Discussion about _potential_ opening of new ticalc subdomains...

[Lionel Debroux]

Yesterday morning (European time), on #ti, several of us discussed about the possibility of opening new ticalc.org subdomains, for pointing to external, significant projects (and possibly storing some data).
There are multiple goals, starting with increasing the visibility of some significant projects even more, and reinforcing the role of ticalc.org as a link between programmers, users and projects

To summarize and provide a starting point for a wider discussion, before the result of the discussion becomes reality (should it be decided to go ahead), I have created a more detailed topic on UTI, http://www.unitedti.org/forum/index.php?showtopic=9477 .
To reduce the necessity to cross-post across forums, it would be best to post only on UTI, but you can post here too.

[DJ Omnimaga]

Since I cannot login there I'll share my thoughts here for now. Someone is free to quote me there if there are some other users participating on UTI.

I was in #ti when this was discussed and did see the post on UTI last night, and I think it would be a nice idea if some major projects had more visibility on ticalc.org, if it isn't at the expense of the respective site traffic. One thing I thought about, for example, is if Quigibo wanted to cross-post Axe minor updates there and when a new version is released he either links to the Omni attachment or the ticalc.org download link (in the file archives). As you can see, Qugibo already post every version of Axe in one topic, but people who want to know what is upcoming next or the polls that are going on here could see them much better in one web page linking to the discussion here, rather than having to search through 7000 forum posts. It would also provide a nice place for backups and maybe some tutorials.

As for sub-domains, personally, Axe Parser sub-forum already have http://axe.omnimaga.org and Doors has http://dcs.cemetech.net , so such project may not need a sub-domain as much, but I guess they could be used as an HTML redirect while the webspace is used for backups purposes.

Otherwise, another idea I had was project pages, using the file archives for releases and the user could be free to link to an external site, but such thing would need to be moderated to prevent bad links and people from adding their new number guessing game or quadratic solver to the project list, drawing the line at which something is considered good, bad or redundant would be hard because everyone has different opinions about that and if project pages allowed anything it would become a huge mess.

In overall, I feel that ticalc hosting should be revived, kinda, not to replace the currently existing forums but rather to give more visibility to certain projects (and the communities themselves) or make the updates easier to find (as the project page(s) would show them all at one place without any other update in between. A lot of people who search for calc stuff go on ticalc.org first.

[Netham45]

I think that possibly the best thing that ticalc could do for the community would be to host some sort of SVN or CVS server, so users can collaboratively work on projects, and so that there won't be major projects lost due to hardware failure.

[DJ Omnimaga]

That could work actually. Also, the sub-domains could be useful for something like an Axe Parser Wiki, or a  redirect to a wiki here

[Lionel Debroux]

In a way, yes, ticalc.org might make the community a service by opening such an infrastructure. That said, how would it be better than external SVN / Git / whatever SCM hosting providers (+ issue / feature request trackers for most of them) that have existed for years (SourceForge, Google Code, GitHub, among many others) ?

(in the first step, my concern is that everyone, especially the ticalc.org infrastructure owners, gets to do as little work as possible.)

[DJ Omnimaga]

Yeah my concern is if such SVN gets flooded with crappy projects like Mega Quadratic Solver III: Rise Of The Mathematics, then it would become a major PITA to browse to find good projects. Even the search engine would return a bunch of crappy projects.