I'm wary of diving into this dust up.... I'm sure to upset someone by making this comment...
No offense to any of the parties involved, and irregardless of the forum technology used, the root problem here is having a large active forum without an active site admin. The less active a site admin is, the more frequent and severe these kinds of outages become.
Forum moderators can take you a very long way, but large communities like gp32x require a fair amount of attention. Regular site updates, particularly forum updates, are a must.
I think it would be sad if we needed to abandon gp32x.de and move elsewhere. It has a well established community that would be fractured by moving it elsewhere. But I think it may be time to, politely, ask hando if he'd be willing to hand over the reigns to someone else who had the time and energy to maintain the site.
The same is true here. forums.openpandora.org is a great idea, but without active moderators or site admins, this place is effectively stagnant. Yes, it's slow because all the action is happening over at gp32x.de, but still we have months old stickies irrelevant to the discussion about Pandora. The site needs active pruning and community leaders to seed the site for future growth. ED should similarly consider handing over the reigns to someone willing the time to perform site admin duties.... perhaps to take the duties back once manufacturing details of the Pandora were sorted out.
This isn't to say Chip and others aren't doing a good job in forum moderation.. on the contrary they've been doing a fantastic job. But site admin duties are different alltogether. Communities on the scale of thousands of users expect downtimes measured in hours instead of days, even if they don't "deserve it" or are impatient. The Pandora will thrive on these active communities and Pandora Ltd neglect them at their peril.
I actually *have* played secondary site admin to a site that was owned by another person that was exceptionally busy, and was hard to contact when things went down. I had FTP access and passwords, but I wasn't the client, wasn't paying for the site and couldn't complain to the ISP if things went wrong. After several similar outages I eventually ported the site to another location and upgraded all the server software... a good thing too as the original site domain name expired weeks later without a word from our site owner. We haven't heard from him since.
On another note, I think it's a bad idea to split up the GP32, GP2X, Wiz and Pandora folks... Even though their user communities might be somewhat segregated, their dev communities are much more tightly integrated, and there's a natural evolution from GP32 to GP2X to Wiz and Pandora behind the scenes. Even as a Pandora dev, there's plenty of dev gems of wisdom hidden in the gp2x dev forums that would be lost if user groups were segregated to different sites.
I don't mean to start a flame war... this is a discussion to have *after* gp32x.dees back online. For the moment we'll sit tight here and wait out the storm.
