Forum structure

General discussion about calculators, SwissMicros or otherwise
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ziggurat29
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Joined: Mon Apr 24, 2017 8:42 pm

Re: Forum structure

Post by ziggurat29 »

I agree with starting simple, and bifurcating as need manifests itself, as opposed to a speculating on a rich set of subdivisions that may prove to be unaligned with actual needs and wind up being clutter (and wasted time).

I believe these forum softwares generally support moving threads/topics around, so it seems that if you had, say, an aggregate topic like 'DM1x', and it later became obvious that the small and large format needed to be separated, that you could do that with relative ease and folks would not be confused by the change.

That being said, to my sensibilities, these initial divisions seem useful:
1) Announcements -- probably locked to SM staff and read-only to others
2) Hardware -- for talking about the hardware itself; e.g. for discussions like 'keyboard issues' or 'IR led mod' etc.
3) Firmware -- for talking about the software that runs on the units; e.g. 'holding PREFIX causes excessive battery consumption', or 'special build with Arabic font' etc.
3) General -- for random stuff folks might want to discuss (probably a nursery for future topic creation as the accretion of similarly-themed discussion becomes noticeable).

I agree that 'hierarchical' possibly/probably means 'inscrutable', because this software doesn't seem to have a tree view of topics, so you would need to spelunk to find deep topics. The 'tags' suggestion could be useful (though

As to a topic on 'user programs', I guess 'why not?', though it does seem that there are more than enough forums extant on that for models that are HP work-alikes. If one day SM decides to go into the software market as well, creating some completely new system, then yes that make sense because there is no other outlet.

Anyway, SM is a small company; I'm sure they would like the forum management burden to be light relative to producing product. Often these administrative tasks are done by volunteers outside the company (not me; I am a very very light forum user).

-z
Thomas Okken
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Re: Forum structure

Post by Thomas Okken »

BigEd wrote:
Wed May 03, 2017 9:02 am
Hierarchical subforums - terrible idea! For as long as it's a small world, arrange things so there's a single front page which can show all the forums.
Seconded. The subforums make navigation confusing. It's hard to see that there would be so many forums that you couldn't just show all of them on one page, perhaps with some optical grouping, like the hpmuseum.org forums.

Also: the DM42 Beta Units forum on the front page is not visible when I'm not logged in. Is that intentional?
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Walter
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Re: Forum structure

Post by Walter »

Thomas Okken wrote:
Wed May 03, 2017 8:58 pm
BigEd wrote:
Wed May 03, 2017 9:02 am
Hierarchical subforums - terrible idea! For as long as it's a small world, arrange things so there's a single front page which can show all the forums.
Seconded. The subforums make navigation confusing. It's hard to see that there would be so many forums that you couldn't just show all of them on one page, perhaps with some optical grouping, like the hpmuseum.org forums.

Also: the DM42 Beta Units forum on the front page is not visible when I'm not logged in. Is that intentional?
Thirded. And I confirm Thomas' observation. Please bring the DM42 Beta Units forum to the front page as well. Thanks in advance!
WP43 SN00000, 34S, and 31S for obvious reasons; HP-35, 45, ..., 35S, 15CE, DM16L S/N# 00093, DM42β SN:00041
Thomas Okken
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Re: Forum structure

Post by Thomas Okken »

Would it be possible to increase the session timeout?

A bit earlier, I typed a somewhat long post, on my phone and therefore not very quickly, and when I finally hit Preview, I was told I had to login.

Fortunately, I could hit "back" and copy the post, before logging back in, but all it takes is one false move, or a browser that discards form contents in this situation, and you end up losing your post. Which is very annoying if you just spent half an hour writing it.
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