As school ends in June, we usually get our biggest amount of new active forum members then. Since last Summer, we are holding programming competitions around that time too. However, as reported back in
June 2009, this increase in activity also increases the chances of seeing less than appropriate forum or IRC messages, due to newer members not being used to our community. While our
Board/IRC Rules, which also show up when a new member registers, explains that we are stricter towards trolling and the bashing of people work on calculator project, this part of the rules is sometimes overlooked. This means there are chances that people go too far. In 2010, we got an unusually higher amount of activity than the past years we were online, meaning there are higher chances that this happens (although we have been lucky so far).
While we welcome every forum members, new to TI programming, new to internet forums as a whole, intermediate or experienced, I want to remind you that Omnimaga is also meant to be a place free of any hostility, provocative comments (including towards people projects or the starting of software/language wars) and troublemakers. Omnimaga is the only english-speaking TI calculator community of its kind. We are also generally more lax toward funny posts and new members not searching for very long before asking questions (or anything that scares some new members away), but we will not tolerate any comment meant to downgrade someone's project as if it was worth nothing. One thing I've been noticing by people I will not name is the bashing of high-end projects such as Axe Parser with no valid explanation, in a way that makes it sound like its author completly wasted his time on it. Besides that, I have noticed that some people lately have been trying to force me to change our forum policies and allow such comments. We will not. In the past, such comments were the cause of the migration of some members from other forums towards Omnimaga, as they looked for a place where it doesn't matter what language you use to program a game or how large it is, it's the content that matters. While we encourage people to remain realistic when starting new projects, we do not tolerate attempts at discouraging people from programming. Such behavior will lead to rules enforcments as started in the rules page. Same goes for stuff like being rude to newbies. If you feel someone doesn't understand fast enough for yourself, you are better just letting someone else help him than potentially scaring him away. Not everyone understand things as easily as others. On the other hand, when it comes to general help, we encourage members to look around our forum and the help section to see if their issue was not answered before, to avoid cluttering the topic list. We also recommend against asking help via PM, as you will get an answer faster on the forums.
Also, Omnimaga is not ran by the goverment. It is a privately owned website. While we try to make sure post content remains untouched by our moderators, we reserve the right to decide what is allowed and what is not on the website. A lot of the older forum members also remembers the TI community in 2008.
Again, everyone is welcome to sign up on the forums if they want to learn calculator programming or to showcase their projects. But do not forget there are also guidelines to follow, which you can read while registering or in the navigation bar, to ensure the community runs smoothly.
