If people help you, then it's good manners, to be as helpful back. I ain't a developer or a coder (poor vbscript isn't much use around here), but I try to contribute where it is positive, even if it is just saying thanks.
I guess mine was, too. These things happen in forums. Misquoted, out of context, misinterpreted etc. I suggested subforums for users and developers a while back as I saw the influx of a more user oriented kind of community member, expecting help etc.
I guess mine was, too. These things happen in forums. Misquoted, out of context, misinterpreted etc. I suggested subforums for users and developers a while back as I saw the influx of a more user oriented kind of community member, expecting help etc.
I wasn't suggesting gated communities, as your reply seemed to imply I was. Nor am I looking for a single demographic here (far from it).
I'm looking for forum management. That can take many forms. And while Nokia certainly likes volume, there's only so much a single site and limited number of people can handle... and how many chiefs would we want, anyway?
Please dont jump at me here, just want to give a slight insight to what I feel about the n900 and this forum.
The reason why you are having a lot of new people here, people who dont know how to format a Floppy in dos, asking for frustrated help on this forum, with below par punctuation and thought is .......
People now want the new all singing all dancing phone, they do not research into it, because of things like the iphone and windows mobile, they expect to be able to click on download and away you go a playabale game! - they will not expect you having to type mv to move a set of .pk3 files to a certain system folder in order to get Quake 3 working on the blinking thing. The majority dont want a very poor binary viewer or ascii editor, they want something to show to their mates and their mates to go, thats awesome, im getting one.
And this is where the problem lies, people arent all great elitists like you guys, they dont all program, they dont want to click on a thumbs up icon to show they "love" your idea, they wont stroke your egos because you have managed to make the n900's LED flash a different colour. In the normal world of forums and phones people do the work because they enjoy it, they dont expect nor want help the majority of the time, just the occasional thankyou.
Here is the frustration, the N900 is marketed as an all singing all dancing Iphone beater - which it is NOT - not yet anyway - It DOES have the potential to do it, but it never will, because there is just not enough people working for the N900, theres no massive sales pitch, theres nothing that sets the N900 apart from the crowd at the minute other than the fact that its bloody hard to use if you dont know what you are doing, people are lazy - they just wont learn, they will trade it into CEX and buy something new.
There is no real compromise with the N900, its not actually very good at anything - its not very good at being a phone, games machine, computer - its ok in all of those (ok maybe not the phone). I had a HTC Kaiser before this (TyTn II) which i kept over the course of 2 upgrades because nothing could touch it in respect of functionality, support (thankyou XDA developers - take note of that forum) and i must admit I will be sending the n900 back - I like to play with my phones - when the Mrs is watching Americas next top model or bloody Eastenders, without knowing a whole bunch of stuff, quite franky, just trying to get cannon fodder to work on my phone via dosbox took me hours, even now, i click the stylus where i want to go and the curson is 2cm away from the pointer of the sylus, i dont mind playing but ive changed pretty much every setting the config to no avail.
SO
Conclusion - Nokia want to sell this phone en mass - they want to generate sales for it, it has never been marketed as a phone for geeks, it has been portrayed as the next big thing - which i am afraid it isnt, however because of this, people are getting them on 24 month contracts and suddenly after the initial first day glee of having the latest fad phone they realise......oops - this phone is not for everyone yet nokia want it to be (although seemingly you guys dont - close knit or what) If things carry on the way they are - it will die very soon, I mean comon, the majority of people wont even know how to add the dev-extras library, they will be looking on OVI store at the gigantic amount of excrement they have on there, you only have to read recent press releases and comments on it for confirmation.
SO To summarise, this phone / computer/tablet/crazy chicken is just not good enough for the average Joe to use, its a specialist phone.
I dont mind this forum however, it isnt a patch on similar other format places, there is a very a scathing aura to this one which i noticed just browsing. The n900 of mine has gone back to mobiles.co.uk and a HTC HD2 is on its way - And im not a novice user, this phone is just not feature / user friendly, which is a shame because it has so muc potential, which i fear will never be realised.
You're correct Celicabloke, and ironically, the strengths of Maemo are also its weaknesses (ie, the Linux aspect). Clarifying and firming up the strengths is certainly one of this community's (and Nokia's) greatest challenges.
To hauser,
3. Only reason to keep this train running in future is app store which gives apps that make mainstream/average joes buy next Nxxx. They will not buy Nxx because its open or because its based on OS or because community thing, but because its powerful, fluffy and there is great "ifart" apps. They will be delighted when they find true power of community and OS side of this device, but that will be just added extra.
Good ROI is what shareholders and commercial developers want and there is huge pile of easy money in pockets of mainstream users. With success there will be continuation also from Nokia's side and probably that is what this community also wants.
----
And about this community. I have seen great threads where Texrat, RevdKathy and other active members are brainstorming, analyzing, suggesting different scenarios, helping and having fun, but still I´m afraid.
How they are going to implement even half of wonderful stuff what they come up here. There is lots and lots of talk, but how eventually things start to roll. Making decision and starting to implement things with timeline. I haven't been here long so I don't know how everything goes. What this community/council/maemo team has managed to do to this webpage? Right now after 1 month everything, including bugzilla, garage, talk forum, wiki, brainstorm, packages are quite spaghetti and it just scares me because I really am power user amongst my friends. They just don't have as so much time on their hands as I have
In my opinion this spaghetti doesn't make us closer to each other it just separates users to different groups. And I´m really sorry to say that I do not know how to solve this and all I can right now come up is criticism without any solution.
I just lost a full page of well crafted response... to bad. It was good so now I'm not so polite.
Polarization? Bah! I only see it when it's brought up.
And BTW Texrat, slicing Maemo users off and then making a statement about Howard Forums is, um... Polarizing
Trolls, ***-buckets, and general ne'er do wells? Active moderation via mod edits to cut the crap off when it starts and to communicate to everyone else that there is no need to respond will reduce this. With some however, be prepared to go nuclear.
Sense of community? Fix the dang sign off that a new member experiences when he ventures out to other maemo.org sites. No wonder they may feel safer just asking a question in the forum even though it is covered by a WiKi or complaining about a bug when Bugzilla is provided.
The days of a genteel participants who are responsible members of the community by virtue of their choice in using an Internet Tablet are over. 5 letters changed all that... P-H-O-N-E.
Unfortunately more work is required now but hey, work is what builds a community. People live up to what we expect from them. If a post is close to going over the line and no action is taken via a Mod edit, posts will soon cross that line and general mayhem ensues. However, once that expectation is raised and the garden is rid of the weeds as it were, then the amount of work required to maintain a weed free garden is less.
A great addition to what Im feeling slender, the way things are going and the support this phone doesnt have compared to other phones will be its downfall, again as Texrat has said, its greatest strength is its greatest weakness, hell (and please dont twist the dagger here) look at Andriod for how to START a new app project, thats the ways its done.
I wasn't suggesting gated communities, as your reply seemed to imply I was. Nor am I looking for a single demographic here (far from it).
I'm looking for forum management. That can take many forms. And while Nokia certainly likes volume, there's only so much a single site and limited number of people can handle... and how many chiefs would we want, anyway?
I read your text in the context of NvyUs comment where he said
"in a community you have no say who moves next door or over the road you just learn to live with them and get along.
you can't manufacture your idea's of who belongs here and who does not its just plain protectionism and elitism."
your reply started:
"Comparing a forum to a live neighborhood is flawed anyway. There are gated communities and other elements in real life that serve to create homogenous communities. In addition, gated communities on the internet can easily narrow membership to a select constituency."
I understood this as implying creating a gated, homogenous community would be preferable. The reason I interpreted it as such was your first sentence, where you disagreed with NvyUs analogy of a live neighbourhood. So now you know how I misinterpreted you.
I did see later that you were talking about several distinct communities under the same umbrella, and it is useful to discuss it. I agree with you on both those points.
I read your link, and if you read mine, there are a couple of commonalities.
Well said.
