Should Community section come before General?
 

There's been a great deal of discussion over reforming parts of maemo.org to better suit existing members and newcomers. The common concern is presenting a 'face' useful for all and providing conduits for differing needs and goals.

In the spirit of that, I propose we switch the order of General and Community sections. This will result in the following order for Talk:

Community
General
Off Topic

In my opinion this is a more functional order based on recent topics.

And yes, I realize that injecting an opinion makes this very unscientific, but it is after all a proposal, not a co-create session. ;)

Re: Should Community section come before General?
 

Sounds good. Maybe i'm being overly optimistic, but i think there are going to be an order of magnitude more users here in the next year and the traffic is going to make things really hard to find. Is there a way to set it up so that there are "channels" in the active topics? N8x0 users are already getting flooded with Maemo5/N900 stuff. Add another device and it's going to get ridiculous. Plus, the noise from non-developers randomly chiming in in technical discussions is going to become a bigger problem. That leads to FUD and dilutes the useful comments. A default minimal subscription could be changed by going into the user CP.

Think of e.g. the recently released information on the Maemo6 UI.

Re: Should Community section come before General?
 

Good questions... no answer from me, sorry. But I do have ideas about ad hoc channelling, and they fit in with this proposal. More on that very soon.

Thanks for participating!

Re: Should Community section come before General?
 

I think we should do away with General, altogether.

If we try hard enough, every thread should be able to be fit into

a specific OS
a specific device
a specific app
|||accessories
|||buy / sell
community
off-topic

General is full of... well, just about everything, including the kitchen-sink, much of which could be fit into another topic (kitchen sink would be off-topic, of course!:))

Re: Should Community section come before General?
 

I actually see value in General still, and in fact that has been discussed here ad nauseum with reasonable consensus. I just think Community has shown increasing value over it.

Thanks for contributing!

Re: Should Community section come before General?
 

I dunno, I see General as a place for people to start threads when they are too lazy to figure out a more appropriate sub-forum.

For instance, I see to my right on the Active Topics list, a thread in General called Super Tiny Keyboard. That would fit great in accessories, but I can see where logical processes like that could be too difficult for some people.

Re: Should Community section come before General?
 

This is not central to the poll but certainly related:

A forum should function as a hierarchal filter as much as possible, serving the majority need with the first section and narrowing down as it proceeds.

With this in mind, I believe Off Topic should appear dead LAST on the overall page. Let the targetted sections catch the specific subjects and all else fall into Off Topic. In that light, General could and probably should be next to last.

Regardless I still think Community should come first.

Re: Should Community section come before General?
 

Oh, for sure.

Just do it. You've got the juice now.

Just be prepared for My tablit keeps reboting HELP! to show up in Community ;)

Re: Should Community section come before General?
 

This gets into the question of whether or not Maemo Talk wants to be a new N900 user destination. If so, Talk should be structured:

Talk

Newbie
General
Community
Off Topic

I think Community, while valuable, will be primarily of interest to those who contribute to the community rather than those who are seeking information from the community. I would also consider moving Off Topic out of Talk.

I would also suggest that a more comprehensive restructuring might be in order. To wit:

N900 - Maemo 6

N900 Newbie
N900 Hardware Users
N900 Software Users (Maemo 6 and Applications)
N900/Maemo 6 Developers

N800/N810 - Maemo 5

N800/N810 Newbie
N800 Hardware Users
N810 Hardware Users
N800/N810 Software Users (Maemo 5 and Applications)
N800/N810/Maemo 5 Developers

Talk

General
Community
Off Topic

Old
. . .

Re: Should Community section come before General?
 

I feel the same way about the N900 posts.

(At least until I get my own.)

Re: Should Community section come before General?
 

I still think there should be a generic aspect to the first section or three, with a primary purpose being to engage visitors at a high level and secondary purpose being routing to those specific sections. Again, I think the filter analogy works well here.

Remember, a forum appears to have 2 dimensions but there are actually 3, and 4 if you consider time.

Re: Should Community section come before General?
 

Sweet. So what you're saying is that the N900 will run Maemo 6?

Hehe.

I agree that more of a hierarchy would be good. The problem is that there is some cross-hierarchy going on with devices, and one would hope there's more of it in the future.

Re: Should Community section come before General?
 

...which validates the filtering/routing approach. ;)

Re: Should Community section come before General?
 

That's not a problem, it's a creative challenge. ;)

Re: Should Community section come before General?
 

I like DaveP1's suggestion in general, namely keeping the hardware releases "bracketed" in with the related OS releases. If/when other devices come out that use Maemo 5, they can be placed within the Maemo 5 section.

I guess things will get tricky if/when the N900 is upgradeable to Maemo 6, but things can be reorganised if that happens. Until then, at the moment there's pretty much a one-to-one mapping between hardware and OS version.

Re: Should Community section come before General?
 

You're right. I got my Maemos wrong.

I blame wishful thinking and/or old age.

Re: Should Community section come before General?
 

The more I think about this, the more I suspect there is a useful alternative: maybe the solution to this poll's concern is to simply make the link to the Community talk section very prominent on the Community page.

That said, I still think we need to work on routing.

Re: Should Community section come before General?
 

If you want users to use more specific sub-forum where their post belongs you should make it harder for them to post in General, or expect to do moderation from General to the correct forum.

Re: Should Community section come before General?
 

Exactly. Moving General to the end of the list of active forums encourages users to at least page through all the forums they should be using before they get to it. Especially on small devices, you may never notice there is a section below Talk.