OSDev.org

It looks so odd... again ;D

First, a quick apology to all the MT users: we didn't think enough about you guys, and more were just thinking about the Bona Fide fans who really wanted us to hurry up with getting the forum up. As such, we forgot about you guys and kinda made you all beta testers on a poorly tested forum which looks horrid in IE, amongst other things.

Second, we won't move back until all bugs are ironed out, and we've run the design past you guys.
If you all don't find the forum as good as or better than MT, we don't want to force you to move.

It's not as if we demand all-around first-class premium service or else. I think it just came a bit too sudden, and we didn't know how well you would respond to user wishes. You'll agree, when you come from this board here and then are faced with what initially was a very bare-bones forum implementation, with the prospect of it staying that way for weeks to come, you'll understand the initial reaction of some of us.

You've shown remarkable responsiveness, and I'm sure this will be a happy "wedding" of the two best OS-related sites in the end.

I vote the OS boards be permanently here.. if my vote has any value. ::)

yeah. me too. This one. The best.

df has problems both with the bandwidth and the administrative overhead, as far as I understand, and I think we should give him our support in finding a new home for the forum and the FAQ, together with a big thank-you for hosting both for the last few years.

Since it's bringing two OS-related sites together, I'm for the move as long as we can make the transition a smooth one.

I don't think moving eventually will be such a bad idea.

I was actually surprised to see the new forum work that well, assuming it shares no code with this one, but well, it might not be quite ready yet.

One thing makes me sad. Having both the OS people, and the AGI people on the same forum was kinda fun, and gave this forum a somewhat special tint. It made this feel more living, than most forums that only have people from a single narrow focus.

But well, I do understand the techical and economical issues with this, and well, I remember people talking about it like... years ago. So I guess we are moving, sooner or later.

As for the Wiki links that Solar mentioned, maybe we could either automatically, or at least with some help, convert the links to point to the new forum, after the move. I mean, simply having a list of links to this forum, from the wiki, would help going through all them, page by page, and replace them, assuming we can't do some kind of regular expression replacement..

For all of those who miss the old style and want it as soon as possible for the new one (and if mr. xsim/etc. want to you guys can rip my cheap hack ), heres a CSS listing that you can put into stylish (Firefox Extension) or userPrefs.css in Firefox to override the site's look. I got it about as close as I could to what we have over here, but I can't even login or post/reply, so I can't tell you what those areas look like .
Oh, and no offense, but I'm not the biggest fan of the coding style used....

If there is a deterministic algorithm to translate the forum links, it would be great to share it with everyone... I have nearly 30 bookmarks to forum threads that interest me.

On second thought, maybe the solution is for me to just put them on my personal page in the wiki. ;D

Simple solution... http://www.simplemachines.org/

I am willing to offer my assistance.

I can help convert this forum to SMF (pretty simple actually, very stable and very worth the trouble) and the osfaq to MediaWiki format (a little more intense, and also worth the trouble), and bring everything "up to speed".

As a side note, one of my current domains, dynatos.net, is practically unused (I host a OS Dev Book there right now). It is there that I can help host forums/osfaq if needed, though I do like the straight-forward name of "osdever". I wanted to turn it into a big OS Dev support site, but I lacked the motivation for re-re-re-re-inventing the wheel. Simple truth is, I come here often, but I have a tendency to use the search function, and it hasn't failed me yet... so there is no sense in trying to *compete* with this place

As for my qualifications, I help admin the ASM Community Messageboard (but that also utilizes TinyPortal)

As for my desire to help, The DynatOS Project

We will make the layout choosable in the user profile and i'm sure we can work it out so you can use custom CSS.

As far as coding style i'm assuming you mean how everything is inlined, including the CSS and javascript. I agree, that's dirty, but it is our beta phase still and for simplicity we did it that way. That's how the CMS it runs on atm works easiest.

I'm sure your CSS 'rip' will be appreciated by some, but remember we are still cleaning the UI up on the forums. The first run was an excellent test of the data conversion that went over better than expected.

We truly appreciate everyone's feedback. We at osdever have used MT zealously for years and we want to only improve. We want to make our communities stronger. The larger the community the easier it will be to help eachother. DF and the mods will be around still too, but the burden of bandwidth and time to manage the forums will be lightened.

I honestly believe everyone will be impressed with the new forums. I hope everyone will continue to help us and work toward an improved community for osdev. I know a couple of you mentioned you wanted the forums to stay here, but sometimes its good to embrace change. It allows for adjustments to be made where they are sorely needed. OSdev specific forums might be one of those adjustments.

Remember, strength in numbers, strength to the meak. Let's work together and we will all come out on top of what is surely a good thing.

i'm sure we could code something like that for you. Would be kool to code some builtin favorite thread collection feature though too.

There are other AGI boards, and the SCI forums really an SCIstudio forum, Troflips new companion Makes the scistudio forum obsolete and can restart almost anywhere based around T's software. There are obviously other OS forums, even besides the one that you are all trying to run off to. What makes this a community is that we all choose to come here. There are thousands of other places and ways we can spend our time but we each choose to come here. I don't see any reason to move anything. If you don't want to be here don't. If you want to join another forum then join. Can't run the forums here then don't. But to move half a communtiy means to me that you don't recognise the other half as being relevant, and as part of the irrelevant half I definately feel slighted.

Until recently I had always felt like a part of a community.

@ cloudee1:

What we all decide to come to is not the URL or the forum software, it's the community. Of course, we've grown used to the forum software, so any move shouldn't make the transition too rough. But hosting the OS forum and OS FAQ has been a strain on df's spare time and his wallet; I think we should honor his wish to have somebody else take over. I don't see any slighting or "running off" involved. It hasn't been a secret that df isn't exactly happy with things, and I think osdever.net is an excellent choice because it will be bringing two communities together that have been closely related anyway. (About half the beginners here started with their tutorial...)

@ Spook:

Thanks for the offer, but I think moving to osdever.net (instead of whatever other domain any of us can offer) was part of the plan... as for the FAQ, I don't see the need for any conversion away from PhpWiki - any feature that has been discussed (like, demanding log-in / registration before you edit) can be configured there.

As for the forum software, I get the feeling the osdever.net people are hot at it, and from the improvements they made in the one day of the move were impressive. I'm all for giving them another shot at it.

Np. As I said, I like the name "osdever.net" a bit better (gets to the point), I am just a little weary of losing this knowledge base over a few mishandlings-too-many.

Here's to hoping things work out for the best ;D