I've been trolling this community for like half a year. Then I leave for a couple months. Wow, what happened to the layout of everything? Is this still the same community as ITT?

EDIT: Just noticed a Community section. Can a mod move this thread there, please? Thank you.

Nice new clean brand, consistent with the rest of maemo.org - Nokia now kindly pay for the servers (although it's still under Reggie Suplido's control) and so no ads :-)

Yes (although with the comments that accompanied the theme change, you'd imagine this was some kind of hostile takeover by "them").

More info in the original announcement:

http://www.internettablettalk.com/20...-talkmaemoorg/

It was a takeover that many people objected to and there was a fake vote, fake in that you had to go to the maemo site to vote, implying acceptance of the takeover when voting for whether there should be a takeover. A very small number of people voted, which could hardly be taken as an overwhelming endorsement.

So, the ITT site was owned by someone and he did whatever the heck he wanted to do with it. No one can object to that...

And yet... and yet...

Yeah, how after seeing how it's integrated into the maemo.org site, I thought Nokia took it over. Good to know it's still ITT at the core, though.

There was no vote, fake or otherwise. The council election was entirely unrelated to the "rebrand" of ITT to tmo. It wasn't something the council decided in any way whatsoever. For the five billionth time, the council is primarily one of facilitators. The only decisions we've ever made are who gets sponsored to go the summit; who was our debmaster and who was going to decide on the content for the community days for the summit.

Anyway, the constructive comments about ITT/tmo users knowing about the election have been taken into account with this month's election:

http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?p=310976

tmo users who didn't have a linked maemo.org account (as far as I could work out) and would be eligible to vote based on their tmo account alone, have received an email telling them how to link their account.

So, as Texrat suggests, stop objecting.

Nokia don't own maemo.org. The community does. They just pay the bills (for the servers, and the four full-time employees who work on our behalf).

Oh, didn't know that. Learned something new today. (:

But ITT wasn't sponsered by Nokia?

ITT wasn't, it was entirely Reggie's doing, he paid for the servers too. Talk.maemo.org is still his doing, but the servers are paid for by Nokia.

Incidentally I've never worked on a Nokia-sponsored site but All About Symbian does get lent a lot of review equipment by Nokia and we have never had problems with them over our critical reviews. Some of our articles have totally savaged Nokia products but they've never stopped sending us free loan devices.

I think Nokia's approach to PR is a fairly mature one, they aim to keep people talking about their products rather than forcing people to talk in any particular way. They seem to see silence as much more damaging than criticism. It's mature because it means that when third party sites do praise a Nokia product after slating previous products it can be more trusted. I remember the E71 got good reviews across the board even on sites like El Reg, and that carried a lot more credibility because El Reg had tended to be anti-Nokia in the past.

Some other phone manufacturers (naming no names...) have a tendency to cut off any sites which fail to give their products good reviews, but that's never happened to AAS or any other Nokia-related site AFAIK. Nokia even publicise the critical reviews alongside the positive ones on the WOM World site, which again adds to the credibility of their approach to PR.