Bringing the legacy discussion group messages into 'archive' sub-forums within the forum software - I've experimented with a script that processes the email archive from the old mailing lists and brings them into a pretty well threaded version in FUDForum. If people thought that was a useful way to view the old messages (as opposed to the HTML pages/Google Custom Search) I could explore bringing them in (note this plays into #2 above a bit as well, since the import feature being used is a FUDForum feature)
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| Re: Forum/Wiki Feedback - 6 months in [message #513 is a reply to message #512] |
Sat, 16 April 2016 12:50  |
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will
Messages: 213
Registered: October 2015
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Senior Member |
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Andrew
Firstly, THANK YOU for everything you have done!
My thoughts on the forum: I think the current forum software is fine. I don't feel there's enough volume to require dividing it up. It's nice to have only one place to look to find discussions. If the forum were split into separate sub-forums there would be multiple places to look, I fear some would end up neglected.
Overall I have to say I miss reading the group messages as emails in my email client, although the ability to embed images in the web forum is useful.
The new Wiki software is an improvement I think. The additional section you propose sounds like a good idea.
Thanks again
Will
[Updated on: Sun, 17 April 2016 02:54] Report message to a moderator |
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| Re: Forum/Wiki Feedback - 6 months in [message #558 is a reply to message #514] |
Sat, 23 April 2016 19:32 |
Garth
Messages: 29
Registered: April 2016
Location: Southern California
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Junior Member |
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I have been on many related forums, and am a moderator of four, administrator of two.
My main one is the 6502.org forum. The way Mike Naberezny has laid it out seems just about ideal. He had the forum on Delphi in the early years (and I was on it), and apparently Delphi was gradually making things more and more difficult to run it the way he wanted, so he migrated over to the phpBB forum on his own 6502.org site and transferred all the archives. (He had to write some sort of program to do that, as Delphi would not help.) The fact that he wasn't starting cold probably gave a better understanding of what he might want to do with phpBB. Based on forum traffic observation, I did recommend adding the Forth section, the Newbies section, and maybe one or two of the others. I can't remember for sure.
I am also on the Brad's Projects forum. That one has way too many categories on the front page, and you have to scroll and scroll to check it all.
The 6502 is possibly the most-documented processor in history, and since there wasn't such support for Z80 and others, people interested in these started getting on 6502.org hoping to capitalize. One fellow who thought he could do this said in his first post, "After all, anything but x86, right?" I had to explain that no, that's not the way it works, and we need to keep a sharp focus on 6502 here, partly because there are quite a few valuable members who want it that way and would leave otherwise. With a sprinkling of these other processors, it made sense to start the AnyCPU forum, a sister forum, for other processors including ones the members themselves are designing. The aim was somewhat different, and to avoid the super long front page length that Brad's Projects has, Dajgoro laid out categories, and subcategories within categories. (I can't deny guilt, as I kind of helped.) This turned out to be both good and bad. You might save time not having to look at so much of the stuff you're not interested in, but it's harder to navigate. By the time it became clear that that really wasn't the way to do it, there were enough posts that it would have been a huge amount of work to change it and move topics into the right places.
Some categorization seems almost imperative. I'm on the 6502ag Yahoo group, and it's a little more difficult, due to the lack of categorization. (At this point it hardly matters though, as there's so little traffic. It was nearly killed by spammers years ago, and never really recovered; but that's a different matter. You won't find anything charming in what I think ought to be done to spammers!) The worst for finding things is of course something like the 6502 Programming facebook group, because besides not having categories, it's not searchable. It also does not allow italics, bold, underline, quote blocks, hypertext links, inlined pictures, code formatting, etc..
My own interest in this forum which someone recently linked to on 6502.org is in the implementation of simpler computing hardware and philosophies without needing to be strongly connected to a particular microprocessor family or computer brand (Atari, Apple, Commodore, TRS-80, etc.) or to games. (I am definitely not a games person!) There are some essays and articles I like to point to, and which I have linked in the philosophy section of my links page on my site:
I'm always striving to improve the efficiency, techniques, organization, clarity, usefulness, and performance of small computers and their software that a single person can get a good handle on, rather that going for impenetrable loads of software layers and then "fixing" the inefficiencies by just throwing GHz and MB at the problem.
http://WilsonMinesCo.com/ lots of 6502 resources
[Updated on: Mon, 22 August 2016 01:31] Report message to a moderator |
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| Re: Forum/Wiki Feedback - 6 months in [message #570 is a reply to message #558] |
Mon, 25 April 2016 12:21 |
biged
Messages: 9
Registered: April 2016
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Junior Member |
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For my part, I'd recommend not adding any categories until you need them - but do be sure your forum software allows you to move posts around when you change the organisation. Always keep a catch-all category, then you don't have to struggle to find sufficient non-overlapping subforums to suit everything.
(I help with 6502.org and anycpu.org, also moderate some G+ communities.)
[Updated on: Mon, 25 April 2016 13:31] Report message to a moderator |
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| Re: Forum/Wiki Feedback - 6 months in [message #1056 is a reply to message #680] |
Mon, 22 August 2016 01:16 |
JonB
Messages: 92
Registered: August 2016
Location: UK
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Member |
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Definitely add categories for posts. We are all familiar with how they work, and a forum "show posts since last visit" feature gets round the problem of thread neglect.
As a start, why not consider partial replication the breakdown of the WIKI subjects? Something like:
- General discussion
- Boards
- ecb
- isa
- other
- s100
- sbc
- Software
- Applications
- Firmware / OS
- Off topic [Updated on: Mon, 22 August 2016 01:17] Report message to a moderator |
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| Re: Forum/Wiki Feedback - 6 months in [message #1145 is a reply to message #1135] |
Fri, 16 September 2016 17:25 |
Garth
Messages: 29
Registered: April 2016
Location: Southern California
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Junior Member |
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will wrote on Wed, 14 September 2016 15:02I don't understand the desire to break up the forum into separate categories.
There were only 12 new threads created in the last two months. Only 20 threads received any posts in the last two months. It's hardly unmanageable to keep it all in one forum.
Breaking it up just gives everyone more than one place to check for new or updated threads.
Maybe it would be justified if the volume increases dramatically, or threads on one subject start to drown out other subjects, but that isn't happening yet.
Incidentally my personal preference would be for us to switch back to email, using a mailman-managed mailing list. When we used email I could read it on my vt510, from a retro machine, this ability was sadly lost with the switch to the web forum. But I'm happy enough with the current situation and, essentially, just grateful that such a forum exists at all.
One of the forums I'm on is the "museum" (poor name) of Hewlett-Packard calculators (MoHPC) at http://hpmuseum.org/forum/ . Before they started using phpBB, everything was mixed, and they discussed a lot of things I wasn't interested in. When the HP Prime came out, a calculator with a lot of wrong design choices IMO, there were suddenly a lot of posts about it every day, making it harder to find the stuff I was interested in. Soon after, they went to a phpBB format and put the Prime in its own category so those of us who have no interest in it don't have to be bothered with it. Of the 12 categories you'll see on the front page, there are only three that I check. It makes it easier.
The RBC forum front page now for me has an awful lot of red books (or whatever that little icon is) down the left edge for topics with new posts I haven't read, either because I'm not interested, or I am and there's a new post. Which one is it? I have to read every single topic title every time. I don't see any way to mark all topics as read.
http://WilsonMinesCo.com/ lots of 6502 resources
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| Re: Forum/Wiki Feedback - 6 months in [message #2226 is a reply to message #1159] |
Mon, 03 April 2017 05:36 |
plasmo
Messages: 876
Registered: March 2017
Location: New Mexico, USA
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Senior Member |
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I'm new to wiki creation so this may not be a bug, but my incorrect way of creating wiki page.
I'm having problem with broken link on my wiki page:
1. upload a picture (must be jpg file, pdf & txt files have no such problem) using media manager; create a page and link to the picture with "internal media" link. Save.
2. display the page and click on the picture link. It works fine.
3. edit the page, altering just the text, not the link, save.
4. display the page, click on the picture link, it works fine.
5. edit the page again, altering just text, not touching the link, save once again.
6. display the page, click on the link, it still works.
7. edit the page the third time, altering just text, not the link, save the third time.
8. display the page, click on the link, it is not broken! The message displayed is: "Precondition Failed"
I noticed every time I save, the picture link grows longer. at creation it is:
https://www.retrobrewcomputers.org/lib/exe/fetch.php?media=b uilderpages:plasmo:tiny020:dsc_21910207.jpg
After the first save, it is:
https://www.retrobrewcomputers.org/lib/exe/fetch.php?tok=628 d32&media=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.retrobrewcomputers.org%2Flib %2Fexe%2Ffetch.php%3Fmedia%3Dbuilderpages%3Aplasmo%3Atiny020 %3Adsc_21910207.jpg
After the 2nd save, it is:
https://www.retrobrewcomputers.org/lib/exe/fetch.php?tok=dc8 758&media=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.retrobrewcomputers.org%2Flib %2Fexe%2Ffetch.php%3Ftok%3D628d32%26media%3Dhttps%3A%2F%2Fww w.retrobrewcomputers.org%2Flib%2Fexe%2Ffetch.php%3Fmedia%3Db uilderpages%3Aplasmo%3Atiny020%3Adsc_21910207.jpg
After the third save when it has broken link, it is:
https://www.retrobrewcomputers.org/lib/exe/fetch.php?tok=5d4 24e&media=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.retrobrewcomputers.org%2Flib %2Fexe%2Ffetch.php%3Ftok%3Ddc8758%26media%3Dhttps%3A%2F%2Fww w.retrobrewcomputers.org%2Flib%2Fexe%2Ffetch.php%3Ftok%3D628 d32%26media%3Dhttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.retrobrewcomputers.org%2Flib %2Fexe%2Ffetch.php%3Fmedia%3Dbuilderpages%3Aplasmo%3Atiny020 %3Adsc_21910207.jpg
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| Re: Forum/Wiki Feedback - 6 months in [message #3988 is a reply to message #512] |
Thu, 21 December 2017 07:03 |
mikemac
Messages: 249
Registered: March 2017
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Senior Member |
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Has the forum SW been updated lately? It's no longer highlighting threads with unread posts for me and the quick post message box at the bottom of the thread page isn't there anymore.
I can live without the quick post box but not having unread threads marked in red is a pain.
Mike
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| Re: Forum/Wiki Feedback - 6 months in [message #7338 is a reply to message #3989] |
Fri, 27 March 2020 17:57 |
rpiguy2
Messages: 9
Registered: March 2020
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Junior Member |
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New member observations here:
- I generally agree new posts are so rare here that subtopic forums are not necessary with the current focus on active projects
- The only reason I can think of for creating subtopics would be to discuss other topics very dissimilar to active projects
Suggestions:
- Add a Wanted topic for people seeking spare parts to complete a built
For example, I bought a large lot of ICs a long time ago, most of which I will never use and would be happy to share for cost of postage. In this way forum members could help other forum members complete their projects.
I was also thinking of a For Sale topic, but I don't know if you want to turn this into a marketplace. You will get a lot of people signing up just to buy and sell. I was just thinking about this today as I noticed several project threads included kits or PCBs that members could buy.
[Updated on: Fri, 27 March 2020 17:58] Report message to a moderator |
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