Processing 2.0 is now officially out, marking a clear change from the 1.0 series.
Perhaps it is time to go to a new forum, marking a clear change from this old one...
Not so old, OK, and people can be grumpy about yet another forum change...
But this change is not a whim, for the sake of changing. We feel it is a necessity.
This Zoho forum was, somehow, an improvement over the old YaBB ( IIRC) forum: modern look, WYSIWYG editor, etc.
But with usage, we found it has many shortcomings, lot of them listed in topics here...
One of the most annoying is that sometime it slows down to a crawl, and even can be unavailable for a while (again this week). Spam was an issue too, and the means to fight it were not adequate (automated report are useless, we had to delete hundreds of spam messages one by one, etc.).
Overall, the main issue is that this forum is created, maintained, hosted and owned by Zoho. We have very little control over it, and if they decide to change something, we can only protest in their forum! For example, they changed the way text coloring is done, breaking it (the IIRC above is supposed to be red!). I posted a bug report, showing how to fix it, and months later, the problem is still here!
They also broke the CSS once, etc.
So it is time to move away, for a self-hosted solution we can manage, improve and fix ourselves, if needed.
The choice goes toward Vanilla forums, community edition, open source in a language we can handle (unlike the interesting, but harder (for us) to manage Discourse).
Of course, all the current threads in this forum will be archived (as static HTML pages), like the previous old forums. All these topics form a kind a huge knowledge database, we won't throw it away! Hopefully, unlike the Zoho search, the search will act like the one on Processing.org, encompassing the whole site, no only the current forum!
We plan to simplify the categories, because lot of people are confused about Programming Questions (too generic), Core Libraries and Contributed Libraries (newbies cannot distinguish them).
So I think we will merge these into one.
My suggestions:
- Share you work, Events & Opportunities are OK and useful as people will search inside.
- Integration & Hardware can remain, for questions about connecting some specific device, using Eclipse or changing settings in the PDE.
- Other languages might remain, although most topics are about JavaScript, which is now integrated to Processing.
- Android, why not, questions are quite specific currently.
- Library and Tools Development is sometime misused by questions belonging to Contributed Library Questions, but not so often, so perhaps it is good to discuss these specific questions and do announcements.
And perhaps keep a generic Programming Questions, without distinguishing the usage of libraries, because questions are often across these categories, and newbies cannot distinguish core libraries from contributed ones...
Not sure if General Discussion is useful. Perhaps to put questions really too broad, like "how to make music when the user moves the hand in front of the camera"... or to discuss about the forum, design of new releases and such.
The new forum will probably be set up, initially, at the http://forum2.processing.org URL, in sandbox mode, where you can experiment, test, fool around (but not to ask real questions!). After a while, when we are confident with it, Zoho would be closed and archived, the database of the sandbox would be reset (messages would be erased, but perhaps accounts would be kept) and the forum would be open here, in http://forum.processing.org
What do you think of these suggestions? Comment are welcome!
Perhaps it is time to go to a new forum, marking a clear change from this old one...
Not so old, OK, and people can be grumpy about yet another forum change...
But this change is not a whim, for the sake of changing. We feel it is a necessity.
This Zoho forum was, somehow, an improvement over the old YaBB ( IIRC) forum: modern look, WYSIWYG editor, etc.
But with usage, we found it has many shortcomings, lot of them listed in topics here...
One of the most annoying is that sometime it slows down to a crawl, and even can be unavailable for a while (again this week). Spam was an issue too, and the means to fight it were not adequate (automated report are useless, we had to delete hundreds of spam messages one by one, etc.).
Overall, the main issue is that this forum is created, maintained, hosted and owned by Zoho. We have very little control over it, and if they decide to change something, we can only protest in their forum! For example, they changed the way text coloring is done, breaking it (the IIRC above is supposed to be red!). I posted a bug report, showing how to fix it, and months later, the problem is still here!
They also broke the CSS once, etc.
So it is time to move away, for a self-hosted solution we can manage, improve and fix ourselves, if needed.
The choice goes toward Vanilla forums, community edition, open source in a language we can handle (unlike the interesting, but harder (for us) to manage Discourse).
Of course, all the current threads in this forum will be archived (as static HTML pages), like the previous old forums. All these topics form a kind a huge knowledge database, we won't throw it away! Hopefully, unlike the Zoho search, the search will act like the one on Processing.org, encompassing the whole site, no only the current forum!
We plan to simplify the categories, because lot of people are confused about Programming Questions (too generic), Core Libraries and Contributed Libraries (newbies cannot distinguish them).
So I think we will merge these into one.
My suggestions:
- Share you work, Events & Opportunities are OK and useful as people will search inside.
- Integration & Hardware can remain, for questions about connecting some specific device, using Eclipse or changing settings in the PDE.
- Other languages might remain, although most topics are about JavaScript, which is now integrated to Processing.
- Android, why not, questions are quite specific currently.
- Library and Tools Development is sometime misused by questions belonging to Contributed Library Questions, but not so often, so perhaps it is good to discuss these specific questions and do announcements.
And perhaps keep a generic Programming Questions, without distinguishing the usage of libraries, because questions are often across these categories, and newbies cannot distinguish core libraries from contributed ones...
Not sure if General Discussion is useful. Perhaps to put questions really too broad, like "how to make music when the user moves the hand in front of the camera"... or to discuss about the forum, design of new releases and such.
The new forum will probably be set up, initially, at the http://forum2.processing.org URL, in sandbox mode, where you can experiment, test, fool around (but not to ask real questions!). After a while, when we are confident with it, Zoho would be closed and archived, the database of the sandbox would be reset (messages would be erased, but perhaps accounts would be kept) and the forum would be open here, in http://forum.processing.org
What do you think of these suggestions? Comment are welcome!
I even put questions about the PDE there.
(its ok, i wasnt active much lately.)
