"message thread"?
The going off topic problem is in part down to this forum cores inability to sub-forum and in another way down to the lack of moderator/administrator time that is available to keep the board fluid. I have to take my hat off to the people in this forum, as most of the time they are self-regulating and do a good job of getting by - that just shows the calibre of people here.
My rant in that ActiveSync thread again has nothing to do with the forum structure. It was about an unregistered user quite probably being too arrogant/ignorant to consider for a second the charter of the site and netiquette rules. Hijacking someone’s legitimate CE 2.00 question with a CE 4.20 question that wasn't remotely related is one thing, but I have a particular dislike of people who want to spoon fed over "email". In my experience such people want nothing more than the email address of a technically able user from which to hound for free one to one support. I resent that as someone who has to reciprocate.
It is also bad for the community, moves expertise and advice out of the public domain where everyone can benefit from it... and if posters can't be bothered to check back for the answers provided by other, why should I or anyone else be bothered to spend the time offering advice?
I am very cynical over it, no arguments from me there. Guilty as charged. However 7 years of it has taught me a few lessons over how the mind of a
certain type of person operates. These are in the minority of people.
I do also understand that posting in the wrong thread can happen for legitimate reasons, confusion, inexperience, H/PC Pro branding itself as "3.0" and so on. No bad karma is aimed there. That’s why we have moderators
As to the forum structure; I do not want device specific forums, the formula is used by PPC Mag and more importantly was used by this sites predecessor. It does not work as well.
There is more to this community than NEC and HP. Users of non-HP/NEC devices have always had somewhere to come and know exactly where to post.
Your list above advocates bundling by CPU, meaning you could get messages for CE1, 2, Pro, 2000 all in one MIPS forum, and that's of no use what so ever to anyone trying to filter out white noise and get LEGACY support - the entire reason why I started ce320 in the first place back in 2000!
The CE1 board here is particularly small, but imagine trying to find the posts that are in it had they been interspersed amongst 2/3 of the H/PC Pro and HPC2000 posts that are currently on the site. You would give up. I know that I did back in 2000. So you might say that I did something about it
In nearly all cases a thread on the HPC2000 board discussing a software issue on one HPC2000 device is applicable to any other HPC2000 device, just substitute the name. As I always say in these situations. You don't go looking for Windows XP support, hunt down the worlds only Dell Dimension support forum and post only in the Dimension 8250 sub-forum. What would be the point? One BSOD for XP is invariably the same as any other on any system. You don't need targeted technical support. It's no different with CE devices of the same OS, and I am still confident that this forum has proved that my belief is correct.
This isn't to say that if I had the ability to sub-forum, that things woudn't be different - the bbs structure would be different. However as I don't have the luxury and don't have the time to write it into the kernel, we'll have to make do
Plus... if I text archived everyone's posts, I don't think that members would appreciate having their post counts 0'd