Specialized Groups

[AJ]

Sorry - sounds far too complicated for too little gain. I think it's really important to get new ideas about making the community work better together, but in this case, just don't see it working. From the description, it sounds like the mods would be a committee, with the groups being styled like subcommittees.

faster than you can say "can't compile a cross-compiler".

Cheers,
Adam

[gravaera]

Not if the users post their questions to the proper group. Those threads will be quite active, as long as the users do their job. With a little rules, this could work out, for example, each Group has a Captain. Captain approves membership. If a member is offline too long, Captain revokes membership. If Captain goes offline too long, the group can appoint a new Captain or else choose to lock the group. If that happens, then the threads will be become read-only and that groups forum will merge with the general forum as an archive (subforum). If a user wants to re-open the group, he can ask a Mod to give him/her ownership and the group will be restored as before. Groups cannot be created until there are at least 1 Captain and 3 Members. All groups must be approved by Admin or Mod majority vote. Maybe start it off on a trial period (30 days) to see if it works, if not, it shouldn't be too hard to end the trial, merge all the group threads to the general forum, and kill the groups. So, it wont hurt to try.

For what it's worth, I completely dissent. This is too complicated and it promotes too much of a top heavy management structure. There aren't enough constantly active/long staying users for this to be of any real value. Yeeesh.

[neato]

It really would work out easier than it sounds, but it seems there isn't enough people here to get that ball rolling, so if that's the case, then it's OK. Thanks

[Combuster]

I think your mistake is the suggestion to actively administer question flows. That just costs way too much time for both the regulars, the newcomers and the crew. We either need a self-organizing system, for which there is too little interest, or a passive system (like Creature's suggestion).

[neato]

I guess I don't see how a label would improve the question to answer ratio. I fail to see how giving yourself a label like "USB Expert" or something would be helpful to answer seekers. How would they connect? Would they search you out so he/she could PM you directly? I mean how else would that work, surely you don't expect people to create a thread and shout out the users name and hope they see it. You would be inviting even more reasons to ban people. And, you already have a lot as it is. lol

This sucks, because I gave you a perfectly valid suggestion as to how you could go about making actual improvements to this community, and the answer I got was, "No one wants to put in the time it takes to do it all.", so, because it might be too hard or too time consuming the answer is, NO. I think that is a sad excuse. I'm disappointed.

Anyway, like I said before, it's fine. It's not like I really care, I just thought it would be nice while I was active. And, also the kids. I was thinking of the kiddies too. Anyway, your wiki is awesome, so at least there is that. I only wish it was more complete in some areas, but for what its worth, what you have is pretty helpful, so thanks for maintaining that. Sorry my suggestion didn't help you.

[Combuster]

Your words.

I'll leave you this, in the hope that one day, you will understand:

In general, questions to a well-selected public forum are more likely to get useful answers than equivalent questions to a private one. There are multiple reasons for this. One is simply the size of the pool of potential respondents. Another is the size of the audience; hackers would rather answer questions that educate many people than questions serving only a few.
(...)
Hackers believe solving problems should be a public, transparent process during which a first try at an answer can and should be corrected if someone more knowledgeable notices that it is incomplete or incorrect. Also, helpers get some of their reward for being respondents from being seen to be competent and knowledgeable by their peers.

When you ask for a private reply, you are disrupting both the process and the reward. Don't do this. It's the respondent's choice whether to reply privately — and if he does, it's usually because he thinks the question is too ill-formed or obvious to be interesting to others.

[neato]

Sorry, didn't realize this was hacking forum. Code Red?

[AndrewAPrice]

I think it'll be a bad idea to have a lot of sub forums. It'd be overwhelming for newcomers.

Since you mentioned tags, one thing I'd consider a serious flaw of the forum software is that the common subjects are unsearchable, even if they are valid and meaningful queries

That also annoys me and I have to revert to Google (inurl:forum.osdev.org). Can this limit be removed? I'm sure if you're searching for a popular term then you don't mind if you get 5,000 results.

[AndrewAPrice]

... or people will find the highest post count in the group and PM them.

That's crazy. Why would anyone do that? You post your question to the ENTIRE group and someone in that group answers the question. No need to PM anyone.

I'm not the highest poster on these forums, but several years ago I received an message through my website saying "I saw you're writing your own OS on OSDev.org, can you help me with this problem."

[neato]

That sucks. Did you help or where you like, "OMG this is an outrage!!!"? Anyway, the reason they prevent common words is because lets say the results where 5000+, the time to return would most likely cause a timeout, most servers allow what, 60 seconds? You just have to pay attention to directions. I pointed out how to do it already.

Place + in front of a word which must be found and - in front of a word which must not be found. Put a list of words separated by | into brackets if only one of the words must be found. Use * as a wildcard for partial matches.

[Selenic]

Sorry, didn't realize this was hacking forum. Code Red?

You're thinking of the bad type of 'hacker', rather than the one we mean.

"can't compile a cross-compiler"

I think this would be an appropriate title to give to anyone who repeatedly asks dumb questions

That also annoys me and I have to revert to Google (inurl:forum.osdev.org)

Yes, but then you're using Google's (immensely huge) server power, rather than this forum's.

Anyway, I agree with the idea that the concept of sub-forums for different parts of OSDev a) might be somewhat overkill unless we had a much larger community, and b) would possibly confuse issues where a topic could fit into different groups, unless they were fairly broad categories, which would potentially be workable (maybe something like booting and initialisation, peripherals, etc.), although even now we tend to get less than a page of newly-posted-in threads per day on the main board, so it might not even be necessary. Tags could be a good compromise, though.

As for the idea of titles or a section on the user page mentioning if someone has a particular specialty, I imagine most people would leave it alone, but the people who did put something might get lots of PMs from newbies who don't read the rules.

[Combuster]

Wow, necroposting in reply to a banned troll. I haven't seen that one before

[Selenic]

Wow, necroposting in reply to a banned troll. I haven't seen that one before

That's what you get for not checking post dates. Someone may as well come along and kill these three posts then, seeing as they're irrelevant.