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AVR Freaks Forum Index » Non-technical forums » AVRfreaks.net Housekeeping

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rfinanger

Posted: Sep 19, 2007 - 08:52 AM

Joined: Feb 26, 2004
Posts: 140

Quote:

Have you looked at vbulletin? It appears to be a very nice, stable, secure, and extensible forum framework.

Yes + Invisionboard http://www.invisionpower.com/community/board/index.html.

rfinanger

Posted: Sep 19, 2007 - 09:07 AM

Joined: Feb 26, 2004
Posts: 140

Quote:

4) As little of the "fancy design stuff" as possible. This site is good because of the quality of it's (text) content.

This request is also going to be granted. The new freaks site is going to be clean and not "freaky-looking" in any way. We want it to be a good tool for you guys without any disturbance from eye-candy graphics. We hope to have a design draft ready during october. All beta-tester will be involved in this process.

ikletti

Posted: Sep 19, 2007 - 09:14 AM

Joined: Oct 17, 2003
Posts: 311
Location: Germany

Hi,

I second the wishes for a "Don´t show me this forum" or "Don´t show me new messages for this forum" option/flag in my profile.

The current forum has the option to "watch" topics without actually posting there myself. I´ve been using this feature to bookmark threads for future reference. Maybe I´m missing something obvious, but until now I haven´t found an option/link "show all topics I am watching" (similar to the egosearch showing all my forum posts).

So my wish for the new forum would be a kind of bookmark list or search function for watched topics.

Posted: Sep 19, 2007 - 09:33 AM

Joined: Mar 28, 2001
Posts: 20633
Location: Sydney, Australia (Gum trees, Koalas and Kangaroos, No Edelweiss)

Quote:

And are you sure that I henceforth will not see the thread in the forum listing or in "show new posts"?

Don't know about that, but you can unsubscribe from a topic and no longer get notifications of new postings to that thread.

_________________
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Ampertronics Pty. Ltd.
www.ampertronics.com.au
* Electronic Design * Custom Products * Contract Assembly

pykedgew

Posted: Sep 19, 2007 - 02:35 PM

Joined: Jun 18, 2001
Posts: 1085
Location: Brisbane Queensland Australia

Hi

I would like to see better guidelines or improvements to Project Area.

There has been an increasing usage of URL links for the owner’s projects.
If the link does not respond due to the person has move or close their personal sites.
Then it defeats the whole purpose for others who would like to see it.

The whole project contents should contain the files, codes, diagrams, schematics & picture.
This will suit better for all members.

Maybe when a new member joins then a quota of 100 posts or more will be allow placing their project.
Then we know that they are serious about participating.
This will weed out the homework or project requests from University, Technical College, Prep, School and other educational bodies.

Cheers
Ken

ikletti

Posted: Sep 19, 2007 - 05:19 PM

Joined: Oct 17, 2003
Posts: 311
Location: Germany

How about a customized start page, i.e. the user can configure what he wants to see after login. This way one could directly jump to the forum section or the advanced search, for example.

While I like Ken´s idea of a posts quota for the projects section, I think it is a double-edged sword. Just think of someone who has successfully completed a project and would like to publish it only to find out he is short of 27 posts to hit the quota. Could be really annoying.

Ingo

ikletti

Posted: Sep 19, 2007 - 05:39 PM

Joined: Oct 17, 2003
Posts: 311
Location: Germany

Another thought on the projects section: A rating system where the ratings of members with higher posting figures have more weight. The rating could even be dependent on the project category and where rating user gained its quota: AVR, GCC, general electronics, off-topic, etc.

Ingo

JohanEkdahl

Posted: Sep 19, 2007 - 06:35 PM

Joined: Mar 27, 2002
Posts: 18757
Location: Lund, Sweden

Quote:

you can unsubscribe from a topic and no longer get notifications of new postings to that thread.

Yes, but... I wasn't wishing for notifications disappearing. I was wishing for a filter of what I see when visiting the site.

bloody-orc

Posted: Sep 19, 2007 - 06:37 PM

Joined: Dec 17, 2005
Posts: 1500
Location: Europe- Estonia- Tallinn

maybe a small quiz on forums rules when joining? One has to read the rules and after reading it he must complete a quiz of say 5-10 questions on the same topic.

daqq

Posted: Sep 19, 2007 - 07:24 PM

Joined: Dec 15, 2003
Posts: 4412
Location: Slovakia, Bratislava

I have to disagree with the project quota based on posts. While it would keep out the homework, it would also keep some projetcs away Sad

I don't have any suggestions though for an efective project system. Sad

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JohanEkdahl

Posted: Sep 19, 2007 - 08:24 PM

Joined: Mar 27, 2002
Posts: 18757
Location: Lund, Sweden

The solution to a good projects section is in the answer to the question "Why is it so darned hard to navigate the projects section today?".

If it was easy any moderator could browse through the latest weeks submissions and simply toss the ones that did not adhere to the "only finished projects, with full documentation..."requirement. If a moderator could do that in five minutes per week I suspect it would be done.

An alternative would be a two-step process. You submit your project to a "prospect" list. This would be browseable so that the really impatient could find all things seconds after submitted, but it would not generate any announcements or such. Think "silent unless you actively look yourself". A moderator/scrutinizer would accept/release the project from this list into the "real" projects area. In this way the projects area would be kept clean/neat also.

Think this: "Dear 'freak. You have submitted a project to the projects area. I want to inform you that this area are for complete and finished projects only, and thus your submission has been rejected as it is only a sketch or idea. When/if you finish your idea you are most welcome back to re-submit."

Or this: ""Dear 'freak. You have submitted a project to the projects area, but you have not tagged it with any keywords (neither from the required list nor any own-invented ones). For the admission of the project into the projects area this has to be done. Please update [bla, bla...]. Thank you!"

The projects forum could have a requirement that you identified a project before starting to discuss it. This would stop "rogue" posts in the projects forum. The project per se in the projects area could have links to theese threads (or some such, eg. a button "Find all project forum threads pertaining to this project").

Posted: Sep 19, 2007 - 09:01 PM

Joined: Mar 01, 2001
Posts: 4960
Location: Rocky Mountains

I already gave my suggestion to Eivind, but here is to the rest of the community. To solve all the issues with the Academy section, how about turning the Academy section into a GForge site?
http://gforge.org/

This would give the AVR Freaks community all the capabilities of SourceForge. Real project management, and real tools per project: revision control system, bug trackers, feature list trackers, mailing lists, forums, file release system, user access control, news releases, etc. This would definitely allow an open source development model for any project, as opposed to what there is now, which is just a static repository. And of course, it would allow easy categorization of projects and search. Smile

So what do you think? Would you like to have AVR Forge (tm)? Smile

daqq

Posted: Sep 19, 2007 - 09:11 PM

Joined: Dec 15, 2003
Posts: 4412
Location: Slovakia, Bratislava

EW: Uuuuh...goood idea! Does the gforge system provide "online meetings"? You know, a bunch of guys working on a projects sits down infront of some flash app, where they get a drawing board, chat etc...

An idea: "outsource" the search function to google. Reinventing the wheel is nice and all, but with all due respect, google can most likely provide better results than the local search. They''ve been at it for quite some time now, and I hear they're good at it Wink

OK, so the things I like most (compared to some other forums) are:
My recent posts
Nice and briliant and experienced people

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Time flies when you have a bad prescaler selected.

smileymicros

Posted: Sep 19, 2007 - 09:48 PM

Joined: Nov 17, 2004
Posts: 6144
Location: Great Smokey Mountains.

JohanEkdahl wrote:

An alternative would be a two-step process. You submit your project to a "prospect" list. This would be browseable so that the really impatient could find all things seconds after submitted, but it would not generate any announcements or such. Think "silent unless you actively look yourself". A moderator/scrutinizer would accept/release the project from this list into the "real" projects area. In this way the projects area would be kept clean/neat also.

I want to strongly second Johan's suggestion. This feature along with a better projects search feature, and a better hierarchical organization would go a long way to improving the project section utility.

Smiley

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benedict

Posted: Sep 19, 2007 - 09:56 PM

Joined: Sep 11, 2006
Posts: 163
Location: Kamuela, HI

Here's my take:

Low Eye Candy - Glad to hear the new site will be low on eye-candy. I have a relatively good network connection, but I do live on an island. Some sites are slow because of graphic overload. I also have problems reading sites that are too "glitzy". Black text, white screen, decent margins, and undistracting borders. The current AVRFreaks site works well for me in this regard. (All kidding aside, this really is a big deal for me. I have a hard time visually processing cluttered sites.)

Projects Revamp! I'll second and third most of the comments on the projects area but it does mean more time and energy spent on site-management. I think the current project setup encourages what we're seeing, though: A project must be set up and posted before code or schematics can be added to it. First project I posted, the upload function was broken so I stuck in a URL to point at the Sourceforge site. Not great, and I remedied it as soon as possible, but it illustrates the problem. Flip it around: Require attached files before the project ever shows up at all. If there's no code or no schematic, it doesn't show up in the list. If the owner doesn't post code or schematics within X days, the project is deleted.

I like the idea of the project tags, but in execution it didn't work. For what it's worth, that's a bugaboo that's been hanging around the neck of every online catalog system that's ever been invented. It's the hellishly expensive ones that tended to come up with fixes first, and they didn't always work well. I'd be happy if the tags were dropped in favor of a site-only Google search tool. "Show me everything involving USB and host-mode." You get the idea. If people write their descriptions well, the tags aren't entirely necessary.

Maybe Some Tags - It might be nice to keep things like "Is it C or Assembly?" "Is it GCC, IAR, etc?" "What device is it written for?" tagged. But these should be pull-down items rather than free-form typing. That avoids a lot of the "ATMEGA128" vs "ATmega128" vs "atmega_128" vs ... As new devices or compilers hit the streets, add them to the pull-down list.

Searching - Bullet-proof searching of the forums would be great, too. I wind up doing Google "site:www.avrfreaks.net ..." searches constantly to get around this. Good to have it on-site, though.

GForge - I'm powerfully tempted. Powerfully. It'd be nice to hear some of the inside poop-scoop from Sourceforge, though, to find out what headaches this is likely to cause our administrators. (Can you imagine every single entry in the Project area showing up as an entry in the RC source tree?) FWIW I've got my stuff on Sourceforge, but I get the feeling it's not entirely set up for embedded development. Too many questions get answered with "other". Having that functionality here on Freaks would ROCK. But not if it makes for so much moderation overhead that our administrators and moderators suffer nervous breakdown.

Datasheet / App Note Repository - I know I can get all this off the Atmel site (and now that I actually signed up for updates, I find out when updates or new documents appear!) But it'd be great to be able to search the forums, the projects, and the app notes repository at the same time. Imagine someone like me, who just got his first USBKEY board, doing an innocent search and finding: the docs for the board, the datasheet for the processor, the app note (and source!) for setting it up as a host controller, two or three projects where people have already done other similar work, etc. Heaven!

"I NEEEEED HEEEEELP!" - I've already said my bit about why it's never a good idea to use a subject header like this, so I won't go on a rant here. If anyone ever truly finds a fix for this, please publish it and take your seat on the stage next to Linus Torvalds and Tim Berners-Lee. I will give you a standing ovation every time I see you.

Beta Testing - I'm in for beta-testing as well. Can't afford the air-fare, but I'd be happy to pick up a couple of rounds of pizza and beer.

Tom

Posted: Sep 20, 2007 - 04:17 AM

Joined: Mar 01, 2001
Posts: 4960
Location: Rocky Mountains

daqq wrote:

You didn't go look at the link very deep did you? No, GForge (nor SourceForge or Savannah) offer that. You can always use instant messaging (IM) or contact Webex (commercial) for stuff like that.

daqq wrote:

An idea: "outsource" the search function to google.

Searching web pages is different from search "open source projects". Go to SourceForge (sourceforge.net) and take a look at how they organize projects. Do a search. See how it works.

Posted: Sep 20, 2007 - 04:25 AM

Joined: Mar 01, 2001
Posts: 4960
Location: Rocky Mountains

smileymicros wrote:

JohanEkdahl wrote:

An alternative would be a two-step process. You submit your project to a "prospect" list.

I want to strongly second Johan's suggestion.

GForge (and SourceForge and Savannah) has a system in place whereby a person wanting to start a project must submit a short form describing what the project is about. The site admins then must approve the project before anything can happen with it. With an "AVR Forge" site, this would allow us to make sure that the project was a project centered around the AVR, and not say a PIC project. Shocked

Posted: Sep 20, 2007 - 04:59 AM

Joined: Mar 01, 2001
Posts: 4960
Location: Rocky Mountains

benedict wrote:

GForge - I'm powerfully tempted. Powerfully. It'd be nice to hear some of the inside poop-scoop from Sourceforge, though, to find out what headaches this is likely to cause our administrators.

SourceForge's problems are very different mainly due to sheer volume: the number of registered users, the number of projects. An AVR Forge site would not have nearly the amount of traffic of SourceForge.

The nice thing is that administration is needed to approve the projects. After that, it's up to the owner of the project whether or not to use the available tools. The GForge software automatically takes care of setting up things like the mailing lists, trackers, revision control system, etc.

benedict wrote:

(Can you imagine every single entry in the Project area showing up as an entry in the RC source tree?)

The software doesn't work like that, even at SourceForge.

benedict wrote:

FWIW I've got my stuff on Sourceforge, but I get the feeling it's not entirely set up for embedded development. Too many questions get answered with "other".

The only thing that I've noticed about SourceForge regarding embedded systems is that they just don't have the categories set up for different kinds of embedded projects. But that's because they serve a much wider audience. On AVR Forge, the categories (of projects) could be modified to suit the audience.

zbaird

Posted: Sep 20, 2007 - 09:40 PM

Joined: Aug 13, 2006
Posts: 6762
Location: Bellingham, WA - USA

I'd like to require that the user's location be filled in on the profile. Not that everyone would tell the truth, but most would. Even a country or continent is better than nothing.

I'd second the idea of having the option to make certain forums not show up on the main page. I'd also like an option that says to put the stickies at the bottom of the first page instead of the top. And I've never had the "already read" stuff work quite right, so anything would be an improvement along those lines.

I also think you guys do a wonderful job with this site. I'm sure whatever you come up with will be done with care, thought, and finesse. Then you'll be bombarded with crap from the malcontents.

I'd also be happy to help out with the beta testing, or in any other way I might be useful.

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"It's better to catch the trapeze than test the safety net" -- RPi book
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kimjoarr

Posted: Sep 21, 2007 - 09:13 AM

Joined: Oct 25, 2005
Posts: 111
Location: Trondheim, Norway

In the new AVRFreaks version we are going to change forum software, and we are wondering if anyone of you have used a forum you really thought worked fantastic. Just let us know, and we are going to check it out!

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/ Kim Joar

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