benjiro said:
To be honest, i don't see the added advantage of gp32x.de. Just look at the user account, etc. here. The forum here has already reached the same level ( even higher ) as before the Pandora launch that gp32x had, and this is just a specific Pandora Board.
441 users. at this forum.
youre about 15 thousand people off.
During the Pandora launch, the maximum the board reached during launch was 482 ( last i checked, and that was at 18.00h GMT+1 ). This forum, while being rather well hidden, has already peaks of almost 200...
you mean users online? that has nothing to do with whether its forum.openpandora or g p32x. like i said earlier to a stubborn user, corelation does not imply causation. the pandora forums and many other sites had been going down. naturally, people are going to be going to whatever source they can for information. thats why there are bloated numbers. also, the majority of gp32x at that point was really just going for the pandora forums anyway.
Hell, it has been only a few hours from when the Forum tab on openpandora.org has been altered to reflect to this forum. All that time before, it was just a link under the blog section.
this isn't fact but an opinion, i think the forum tab was actually much less notable than the blog post was.
I for one don't see a advantage of the Pandora forum being on gp32x. Let alone the fact that the maintainer has trouble getting the site back online. A 2 day downtime is not considered good by any company's standard. And lets face it, its bad PR for Pandora if it happens again to gp32x. Also, the Pandora crew have no control over the gp32x forums as we see now.
lets face it: all sites will go down under extreme stress, and that isn't always in the maintaner's, in this case, hando's,... hands. also, i'd say the pandora crew have a fair share of control, but you are right they dont have total control and honestly i would prefer it that way. 'official' forums tend to have a large bias for obvious reasons and delete all criticism. gp32x is also well established as a homebrew community.
The downtime of the gp32x forum scared the shit out of me ( and i'm not the only person ), because it was my main source of information at that time. And seeing the gp32x forum going down just half a day, after placing your order. Trust me, not a good sign.
the force was distributed. if gp32x wasnt around at that poiutn and it was just openpandora.org and its forum, im sure it would have crashed too.
Take it from me. I used to work at a company who's level of commitment to its customers was questionable. That was one of the reasons i left ( and i'm now working a freelancer for one of those customers ;-) ). We need to provide the customers a product, and service thats guaranteed. The customers ( with a few hundred of thousands of members ) there website 's ( what they needed for member management, invoices etc ) being down for a few hours each month or 2.
All because of a known firewall problem ( hard lock - and it needed to be manually powered down & up at the data center = 2 or 3 hours downtime for the customer ), all because the boss refused to pay 300 euro's for a APC ( or other required hardware! ). Its all a mater of perception to the customer. The forum being down is just a small thing, but it all adds up. There is nothing more fun having the customer shewing your ass off for something you have no control over.
blah blah blah personal anecdote that in real life is only about half true, internet laws etc
One of the complaints i read several times already on slashdot, etc. Something in the line off: "The links don't work on ther site. Look at the design with almost no info. Looks like a untrustworthy company behind it". Thats several potential customer less because they where unable to get information from the forums.
... those people are obviously very unaware, but what dose this have to do with the forum anyway?
So no, i'm not a supported of the forum moving back to a 3th party, with no control over it. Look at it, gp32x is down already for 3 days almost... Whats needed is a temporary page at gp32x, informing that the official forum for the Pandora has now moved to this location.
3th...? lol. you know, the pandora archive has been down, too, i guess they should host it somewhere else. oh, wait...
mkinzler: its the official site of the pandora hardware, but not of the community and you can never force that. the community will make or break the handheld. gp2x was more or less an average chinese mp4 player device before it ended up getting picked up by linux enthusiasts.
