Open Pandora Domainname / Url Inconsistencies

[porg]

I observe that the official domain names related to Open Pandora are not very uniform and consistent but rather like a rag rug with accompanying redirections!

Especially when one considers, that certain standard definitions files (i.e. the PXML definition) reside at certain URLs, it should be assured that they are permanent and reliable rather than being redirected around or in the worst case not even reachable at all!

I suggest that this is properly dealt with! Until now it was no big harm, except that it was a little hard to navigate and that some bookmarks may have broken. But as soon as the product distribution happens, and the community software development thus intensifies, and general internet audience awareness rises, thus increase citations and linking! At latest then this URL rug rag chaos must be resolved!


CIRCUMSTANCES IN DETAIL

• Since a certain time http://openpandora.org redirects to http://open-pandora.org .
• At the same time, according to http://pandorawiki.org/PXML_specification#The_PXML-tag the official definition URL for PXML is http://openpandora.org/namespaces/PXML which itself is not found at the moment and simply redirected to the Open Pandora Homepage.
• The previous remark already implies another remark, namely that there is an own domain http://pandorawiki.org rather than a subdomain like http://wiki.openpandora.org/
• Even though http://pandorawiki.org has built in multilingual support, there is the standalone German speaking community wiki at http://wiki.openpandora.de/
• And all forums are at the retailer domains, rather than a central place under the Open Pandora umbrella.

ARRISING QUESTIONS AND MY REMARKS

Why openpandora.org and open-pandora.org?

I personally prefer domainnames without dashes, because they are easier and shorter to type, as long as readability is still ensured. As both "open" and "pandora" are standard words, the average reader for sure catches the word boundaries when taking a glance at "openpandora.org". Where readability is of vital importance, areas such as marketing where people may encounter a name the first time and thus are yet not familiar with, the CamelCase style "OpenPandora.org" can be used to increase readability!

Why a separate wiki domain rather than a subdomain? Why separate domains for certain languages?

Why are the official forums at the retailer domains rather than under the umbrella domain http://openpandora.org ?

 

[Aninhumer]

I can't remember the details, but they had to move the main site to a different server, but keep the openpandora.org domain for the old server for other reasons, so they redirected openpandora.org to open-pandora.org for website requests.

EDIT:
The Wikis are definitely a mess at the moment, and hopefully that will clear up as people actually start to use them after the Pandora is released.

The gp32x website and forums have been around for a long time, and it wouldn't really make sense to split the community with a new one.
I don't know anywhere they're called "official" forums, and if they are they should probably change it.

 

[dflemstr]

At the same time, according to http://pandorawiki.org/PXML_specification#The_PXML-tag the official definition URL for PXML is http://openpandora.org/namespaces/PXML which itself is not found at the moment and simply redirected to the Open Pandora Homepage.

PLEASE take time and read the World Wide Web Consortium XML 1.1 specification. Here, I'll link it for you: http://www.w3.org/TR/xml11/
It says that the "xmlns" attribute declares an XML namespace (hence the name) and NOT an URL for finding the definition file/the XML schema/whatever. I could've written 'xmlns="horse://OMGWTF"' and it would have been according to the XML specification, but it is customary to choose a name space that is bound to a domain owned by the XML format provider, and that's why I chose a namespace in the "openpandora.org" domain that is bound to the http protocol.

But I agree with you, I also think that all OpenPandora resources should be more organized. E.g.:
http://forums.openpandora.org/en/
http://forums.openpandora.org/de/
http://wiki.openpandora.org/en/
http://wiki.openpandora.org/de/
http://openpandora.org/de/
http://openpandora.org/en/

Now for the reasons why things are like they are at the moment:

• EvilDragon has had some problems with his servers that forced him to move the "openpandora.org" web page to "open-pandora.org". This should hopefully only be temporary and fixed after the release of the Pandora.
• The team seems to be incredibly busy at the moment, so nothing will be changed in the near future. I ask myself why they don't pull in community members to fix things for them, but oh well...
• The Pandora project was born on these forums, so that's why the community has stayed here. OpenPandora doesn't have anything to do with GP or GP32X apart from that fact.
• The German community has always been spread out for some reason, but many of the German pages are owned by EvilDragon, so I don't understand why they aren't organized.
• People around here are very conservative in general, they don't like moving and leaving their old tracks...

 

[Screeny]

I can't understand your problem... sorry.
Everything is "organized":

openpandora.de/org/ca = official site
git.openpandora.org = GIT space
pandorawiki.ORG = english pandorawiki
pandorawiki.DE = german wiki
forum.gp2x.DE = german GP2X & Pandora forum
gp32x.de/board = english GP32x forum
dl.openhandhelds.org = downloadarchives
pandorapress.net = english blog
pandoratoday / pandorasource / pandora-blog. DE = german blogs
openpandora.info = russian blog
openpandora.jp = japanese blog

it would be boring if everything is reachable under a xxxxx.openpandora.org domain
and the forum is for every "open"-device .. I think it's one of the best way to organize this projekt.
If there is a problem with the pandorawiki.org, pandorawiki.de is still available.
These domain structures are like a backup, I think.

 

[gruso]

Just expanding on Screeny's list, I've broken them up into official and unofficial.

OFFICIAL:

openpandora.de/org/ca = official site
git.openpandora.org = GIT space

UNOFFICIAL:

pandorawiki.ORG = english pandorawiki
pandorawiki.DE = german wiki
forum.gp2x.DE = german GP2X & Pandora forum
gp32x.de/board = english GP32x forum
dl.openhandhelds.org = downloadarchives
pandorapress.net = english blog
pandoratoday / pandorasource / pandora-blog. DE = german blogs
openpandora.info = russian blog
openpandora.jp = japanese blog

(Yes gp2x.de is owned by EvilDragon, but like gp32x.de it's a long established site for the whole scene, not just Pandora.) The other unofficial sites are fan sites / community sites, not under the control of Craig or ED.

Apparently there are plans to overhaul openpandora.org to make it a more unified portal, with input from some of the community sites. For example, the wiki could be moved to the official site, and there will hopefully be community news feeds (eg. from pandorapress) on the official site. As for the forums (gp32x.de, gp2x.de) that will not change. They need to remain independent communities.

Screeny's last point is a good one by the way. One server going down can already lock us out of the forums, official site and file archives. Having the wiki and various blogs hosted independently has been a lifesaver in these situations. You could argue that ED just needs more reliable servers, but his time and resources are not endless.

 

[Nova]

I don't know anywhere they're called "official" forums, and if they are they should probably change it.

I think it's generally considered that this is the Official forums now, since ED runs it (with Hando).

I think...

 

[Esn]

I don't know anywhere they're called "official" forums, and if they are they should probably change it.

I think it's generally considered that this is the Official forums now, since ED runs it (with Hando).

I think...

These are the forums where everybody posts. What's the difference if they're "official" or not?

I suppose they can be considered "semi-official", because they're partially run by members of the OP team.

That definition assumes that the forums are subordinate to OpenPandora, when it is really the other way around; OpenPandora was created via these forums.

 

[El Jefe]

as long as its not www.penisland.com, I think its fine...

 

[porg]

THANKS FOR ALL YOUR RESPONSES!

I will not quote everyone separately, but rather reply aggregated by topic.
Please know that I appreciate everyone's input. I choose this reply style for the sake of simplicity and efficiency.

COMMUNITY AND PROJECT ORGANISATION AND COMPETENCES

Generally speaking I like the idea of federalism and autonomies in human organisation. But core competencies should be central!

The sub/communities may organise their communication habits and project management however they like, but the technical foundation "domain / link system", which is needed for reliable referencing and quotations, I see as the duty of the central maintainer, Open Pandora (OP).

URL/CONTENT MANAGEMENT (PERMALINKS)

The web is a hypertext medium, reliable linking and quoting is key for reliable working and permalinks key if you want sustainability. Thus I am an advocate for a well thought URL/content-managent. The FOUNDATIONS must be THOUGHT and LAID BEFORE these systems get under HEAVY DUTY.

The early OP community may know its way through the organisational jungle, but for the public relations (OP to/from the outside world) it is difficult!

Errors accumulate, and the later you apply the corrections the harder and painful they are: loads of dead links, users with confused orientation and a loss of overview, thus people make even more temporary fixes as they need/want "to get things done", and this again results in even more redundancies. The conservatism of people at OP, mentioned by @dflemstr, would not really pay for itself in this issue!

DOMAIN FALLBACK SYSTEM

Concerning that different domainnames avoid single point of failures and thus provide a backup: AFAIK the DNS allows that different subdomains of the same parent domain can reside on different IP addresses. Hence aaa.openpandora.org down would not necessarily mean bbb.openpandora.org down. Expertises welcome! If my assumption is wrong I see the positive aspect of multiple domains for fallback.

TEMPORARY open-pandora.org

I don't understand the technical necessity for the temporary open-pandora.org, because hosting (I guess that is what @dflemstr refers to by "problems with his servers") and domain management are 2 technical independent systems, but of course if these 2 are combined by 1 legal contract, it can occur, that the are bound together, and maybe that's the case here. I don't know the whereabouts, but hope that this is really only a temporary solution!

XML NAMESPACE

Thanks @dflemstr for the technical correction. xmlns="horse://OMGWTF" as an identifier would of course work as well. But if one states a URL, it nevertheless makes sense if it is generally (and sustainably) retrievable. Or not? This was my point!

WIKIS
@Screeny : pandorawiki.ORG as it presents itself cannot be said to be the "English wiki" but rather a "multilingual wiki", hence I don't understand the separate .DE server.

A wiki is a good example for community responsibility within the federalism concept, shared responsibility, the central OP plus the connected communities.
Again, generally the "domain/link system" should be reliably and sustainably working. If there are multiple language versions -- I see that positive!!! -- then it should be easy and reliably possible to crosslink the various language versions, not only on the front page as it is now, but really per item, in a manner such as i.e. Wikipedia.

FORUMS

You have all very well explained to me that these forums are the root for OP. Hence I understand why they are again at different domains. And they may remain there. Fine! Anyhow forums are a good example for autonomous regions within a federal concept.

BUT currently the forum is EVERYTHING.
It is used for various purposes!

It operates not only for general and support talk, but also for development purposes (such as feature requests, bugs, devtalk, etc). And yet is very little organised: categories, tags, etc.

This lack of organisation has consequences:

1. Many redundancies as there is no formal agreement on what communications and processes belong where and in which form!
   You can find info on what you SHOULD NOT do: http://www.gp32x.de/board/index.php?/forum-62/announcement-27-the-list-of-things-you-dont-do/
   But yet no easily findable central information of how you SHOULD ACT for your certain intentions.
2. A competition for attention. As there is only "one big soup for many or even all purposes" the tactics tends to create as much attention as possible for one's project, rather than placing it at the adequate place in the adequate manner, as the latter are simply undefined!
3. Discourage resulting from the previously mentioned points.

For this issue I propose the following:

1. Think about further structuring of the forum! Centrally decided categories/formalities for the minimum requirements. Possibilities for further structuring (subcategories, tags, etc) for those who want/need it.
2. Some parts may make sense to be outsourced into dedicated sites.
3. Erect a kind of "central starting point for users".

CENTRAL STARTING POINT FOR USERS

1) At a very central place at http://OpenPandora.org :

There is already About the Pandora > Questions and Answers, but its way to minimal.
Something as I have in mind is partially implemented at a forum sticky note.
It should be a "central starting point" at the official website which offers the first orientation and behavioral questions.
The subsites then (may) offer their own procedures.

2) Q&A Writing Style :

The forum sticky note info index is formulated in the manner:
Name of the site. What you find there. (Possible a note what you should/not do there).

I propose a formulation more in the manner of:
"What you want to do? Where you find it!"

Examples:

You have an idea for a new game or application?
1) Check if it already exists at: GameBox
2) Possibly other people already chatted about it! Check with words associated to your idea with the search function at: Forum/...
3) If your idea is only basically, and you just want to start some discussion, look whether there is interest, etc, then propose it at: FeatureRequests.
4) If you eventually intend to start a project, start your project at: ProjectSite.

You want to download new games/apps?
1) Open the package manager, [...], detailed instructions can be found at: Link.
2) You may find apps "out in the wild of the web". What's generally needed to run a program on your Pandora: Link.

[...]

 

[Raumkraut]

DOMAIN FALLBACK SYSTEM

Concerning that different domainnames avoid single point of failures and thus provide a backup: AFAIK the DNS allows that different subdomains of the same parent domain can reside on different IP addresses. Hence aaa.openpandora.org down would not necessarily mean bbb.openpandora.org down. Expertises welcome! If my assumption is wrong I see the positive aspect of multiple domains for fallback.

More than that; a single domain name can map to multiple IP addresses - just try pinging google.com a few times[1]. And even then, a single IP address can itself map to any number of machines behind the scenes.


[1]: YMMV: some DNS services may cache just a single IP address.

 

[mali]

Too German for my liking. No thanks. We prefer creative chaos.

 

[Sphinxter]

Rules, pfffffft

 

[dflemstr]

[sub]

COMMUNITY AND PROJECT ORGANISATION AND COMPETENCES

Generally speaking I like the idea of federalism and autonomies in human organisation. But core competencies should be central!

The sub/communities may organise their communication habits and project management however they like, but the technical foundation "domain / link system", which is needed for reliable referencing and quotations, I see as the duty of the central maintainer, Open Pandora (OP).

You assume that OP is "the spider in the web" in this whole undertaking, but I believe that you are mistaken, for you see: OpenPandora (the whole community) is largely autonomous. OpenPandora (the company) basically only exists to fund the production of the Pandora (the device) and to host these web pages. It doesn't necessarily play a central role, at least in my opinion; instead, it's the community that is supposed to bring this product forward, at least that's how I've understood it, and that's how things have been with the GP* devices.

Ergo: these technological resources should not be seen as a medium for communication under control of OP, but instead as a tool for the OP community as a whole to collaborate, and OP (the company) just serves as yet another part of that tool.

URL/CONTENT MANAGEMENT (PERMALINKS)

The web is a hypertext medium, reliable linking and quoting is key for reliable working and permalinks key if you want sustainability. Thus I am an advocate for a well thought URL/content-managent. The FOUNDATIONS must be THOUGHT and LAID BEFORE these systems get under HEAVY DUTY.

The early OP community may know its way through the organisational jungle, but for the public relations (OP to/from the outside world) it is difficult!

Errors accumulate, and the later you apply the corrections the harder and painful they are: loads of dead links, users with confused orientation and a loss of overview, thus people make even more temporary fixes as they need/want "to get things done", and this again results in even more redundancies. The conservatism of people at OP, mentioned by @dflemstr, would not really pay for itself in this issue!

I agree with you fully on this one, but there are too many interests involved. The problem is mainly that the people that carry the responsibility of making changes (namely the OpenPandora development team) think of this as a non-issue. There seems to be a general consensus that "if it works, don't fix it"... which I think is very disheartening since we've seen the effect of this kind of view many times before; many of the delays in the production lifetime of the Pandora can be traced back to such trade-offs.

The solution? I would say that the community should be allowed to contribute more. At the moment, OP is working as a tight-knit organization consisting of a few people, and they don't outsource any tasks to community members, which leads to extreme stress on their part, bad scheduling, bad decisions, etc. I hope that this can be changed somehow.

DOMAIN FALLBACK SYSTEM

Concerning that different domainnames avoid single point of failures and thus provide a backup: AFAIK the DNS allows that different subdomains of the same parent domain can reside on different IP addresses. Hence aaa.openpandora.org down would not necessarily mean bbb.openpandora.org down. Expertises welcome! If my assumption is wrong I see the positive aspect of multiple domains for fallback.

This is possible, but the whole network will still rely on the DNS server being used. There has to be a server that dispatches DNS handles, and if it goes down, and the DNS caches expire...

TEMPORARY open-pandora.org

I don't understand the technical necessity for the temporary open-pandora.org, because hosting (I guess that is what @dflemstr refers to by "problems with his servers") and domain management are 2 technical independent systems, but of course if these 2 are combined by 1 legal contract, it can occur, that the are bound together, and maybe that's the case here. I don't know the whereabouts, but hope that this is really only a temporary solution!

EvilDragon basically uses an extremely rudimentary out-of-the-box system for managing domain names. Parallels Plesk is used for name registrations, and it can only link addresses to specific machines as I've understood it.
Now, the situation was as follows if I recall correctly:

• The forum had some kind of issue that forced ED to restore a backup of it. For some reason, this backup could only be restored on a separate machine.
• The old machine, on which the forum software used to run, also hosts "git.openpandora.org", plus an SMTP server or similar, so it had to remain up and running, with the same DNS name.
• Because of the Plesk system, ED couldn't set the second machine (the one with the forum backup) to the same DNS as the first machine, so he introduced a DNS name change, and added a redirect.

XML NAMESPACE

Thanks @dflemstr for the technical correction. xmlns="horse://OMGWTF" as an identifier would of course work as well. But if one states a URL, it nevertheless makes sense if it is generally (and sustainably) retrievable. Or not? This was my point!

XML namespaces should not be retrievable in general, no. For example, look at the XHTML namespace "http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml". Until recently, it didn't contain any information at all, but just returned a "HTTP 500 Forbidden" response. Why? Because the W3C couldn't handle the massive load of buggy XML loaders (for example, the Java EE 6 default XML loader had this bug) trying to access that URL. It was only recently that they added content to the page, so as to promote the XHTML specification better.

WIKIS
@Screeny : pandorawiki.ORG as it presents itself cannot be said to be the "English wiki" but rather a "multilingual wiki", hence I don't understand the separate .DE server.

A wiki is a good example for community responsibility within the federalism concept, shared responsibility, the central OP plus the connected communities.
Again, generally the "domain/link system" should be reliably and sustainably working. If there are multiple language versions -- I see that positive!!! -- then it should be easy and reliably possible to crosslink the various language versions, not only on the front page as it is now, but really per item, in a manner such as i.e. Wikipedia.

What's even worse is that the Wiki software in use (Wikimedia) supports multilingual articles in the same Wiki, so there's no need for even cross-links...

For this issue I propose the following:

I propose that if you want to change something, you should start an open letter, a wiki page, or similar, since posts have the tendency to disappear in the stream of information currently flowing through this forum.

 

[porg]

I see the autonomous nature of OP, and like it.

Nevertheless, as @dflemstr pointed out, and I simplify it now, only certain people within the OP-community/company "hold the keys to the online infrastructure", thus only they can edit the domain/URL-system or grant permissions to others.

This my post was just a preparative post, before my first real intended post, which is an idea for a dynamic menu structure within the GUI launchers for starting arbitrary apps and documents. But I first wanted to make sure, that it doesn't disappear into nowhere. I guess at the current state, the right place is the developer forum.

Regarding the domain/url/structure issue, I will send a an email, as forum posts diminish in this Stream-of-Attention aka Forums, but just to... whom?

 

[mali]

Regarding the domain/url/structure issue, I will send a an email, as forum posts diminish in this Stream-of-Attention aka Forums, but just to... whom?

http://www.gp2x.de/cms/content/view/5/83/

 

[porg]

Now mass produced OpenPandoras are out in the wild! That's good!
Textual/visual reviews, software downloads, etc evolve!
And what do they all use for reference? Right, URLs! But sadly not uniform!!!
Some use open-pandora.org, others openpandora.org
A domain containing a "-" (hyphen character) is a disadvantage in oral communication, as you always need to state this extra information, to be understood correctly!

Please OP fix this ASAP, if you want a uniform domainname! Later its way harder, as various references already exist, some of them even permanent, i.e. visually burned-in within videos or graphics.

 

[EvilDragon]

Now mass produced OpenPandoras are out in the wild! That's good!
Textual/visual reviews, software downloads, etc evolve!
And what do they all use for reference? Right, URLs! But sadly not uniform!!!
Some use open-pandora.org, others openpandora.org
A domain containing a "-" (hyphen character) is a disadvantage in oral communication, as you always need to state this extra information, to be understood correctly!

Please OP fix this ASAP, if you want a uniform domainname! Later its way harder, as various references already exist, some of them even permanent, i.e. visually burned-in within videos or graphics.

I couldn't do that yet as openpandora.org is on the old server whereas open-pandora.org already is on the new one.
openpandora.org was used as GIT for the firmware development, and I didn't want to risk break it before we delivered.
Will be moved once I get back home.

 

[porg]

Now mass produced OpenPandoras are out in the wild! That's good!
Textual/visual reviews, software downloads, etc evolve!
And what do they all use for reference? Right, URLs! But sadly not uniform!!!
Some use open-pandora.org, others openpandora.org
A domain containing a "-" (hyphen character) is a disadvantage in oral communication, as you always need to state this extra information, to be understood correctly!

Please OP fix this ASAP, if you want a uniform domainname! Later its way harder, as various references already exist, some of them even permanent, i.e. visually burned-in within videos or graphics.

I couldn't do that yet as openpandora.org is on the old server whereas open-pandora.org already is on the new one.
openpandora.org was used as GIT for the firmware development, and I didn't want to risk break it before we delivered.
Will be moved once I get back home.

Thanks! Finally an answer! Even confirmative!
A uniform domainname helps a lot.
I prefer the openpandora.org without a hyphen, with the benefit of the minimal oral communication effort!