according to alexa omnimaga is 575,032th Website worldwide!

Well, maybe there'll be a decrease of activity as soon as texas instruments releases a new calc

Haha, indeed , that would be weird, i think you'dd har 1.000.000 active members i you'dd pay them, so you'dd lose much money

Can't we do like this: in every calc-platform, teams are going to be appointed, and then every team gets a project-idea where they have to work on, we can get help if we want to on this forum, omnimage members can choose if they participate or not, just an idea silly, i know

I guess that could do. Actually an idea for the current contest was to force people to create a topic about their contest project, but I think that rule was scrapped. I know the Omni CoT group already has some activity rules, although not as high as they were while I was still admin.

Yeah I noticed we still have a whole lot of members and a very decent amount of traffic (still pulling 20000+- hits everyday compared to 10000 in 2010) and the school rush still had over 100+ guests at a time like last year. I think what happens is that over the years, more people had internet for a while at home and got used to the fact that Google is their friend, along with forum search engines. Since Axe and the Nspire were both new, a lot of people needed to ask new question everytime. Today, most of those questions have been answered many times already so most new members can find everything they need without asking. There's also the whole novelty effect that the Nspire hacking, Lua and Axe Parser had which weared off over time, like xLIB and the 84+ back in the days. That means less posting.

On a good note: The July drop in activity happened at the same time as the Spam section was shut down, at a time where activity there was very high. If a forum admin ran a SQL query to calculate the monthly post count for 2012 but excluding spam, I wouldn't be surprised if Jan-June were pretty close to July-September.

Also I notice some days there are still a lot of active topics, which is good. There just seems to be fewer instances where one or two topic get about 40-50 replies in a day.

Just hoping it won't drop even more, though >.< (at least right now it's over the old board in general, where half of the month there were like 20-30 posts per day including spam)

Hmm...on that topic of the teams idea....

We should have randomly chosen teams, but each would contain a certain amount from different pools. As in, there would be a pool of users good at graphics, a pool good at the programming, map design, etc.

Also, what about having weekly code-offs? They would start at pre-defined times, and would have a simple challenge. The person can code it in any calc language, and there would be a scoring system.

Example (I'm coming up with it on the spot. Criticism is welcome. )

-100 Bonus points for turning it in first
4000 points for not working at all, can be decreased if, say, it half works.
1 point for each byte in the runtime file. This gives an advantage to Axe/Asm over BASIC/Grammer.
1 point for every frame/millisecond/whatever it takes to run, past the execution point. (pressing enter)

Asm programs should be run with Asm(prgmNAME), and Axe programs should be compiled so they can run the same way. This is because timing problems would result from running MirageOS/DoorsCS/Ion start methods.

There should be a website with a live-updating countdown method of some sort, so it shows the challenge to everyone at the same time regardless of refreshes.

Since they're weekly, there shouldn't be IRL prizes (money is expensive!) but maybe we should bring back the trophy system, but for this. Clicking on the trophy would take you to their zip in the file archives.


Oh, and the entries should be open source. We should have the community development skill increase as people see others' methods for running programs faster. These programs aren't going to be massive games or anything.

A few example challenges: [stuff] means replace with specifics.
* make a program that displays the result of [some (hard) math operation]
* make a program that can draw [3d, lots of grey, etc.]
* make a program that [does something] in an especially creative way.

One potential problem is the time delay between the different time zones we are in. I believe we have 3 separate general regions to deal with (americas, europe, eastern asia) and I have a few thoughts on that as well.
* Have the start base on local time, so everyone starts at 5:00 PM in their area.
* Ignore the problem, and make the challenges hard enough that it's negligible. (ie they take 3-4 days)
* Cycle through starting times, so everyone gets a head start at some point.

I think I'll put my above post into a separate topic, so it doesn't derail this thread if it gets a lot of interest.

Maybe we should improve the Omnimaga website to be more than "just a forum"


First, OmnomIRC definately has to come back.
People (especially young people raised with FaceBook and other things) don't like forums and prefer interacting directly with others.


Maybe we could improve the upload system to handle screenshots, bbcoded descriptions, categories (sorry if it does allready exist - it would mean I've missed it, which might prove that the menu would have to be redesigned).


Maybe we could have an online player/emulator for uploaded files.
TI-Nspire files can easily be previewed online using the official TI-Nspire Document Player.
Most non-Flash TI-z80 programs (TI-76, TI-81, TI-82, TI-82Stats, TI-83, TI-85) can be run by the TI8XEmu GPL online Flash emulator from Brandon Meyer under GPL, which I host and maintain since Brandon disappeared from the Internet (his blog went offline for some weeks some years ago, then came back but was never updated again).
TI-Planet.org can provide some of the needed code.

But... This emulator doesn't support TI-83+/84, and we should ask Cemetech for that, as the only previous online TI-83+ emulator which was advertised here has disappeared (links broken and no source code released).


Maybe we could start newsing about math & science & exams and hosting such programs.
Young people are playing more and more on their phone and tablet, and less and less on their calculator, especially on their monochrome calculator.

Young people looking for calculator websites online will be more and more interested by maths/science programs or documents, and less and less by games because they have their phone in the pocket which is 1000 times better.

We could also have online editors which would let users generate their own calculators documents by typing/pasting text for example.
Cemetech has many high-quality online tools like that.
TI-Planet can provide some code here too.


The world is changing... Omnimaga has to evolve and resume PHP/Web development quickly.

Feel free to disagree with me.

But something has to be done... as soon as possible, definately.
Just dare checking the stats if you're not afraid of:
http://www.omnimaga.org/index.php?action=stats

There might definitively need to be an expansion towards non-game programs and non-programming-related hardware news, but it would be best to not mainly focus on this nor phase out calc gaming from Omni, otherwise this would probably hurt our current userbase.

We definitively need some online tools as well, preferably hosted on Omni server (providing they don't use PHP, since the server is already saturated with load). Sadly a lot of the Omni admins are too busy or no longer into calcs to venture into such emulator/project, so if Omni ever gets such tool, they would have to be contributed by a 2nd or 3rd party (such as TI-Planet or Cemetech). And then of course it depends of the willingness from the staff to update the site. At some occasions, there were months and months of wait before a major feature discussed about gets added.

Also MORE importantly: Since a lot of people use Facebook and Twitter:

1) Change Twitterfeed so that on Facebook it notifies of every new topic created instead of just news. Not every post, though, since that would border on spam
2) Fix the Twitter page and have Twitterfeed relay the same way there.

It might be good critor if you could PM the staff with some ideas (preferably admins) in case they do not check this section, although maybe they already check and just don't reply necessarily. I am sadly done with almost anything calc-related and have quit admin stuff over a year ago so a lot of my contributions to Omnimaga are behind now. And even if I regained interest, I still would no longer be able to contribute much, because of my neck problems that no longer allows me to concentrate doing stuff in front of the computer (my other physical health issues seems almost gone, though).

And in case the stats page takes too long to load:



I still think it really takes something HUGE in the community to draw more people in, though. The only times the TI community ever saw a giant spike in activity like we saw in 2010 were when the TI-84+ were announced in 2004 and when both Axe and Ndless arrived in 2010. And again I would be willing to see those stats without including the spam section. A few months ago there was a 400+ posts day but 300 of those were in the spam section.