Hijacking Threads

You made me laugh C:Amie...in that Activesync thread about giving out that email address to spam-bots!

When I go back and look at some of the posts and see how far off the original topic we get, accidently in most cases, it all too easy to see how the message thread would totally confuse a new visitor.

Sometimes I wonder if it wouldn't be easier to just wipe out the old message database, archive it for text download only, and start over.

In the technical support forums, have you ever considered having something like this:

Jornda 720/728/Mobilepro 900 HPCs
Mobilepro 900C/CE.NET HPCs
All SH3/SH4 HPCs
All MIPS HPCs
All Others
Linux

Rather than by operating system?

Not critisizing, was just curious?

Rich

Rich, I'm not sure, but I think you just hijacked your own thread!

See CE Geek, I just can't help myself...

Rich

"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

Hear hear! It's a sad fact that you'll always get one or two people who will demand an answer with no regard to their conduct, or the value of people's knowledge and graciously giving up their time.

The only way you can sort of circumvent this is to prevent guests from posting, but that closes up what is a pretty open and honest forum.

As a new member, I haven't had an issue navigating the forum; that said I am a pretty experienced H/PC user over the past five or so years. Thread hijacking will always be an issue but when full time moderation cannot be in place (for perfectly valid reasons!) then there will be some drift.

Best thing is to police yourself and ask yourself, is that relevant or have I gone off on a tangent to wax lyrical about something else I'm not perfect but I think we're probably all adult enough to conduct ourselves decently as best we can.

Did I mention that I have this sudden urge to play Doom? lol

Vicky

Prepare to be fragged!

You would think that the email problem is unique to the guest posting system, however in actuality where they feel that have to these types will register, dump their email address and never return.

I imagine that in their minds, the fact that no one emails them equates to this being a bad website. You've got to laugh!

I suppose in a slight sombre way you could jest that in life two things are certain:

Death and that there will be jerks along the way

It's true you do get people register and never return after posting their demands. I suppose the right thing to do is just to ignore it as best you can although it's not easy as that attitude gets right under my skin.

I just feel that it's worth me saying that I have really enjoyed the forums since joining so it's hardly a big downer or problem I have found, but that's my two penneth worth

I think you'll find that's three things..

Death, jerks and taxes

...then there's taxes

I seem to think there is a faint whiff of irony in the air... Oops. Thread hijacking indeed.

Edited by lil 2007-03-17 9:54 AM

Well I kinda agree with C:Amie. Altho I can see where Rich's idea came from. Bundling the CPU type would help in a few instances, especially considering the number of 2.0 and 2.11 devices that are the same in hardware.

I think the current grouping by OS version is working ok.

If we have sub forums, we would benefit from seperating say the HPC2000 forum into MIPS and ARM, and so on. But since we don't have sub forums, what I would do is something in-between Rich's suggestion and the current way

CE .Net/5 ARM
HPC2000 ARM
HPC2000 MIPS
CE2.0/2.11 MIPS
CE2.0/2.11 SH3/SH4
CE1
x86 and others
Linux

What do you think?

Edited by takwu 2007-03-17 11:56 AM

Personally I don't see why the need to break them into CPU. I don't see any technical benefit because the OS is the separator, not the CPU. A technical problem on a StrongARM HPC2000 will have the identical answer on a MIPS4200 HPC2000 - unless there is no MIPS CAB.

Will you elaborate for me as to your thinking on the subject?

With sub forums, my primary aim would be to clean up General Discussion and Off-Topic then give JLime its own sub-forum, NetBSD its own sub-forum and lastly add a Wireless Networking (Misc) to the Hardware Support board to sponge out the counless millions of WiFi questions that are in there.
I would also add a sub-forum to hpcBay where you could start threads on buyers/sellers and leave feedback.

I agree with C:Amie. I think a lot of users are less familiar with the different processor types than with what OS version they have (the UI provides more clues as to the latter without one having to navigate to find it). A lot of people may not know that the X-Scale processor, for example, is part of the ARM family, or know the difference between ARM and ARM4 or ARM720 (gee, I wonder if people might think that's the one on the J720?), or between 1824 and 2577, on CAB file labels. (I still get those last two confused myself sometimes.) That's what the forums are for - to clear the air on these types of things.

I agree with everyone! So there. My original thinking is that just about everything that applies to the J720, also applies to the MP900. Except for size, they are more alike than different. I've found that the MP900 is actually more similar to the J720 than its cousin the 900C. Not hardwarewise perhaps, but certainly funtionality. Anyway, it was just a thought that was worth bouncing off people to see how they felt.

I'm not sure I'd like to see sub-forums. If there were only one big forum with every topic, then we would have total disarray. Sub-forums start to be too extreme in the opposite direction. Suddenly you don't know where to ask questions or post information, because there is so much cross-over between machines. What we have now is a happy, and functional, compromise.

Rich

Edited by Rich Hawley 2007-03-17 5:47 PM

It's actually quite hard to find threads that deal specifically with MIPS HPC2000 devices. They get lost in the sea of j720 threads. And it's a problem because the libraries of third party software are somewhat different between the MIPS and ARM versions.

On the other hand, I don't think there's a worry about repeating threads. The percentage of threads that actually apply to both MIPS and ARM in the HPC2000 forum would be an estimated 5%, if you ask me.

Same thing with MIPS and SH3 in the CE2.x world, I think.

About the other forums... I think you can also do the splitting method instead of using subforums. I don't go to Linux, so I don't know how it should be split. But for General and OT, they can surely use more seperate forums.

sh3 and sh4 dont have much to do with each other... sh4 has its own special problems. so i disagree with this listing.

i think it is the best as it is now. maybe with those extra subforums C:Amie mentioned.

and i'd add a hacking part hehehe - then there the cpu differences would make sense. otherwise i don1t see any point in it.

Edited by cmonex 2007-03-17 9:53 PM