You know what the main reason the community's up in flames is?


Patch leaks in pipes; sure, this info is floating around, but who wants to look for it? This such thread will aggregate it all so instead of having to hunt around for a post in GP32X from 2008 (more than once, at least; we're citing sources here!), we can link to this thread. Which do you think is easier for the lazy, tired, or busy; hunting an old post, or pulling something off the top of your head, even if it's not true or accurate?


And you forget to consider this; if someone can post in these boards, they can see a pinned thread that they can read for themselves. Not exactly true for the wiki. So Joe Schmoe reads this pinned thread; now he has no need for a thread! He either leaves on his own (thus not giving us a reason for uproar that'll stain our reputations), or appears more informed when he does post on the boards. (I find that the more you know about the Pandora before any initial inquiries, the more respect you get when you do ask.)


Also, you have to take long-time preorderers into consideration!
 
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Thread's up! It's a bit bare at the moment, so share your ideas in this (not that) thread. I wanna keep that one clear of excessive discussion so as not to take away from the first post.
 
It needs to be a forum, not a thread.


Get the newbies a place to live in and ask newbie questions. Like one of these magazines for new parents or so that just retouch and recycle the same articles every 2 years or so as their clientele refreshes.
This sounds like a very out-of-sight-out-of-mind "Let's keep the 'newbies' away from us 'real' Pandorians" sort of approach to me, I'm afraid. Segregation won't work, as I'm sure there will be many newcomers who feel that their questions fit better in General Talk. I can already foresee what will happen then - they'll get unpleasant responses telling them to "GTFO" of the place where the "real" Pandora community plays before there is time to move things (after all, we have lives too, and are not present 24/7 to do this), and the result will be exactly the same as it is now.

Out of the way of people who can't help themselves and must react abbrasive when the might as well just ignore it. If they start being obnoxious in the newbie forum warn them and by recurrence ban them.
With all due respect, the folks who can't help themselves could just as easily ignore such threads right here and right now. Why should we only crack down on those who behave in an obnoxious fashion in a specific place, but not in others? It doesn't strike me as very consistent. :p

It's not about seggregation, it's about evolution. Plenty of forums have newbie forums for exactly these reasons. People can ask anything without getting called stupid. A lot of MMO's and stuff have newbie areas. Once people get the general idea they can start posting in other forums. I'm moderator of another forum where we had the same problem and the newbie forum helped it bigtime. In every newbie there is a grumpy old timer screaming to get out, once they evolve they can play the cynical old man/women/thing in the general forum and feel all senior.


Concerning the cracking down. It doesn't really look like there is any cracking down going on anywhere at the moment, so I'm not saying that in other forums then the newbie one should be allowed more, I'm saying let's have at least one forum on this board where people can safely dip their feet in and expect to be treated as if they are welcome.


Personally I think rule number one on any forum should be "Be Nice" but of course this is not my forum so what I think is not very important.
 
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Thread's up! It's a bit bare at the moment, so share your ideas in this (not that) thread. I wanna keep that one clear of excessive discussion so as not to take away from the first post.

"Optimized to the maximum extent"? I don't know BP, that's giving Pandora devs a little too much credit.
 
Well, you got something concrete to say, then say it! You know more than I do, and I ain't stopping you from bragging about that.
 
Okay, well no software is really "optimized as much as possible", but aside from taking that literally, very little software is Pandora exclusive or Pandora optimized very significantly. Sometimes things get a performance boost by being on Pandora instead of some Android phone - for instance because of the direct framebuffer access - but it's not because the developers are optimizing them better.
 
It's not about seggregation, it's about evolution. Plenty of forums have newbie forums for exactly these reasons.
Good point.


Best argument I can think of is that we could provide a place where no flaming/aggrivation is allowed. I'm new enough to hesitate before asking something I didn't hunt down first, but with information in so many different places and with such disparate intended audiences in terms of prerequisite knowledge that a place where I can ask stupid questions would be awesome to me. It could be marked with something like "Any question is valid, but there are no promises for replies if we've grown tired of answering them."


Not only is that just friendly, but it would also give newer members a specific place to help someone less skilled as opposed to always being the one in need of help... I'd dig that.

^ You sir, speak eloquently.
Thank you very much for saying so. :)
 
Okay, well no software is really "optimized as much as possible", but aside from taking that literally, very little software is Pandora exclusive or Pandora optimized very significantly. Sometimes things get a performance boost by being on Pandora instead of some Android phone - for instance because of the direct framebuffer access - but it's not because the developers are optimizing them better.
Would it not make sense to work on a new os that incorporates the dsp i believe this has been discused many times, then the devs would have a bit more juice to work with? Mame0X anyone?
 
Notaz is working on that. The DSP will be better for media playback than for emulation.
 
Best argument I can think of is that we could provide a place where no flaming/aggrivation is allowed.
It might be a bit naive, but I still haven't given up hope for that applying to the entire board.


Respect and decency should not be restricted to a special sub-forum.
 
We just need a newbie forum where people can live when they first hear of the Pandora. The more knowledgeble members that don't mind answering the same, or a variation of the same, question every now and again can take care of the replies. Maybe a couple can volunteer to make sure questions get answered friendly.

At the top of that forum a FAQ should be stickied and someone, Blue Protoman perhaps, gets put in charge of making sure all the questions that pop up regularly are answered in there. That way at a certain point most recurring threads can be replied to with a link to the FAQ and a lock making sure it fades away fast.
Write up a pinned "Why the Pandora is the way it is" thread, and flash it brightly for all to see. [...] (It has to be on the forums, not enough people read the wiki.)
I agree that it has to be on the forum. However, I don't think that an /additional/ sticky thread would help as long as it's about a specific topic, such as "Why the Pandora is the way it is". Because that logic would assume that another sticky thread would help against the problem of too many information sources (after all, the information IS already there, somewhere).


Please read the following quote:

One of the biggest problems this scene currently has is that while much information about the various devices that are being discussed is available, this information is scattered all over the internet in various flavors of usefulness and complexity. This situation confuses new users, which ultimately leads to even more cluttered information.

To stop this spiral movement and prevent further clutter in this forum, it would probably be helpful to aggregate the most profound information that can be found within posts of this forum in a single sticky thread in a useful way. However, the number of sticky threads this forum has is probably already too high to make people pay enough attention to any of them. When creating software, usability can often be increased by structuring a decision tree that is deep instead of wide. In other words, concolidating (some of) the sticky threads into one (and/or unstickying some of them) could help.


Recently, I initiated something on the German forums which I would also suggest for boards.openpandora.org : a "Forenindex" (~="board index"). It's a single sticky thread that should aggregate links to the most profound posts which are useful in the context of the topics that the forum revolves around. It serves two specific purposes:

  1. The likelihood of someone asking a common question (such as which SD card(s) to buy, what screen protector to use, if the Pandora should have had a hinge similar to that of the Nintendo DS (links to various screen adjustment hacks that were posted on the forum) or wether the Pandora's NAND can wear quickly) decreases.
  2. The fact that through the existence of a board index as a single sticky thread it gets WAY easier to find some of the posts containing profound information that are spread across the board increases the chance that someone will add that information to the wiki (which is the place that all information should be headed to).


Number 2) is the reason for why a board index makes sense even though it comes close to being a quirky kind of wiki itself. The board index of forum.gp2x.de is currently at v0.0.0.1 , whenever it changes I will increase the version number and post a diff into a dedicated thread so people can easily follow the changes and updates.

Source: http://boards.openpandora.org/index.php?/topic/3273-do-you-think-id-make-a-good-moderator/page__view__findpost__p__56829


How is this different from any FAQ thread? Unlike FAQ threads, the board index isn't meant to give answers itself. Rather, it is meant as THE single starting point when looking for information on this board. To take the aforementioned hypothetical FAQ thread as an example, the board index would have a link to that. By reducing the number of existing stickies through un-stickying /some/ threads and instead linking to them from the board index (and also to the still-stickies, since they are useful and the board index is meant to link to every useful resource that can be found within this forum), you can make sure that new users understand that the board index is the place to start when looking for information /that can be found on boards.openpandora.org /.


Since for every question that gets asked frequently there probably already exists a good post that answers the question in a sane, understandable and at least largely comprehensive way (~="useful"), these posts can be linked to from the board index in case a question is being asked TOO frequently. By making sure that only answers that are useful are being linked to in the board index, you can prevent an explosion in the number of links that the board index provides as well as let people know that all links in there are useful (which further increases the chance that people will look there when hunting for information and/or point other people there). (For instance, if a new question is being asked several times a day but no one has created a post that answers that question in a useful way, then the board index does not have a link to an answer because there is none that would fit the board index' minimum link quality.)


Plus, it is different from an FAQ thread because it does NOT create any new information itself except for the list of useul information that's alread there, and thus can be a first step to consolidating the existing information by making useful information more easily findable without actually creating new information. As described in my quote above, this way it can help with bringing information from this board to the wiki.

They could ignore such threads, but will they? At least this way their responses will be this;

Check this thread out, it'll explain everything.

...rather than this;

Did you even bother to look at the damned site? It says right there! Do your research before you come here asking silly questions!

See the difference? I could probably go more extreme. I don't think cracking down on our own will do any good. Taking away our reason to crack down on anybody is much better.
But such responses will not change. They can *already* do what you suggest - there is already extant documentation to link to (yes, granted, it's not all in one overview, and I do agree that that would be a very useful thing to have! ;) ) that would allow for this.
Very few people would answer the latter to a question that hadn't been asked before. Seen the other way around, at least part of what makes people answer rudely is that some questions keep getting asked over and over, and I assume that that part is probably a relatively huge one.


There are mainly two reasons for why someone may be asking others for some information that a significant amount of people would describe as being "easy to find through searching". The first one is that the person doesn't bother looking for information himself/herself, and these people shouldn't really be replied to since just giving people who don't respect the time resources of others what they want will only make problems worse. Unfortunately, you sometimes can't say for sure if a person is just lazy. Maybe it's just the second reason, which is that information that is easy to find for those who already know where to look mustn't necessarily be easy to find for those who don't, even if (part of) the former group believes that the existing information must be sufficient for the latter group to find the desired information. Luckily, working on an improvement for reason two also helps with problem one.


-----

Sources will be cited by the best people to cite them from. (Who would you rather take an argument about the Pandora from; Joe Schmoe or WizardStan?) Such as this (this is just an example, there might be more to it);
I agree with the first part, however I can't (and don't want to) resist to say that names don't mean anything.


-----


And one last thing: whenever discussing something on the intenet, keep in mind that the members of the respective discussion platform may live in various time zones. This is not just true for this thread or forum, of course. Prior to deciding anything on an internet discussion platform, it's a good idea to wait a sufficient amount of time before actually deciding or beginning to implement. People on the other side of the globe may have something to contribute.


This is the reason for why this post may not be very well written and/or understandable, for which I'm sorry - I don't have much time right now. You may now call me names for posting something of mediocre quality. I'll have to start since I despise people who publish information in a rush: I'm an idiot and you should never ever read even parts of this post.
 
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I was going to start a thread specifically for preorderers that are still waiting. A sort of support group where they/we could vent and talk about why they ordered, what they're looking forward to most etc. Maybe keep some people from cancelling. Decided against it though because I was worried it would just turn into a "bash Craig and the team" thread.


The main reason being that there are a few threads specifically for people who have already recieved their units. "Show us your Pandora's Desktop" or "What are you playing on your pandora now" type threads. I don't know about others but this makes the waiting even worse so I generally avoid those threads.


Sorry if this isn't totally on topic but it still may be a good idea if the thread was used properly, IDK?
 
Notaz is working on that. The DSP will be better for media playback than for emulation.
Strange i remember reading a topic that all TI dsp can be used as a standard cpu kind of like the tms 34010 used in narc and mc was originally a dsp but most companies used it as the main cpu.
 
Best argument I can think of is that we could provide a place where no flaming/aggrivation is allowed.
It might be a bit naive, but I still haven't given up hope for that applying to the entire board.


Respect and decency should not be restricted to a special sub-forum.

I completely agree with the sentiment. I mean that less to imply that anyone would be rude or otherwise unhelpful, and more to say that its necessary as a result of the way things are to ask people to research the information already available before posting a request for what might be available with a simple Google search, but that it's hard to know at first where to look and frequently to even know how to ask the question, and that I (being the polite n00b that I am) want to avoid annoying my new friends unintentionally.


Whether or not anyone would be upset, it would help ME to know that even if I didn't devote as much time and attention as I have to some searches, that I can ask the questions I have if I just don't have the TIME to search myself, even if the answer is a simple redirect to another place with the answer I need. In some ways I'm really green, and even though I enjoy going on the hunt for information myself I do run out of time and energy at some point and I would really love some hand-holding if I knew I could ask for it without making myself a nuisance.


:)
 
A bit sad if we've come to the point where these forums (this community?) specifically need to create somewhere else - some sort of 'safe haven' - where people who want to know more about the Pandora - people who yes, in their ignorance, might say, ask or suggest things that will upset our sensibilities as True Pandorans - where those people can go without fear of flaming or aggravation.


Sadder still perhaps that we're at the point where it's acceptable to make out those very aggravators as being the victims because they've been given "a reason to flare up".


FFS people. Wake up to yourselves before it's too late.
 
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Whether or not anyone would be upset, it would help ME to know that even if I didn't devote as much time and attention as I have to some searches, that I can ask the questions I have if I just don't have the TIME to search myself, even if the answer is a simple redirect to another place with the answer I need.
It has been my impression and experience so far that this has never truly been a problem in this community to begin with. There have been less than a handful of incidents recently where it caused some issues and immediately a thread like this spawns as a reaction (perhaps even an overreaction) to the incident.


Overall, I would say these boards are fairly serious and mature, helpful and friendly filled with people who share a common love for gaming classics and Linux. Yes, it has been a long and bumpy ride. Yes, sometimes emotions cause a bit of drama. It's only because we're all so passionate about what we are doing here.


Sure, newcomers could and should take some time to read before they post but the longtime members should also be a bit more patient with them. I don't think that a separate forum for questions which could otherwise easily be searched is the solution. Unless you make a serious habit out of asking the obvious or you start asking questions which are on the very first page of the official site, people tend to answer them anyway.
 
Whether or not anyone would be upset, it would help ME to know that even if I didn't devote as much time and attention as I have to some searches, that I can ask the questions I have if I just don't have the TIME to search myself, even if the answer is a simple redirect to another place with the answer I need.
It has been my impression and experience so far that this has never truly been a problem in this community to begin with. There have been less than a handful of incidents recently where it caused some issues and immediately a thread like this spawns as a reaction (perhaps even an overreaction) to the incident.


Overall, I would say these boards are fairly serious and mature, helpful and friendly filled with people who share a common love for gaming classics and Linux. Yes, it has been a long and bumpy ride. Yes, sometimes emotions cause a bit of drama. It's only because we're all so passionate about what we are doing here.


Sure, newcomers could and should take some time to read before they post but the longtime members should also be a bit more patient with them. I don't think that a separate forum for questions which could otherwise easily be searched is the solution. Unless you make a serious habit out of asking the obvious or you start asking questions which are on the very first page of the official site, people tend to answer them anyway.
Overall that is very true,but being the butt of stupid jokes in the past i can speak through experience,you just need to rise above a specific immature bunch(you know who you are)and move on the majority of people in these forums have been extremely helpful,its as the saying goes its only easy if you know the answer.
 
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For my 2p I'd say that it doesn't matter how many threads you open for new people, a vast majority of them won't read them, they certainly won't all file nicely into 'noob' rooms and talk amongst themselves.


A great deal of people will have seen the specs and decided that they know all they need to know and will join in on regular discussions. Another bunch will have seen it, scoffed at the 'underpowered' hardware and deliberately wanted to come here to troll.


It's a nice idea to have a thread that answers all the commonly asked questions, it might work for some but personally I see these types of things as patronising and generally avoid them.


I think it's just going to have to be a case of either resisting posting when someone asks a silly question, or coming down the ivory stairs and offering a hand.
 
A bit sad if we've come to the point where these forums (this community?) specifically need to create somewhere else - some sort of 'safe haven' - where people who want to know more about the Pandora - people who yes, in their ignorance, might say, ask or suggest things that will upset our sensibilities as True Pandorans - where those people can go without fear of flaming or aggravation.


Sadder still perhaps that we're at the point where it's acceptable to make out those very aggravators as being the victims because they've been given "a reason to flare up".


FFS people. Wake up to yourselves before it's too late.

While you're not wrong, the very existence of this discussion is proof that there is some concern that the goodwill of the community might be slipping a little bit. There have never been any set rules here, nor any moderators to warn people that they're acting like jerks. I see this as a sort of middle ground solution.


I'm not sure about a subforum (although Gp32x's boards has an "I need help" section for the Pandora), but at least a compilation thread would be helpful. Countless other forums do such a thing and it is an immeasurably helpful resource.


We're all still going to see a continuous stream of new threads by people who refuse to read and search for themselves (why they can't do this is both beyond me and is an internet-wide problem), but that's still not a good reason to be unfriendly or a jerk. At the very least, a curt "please check the FAQ thread first" is usually enough.


Bravo to Blue Protoman for taking the initiative.
 
I'm not sure about a subforum (although Gp32x's boards has an "I need help" section for the Pandora)
The "I need help" section there is equivalent to the "Support" section here - their purpose is the same. I'm pretty sure all of the systems have them (all named the same, too), on GP32X. :p


Anyway, @Blue Protoman - I've stickied your thread, as it seems to be developing into a concise and easy to navigate resource. However, I have a suggestion: A name-change. The name doesn't quite suggest to me what its purpose is, although I can understand you wanting to differentiate it from a mere "FAQ", as it seems to be a bit more specific than that.


Some slightly more neutral wording in places might help, too, as I suspect some snippets of it might make people think it's a bit biased. For example, the part headed "I shouldn't have to pay more money for something I already paid for!" comes off that way, at least the way I read it, in that bits of it seem to have a hint of trying to pressure people into upgrading in the way they're worded - this might not have been intentional, but I think it's worth pointing out.
 
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