Omnimaga
Omnimaga => Site Feedback and Questions => Topic started by: c4ooo on December 13, 2015, 12:50:14 pm
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Ever since i joined, omni seemed to have the same level of activity. It was not for sometime, however that i learned that the present day omnimaga is but a shadow of its present day self. What i am woried about is the fact that as far as i can tell there is no visible change being made in order to help revive the community
I have bean thinking....
1) How can omnimaga attract members - both new and old - to the site?
How can it keep those members? (i have had @Siphonic_Sugar tell me that he "forgot [omni] existed").
How can omnimaga change the portrayal of its ideology?
2) Should the forum boards be completly redone?
^Well not entirly completely, but the boards dont reflect the focus very well. First of, TI programming as a whole is dieng, so it might do well to shift the focus more towards general computer programming. Further more, all but about three of "our projects" are completely disbanded. (same goes for comunity projects) I think it would do well to move the projects stuck on hiatus to the discontinued section, where they belong, making room for active people with active projects like @123outerme
3) How can conversations on irc be moved to the forums in a non-obstructive manor?
4) For a month there seemed to be a spike because of the start of code golf. Should omni start an official contest, requiring participants to make a topic about their entry?
I really don't have answers, but i realy want to see change being made in order to make the site more active. Notice i am not going to talk about the actual ideology of omni's current leaders.
Edit 2:
I'm not really sure what there is that can be done, but we are certainly open to suggestions. Word of mouth can help. If you have people that are or may be interested, let them know! Also, one thing that can be done that is very simple is having topic titles accurately reflect what they are about. A topic titled "So..." says literally nothing. Let me help you out with that. ;)
Anyhow... Inactive projects can be cleaned up, that's no problem. A restructure to make things more well organized could work as well, but it would depend on what the other admins thought. Branching out is also an option, but again, I'm not sure how popular that would be. We do already have sections for no calc dev. Maybe that could just be restructured a bit?
One of the most important things is current team/ member activity. If there aren't many interesting projects to attract people, people won't post or have reason to visit. Contributing is one of the best things any of us can do to drive activity imo.
I could not come up with with a better title, good thing you where able to :)
Yes i know we have non calc sections, but they are not very prominent, unlike Cemetech (who have hardware and MC) and CodeWalrus (who have a bunch of different stuff), Omnimaga seems to be calc only. Once again, it does have the non-calc sections, but its not like anyone joins for non-calc related resones ;)
I agree with the last paragraph. That is why i suggested scrapping the hiatus-ed projects and replacing them with active ones. I would rather have a few active ones then a huge list of inactive ones :)
Lastly, is there any chance of an omnimaga hosted contest? And btw, on the topic of contests, what happened to @noelthebest and their contest? (ti-conquest(?))
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We also have chrismas heading up, which usually keeps quite some users busy and thus the forum activity decreases.
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We also have chrismas heading up, which usually keeps quite some users busy and thus the forum activity decreases.
Its not that, activity has been low since you-know-what happened, and there has not been any change to revive the forums.
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I'm not really sure what there is that can be done, but we are certainly open to suggestions. Word of mouth can help. If you have people that are or may be interested, let them know! Also, one thing that can be done that is very simple is having topic titles accurately reflect what they are about. A topic titled "So..." says literally nothing. Let me help you out with that. ;)
Anyhow... Inactive projects can be cleaned up, that's no problem. A restructure to make things more well organized could work as well, but it would depend on what the other admins thought. Branching out is also an option, but again, I'm not sure how popular that would be. We do already have sections for no calc dev. Maybe that could just be restructured a bit?
One of the most important things is current team/ member activity. If there aren't many interesting projects to attract people, people won't post or have reason to visit. Contributing is one of the best things any of us can do to drive activity imo.
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I'm not really sure what there is that can be done, but we are certainly open to suggestions. Word of mouth can help. If you have people that are or may be interested, let them know! Also, one thing that can be done that is very simple is having topic titles accurately reflect what they are about. A topic titled "So..." says literally nothing. Let me help you out with that. ;)
Anyhow... Inactive projects can be cleaned up, that's no problem. A restructure to make things more well organized could work as well, but it would depend on what the other admins thought. Branching out is also an option, but again, I'm not sure how popular that would be. We do already have sections for no calc dev. Maybe that could just be restructured a bit?
One of the most important things is current team/ member activity. If there aren't many interesting projects to attract people, people won't post or have reason to visit. Contributing is one of the best things any of us can do to drive activity imo.
I could not come up with with a better title, good thing you where able to :)
Yes i know we have non calc sections, but they are not very prominent, unlike Cemetech (who have hardware and MC) and CodeWalrus (who have a bunch of different stuff), Omnimaga seems to be calc only. Once again, it does have the non-calc sections, but its not like anyone joins for non-calc related resones ;)
I agree with the last paragraph. That is why i suggested scrapping the hiatus-ed projects and replacing them with active ones. I would rather have a few active ones then a huge list of inactive ones :)
Lastly, is there any chance of an omnimaga hosted contest? And btw, on the topic of contests, what happened to @noelthebest and their contest? (ti-conquest(?))
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I could not come up with with a better title, good thing you where able to :)
Yes i know we have non calc sections, but they are not very prominent, unlike Cemetech (who have hardware and MC) and CodeWalrus (who have a bunch of different stuff), Omnimaga seems to be calc only. Once again, it does have the non-calc sections, but its not like anyone joins for non-calc related resones ;)
I agree with the last paragraph. That is why i suggested scrapping the hiatus-ed projects and replacing them with active ones. I would rather have a few active ones then a huge list of inactive ones :)
Lastly, is there any chance of an omnimaga hosted contest? And btw, on the topic of contests, what happened to @noelthebest and their contest? (ti-conquest(?))
The TI-Concours 2015 is starting on January 11th. You should get an e-mail if you filled the form I talked about previously.
I will certainly post a topic on this website when it starts. ;)
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Anyhow... Inactive projects can be cleaned up, that's no problem. A restructure to make things more well organized could work as well, but it would depend on what the other admins thought. Branching out is also an option, but again, I'm not sure how popular that would be. We do already have sections for no calc dev. Maybe that could just be restructured a bit?
Do I sense a volunteer to do the work of cleaning things up? ;)
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Anyhow... Inactive projects can be cleaned up, that's no problem. A restructure to make things more well organized could work as well, but it would depend on what the other admins thought. Branching out is also an option, but again, I'm not sure how popular that would be. We do already have sections for no calc dev. Maybe that could just be restructured a bit?
Do I sense a volunteer to do the work of cleaning things up? ;)
I think we do.
AHEM...
DELEGATED!
AHEM...
Thank you <3
Seriously though. The best way to drive actiivity is to work on cool things and post. No one will post if no one posts. Sadly its an activity brings activity situation. So work on stuff post about it. We all want to see it I promise :P
Contest wise we have been talking around, but right now there is nothing in the works.
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Yea, I don't mind about doing some spring erhm... winter cleaning. :blah: Also, we should get a contest in the works at some point. It's been a while.
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Eh, sorry for stealing your activity >.> JK, I don't believe it's the only reason, as we founded CodeWalrus Omni was already starting to be the shadow of itself, which is kind of why we founded it in the first place...
I do believe a good spring cleaning should be done, we need some changes here, a contest would really help a lot.
Anyway, know that I and the other CW staff would definitely like some activity here (or at least this forum to not die) and support those ideas.
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In my opinion, the problem isn't that we need more exciting projects; there are lots of exciting projects going on already (just look at how long the list of cemetech programs of the month has been lately), the problem is that no one really cares. No one is going to bother posting on a forum where no one will reply (other than maybe 1-2 comments from Sorunome/AoC essentially just written to boost forum activity). This isn't an easy problem to fix, I'm not saying people should comment on posts just for the sake of commenting.
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I second what LDStudios has just said.
Also, I think at the moment students are just pretty busy with term evaluations (at least where I work). Another reason might be that calcs aren't the only 'toy in town' anymore. Nowadays, ppl have phones which keep them busy playing games, doing some programming (yep!) besides communicating with friends, etc.
BTW, shouldn't it be revitalize instead of "revitilize"? :P
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I guess SpiroH have a point. It's no longer what it was a few years ago. People probably have other stuff to do in class besides playing with their calc nowadays.
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Well, I think one of the first things that should be done is redoing the textures or what ever of the OmnomIRC. Maybe not have that extra tap on the right side of it and also maybe even change the font...
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Well, I think one of the first things that should be done is redoing the textures or what ever of the OmnomIRC. Maybe not have that extra tap on the right side of it and also maybe even change the font...
with "extra tap on the right side", do you mean the userlist? You can turn that off in the OmnomIRC options (top-right corner there's an "options"-button)
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Oh... But still...
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OmnomIRC change requests should be redirected to OmnomIRC itself: https://github.com/Sorunome/OmnomIRC/issues
Edit Sorunome: fixed link
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There's also a thread specifically for omnomirc suggestions. :)
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We should give the site a new cool, modern design.
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We already have a fairly modern design, it's just not responsive yet. SMF's next big release will have a responsive base theme we can use. That said, we just updated the theme when we updated to SMF 2 on 2014-03-02. None of the admin staff have the time currently to go through yet another massive overhaul of the site. We all have jobs/school/real life that take up most of our free time. The slow iterative approach to enhancing the site works better with our lives. If I could take a month to overhaul everything again and normalize things even better on the back end I would.
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SMF 2.1 isn't even in stable yet, they tell you to not use it on production sites.
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I wasn't suggesting that. I was saying when it does drop we'll use that as a base. Until then we are not going to touch redoing how the site looks.
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I was just going through this and thinking is it really worth to tell what's up in my mind? Hell, why not?
Maybe we should try to figure out why people join a forum. Here are some reasons that cross my mind:
1. They like talking to other people, especially foreign and weird people (different native language, different going about life, etc);
2. They like programming in ASM, C, C++, AXE ,Python, whatever language (not really that important, after all is just a translation layer to the very crude (and dummy) machine language, anyway);
3. They like to show off their abilities to fellow programmers and friends;
4. Some, just like to criticize. Oh well, they don't really know how to write a single line of code. That's fine for me too, although sometimes you really need a lot of patience;
5. Other are just people looking for help in some aspect of they professional/student life.
You? Come on, surely you must have something to say. Simply do it, we'd love to hear what's up in your mind.
Just my 2 cents to try to stir up this thing up (After lunch thoughts are always lighter ;)).
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There are some people who don't come here simply because it's quiet a lot. I, for one, was suprised when I saw some things at the top of the Recent list that I hadn't seen yet. This place isn't as dead as MaxCoderz, it just seems like its waking up for short periods of time and returning to a comma.
Another thing we could do is be little more calculator friendly. There are few topics that center around newer calculators, and some people just want to see that, because there aren't many all-purpose calculator forums you could go to. Right now, Cemetech is CE central. This place is mostly about monochrome TI calculators. What about color?
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Well, we used to have a rather large Nspire community.
Here's my two cents:
We could change the focus of the site to things that are just general tech/programming. We could hire some new news editors, under the condition that the news not be exclusively calculator-related. In other words, we make news about general tech stuff not necessarily related to Omni or calculators in general.
In addition, we clean up the general tech forums and maybe divide them into some sub-categories based on what news is popular.
buuuuutttt, that's just me :P
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This site is really full of wonderful projects. I'm always amazed everytime i take a look at the dozens of projects on the Nspire board, for example.
But 'Houston we do have a problem' (misquoted, yeah) here. Someone ought to publicize them better. I'm not a web guru myself but I bet some people in here get along with that stuff very well and there also some pretty good writers too.
What about some slide show of each board's main projects on the site home page (changing board every day)? Would that be feasible? Too much bandwidth required?
A couple of cents more... :)
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You mean, like TI-Planet's featured program list, but for news? That would be cool. It would look good on a lighter coloured theme...
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You mean, like TI-Planet's featured program list, but for news? That would be cool. It would look good on a lighter coloured theme...
Yeah, on the money, sorta! Would make it a little more lively, IMHO! :P
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I'm going to remind people on this thread, if you have an idea for Omnimaga that you want to propose we implement (As in new features for the admins to program), please open an issue here: https://bitbucket.org/omnimaga/omnimaga.org/issues
Keep in mind, we are all volunteers and we will work on resolving/implementing these changes as our personal lives permit.
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Keep in mind, we are all volunteers and we will work on resolving/implementing these changes as our personal lives permit.
We know that and we do really appreciate yours and the team's volunteer work effort! Here we're just brainstorming the theme, maybe some bright idea will come out of it (that's the point), please don't take it too seriously :).
@Other people:
If you occasionally visit this place and it appears as though there are no news, please think twice, it might just be that the brains are forging some idea, and obviously humans that come up with any meaningful idea(s) are often rather slow. So, my suggestion is, take a long breath and use your precious free time to read thru some of the wonderful projects (not all at once, OFC) that already exist inside the about 150 boards on this site. Also, other sites' activity is often related to how much people are in need just to talk about different aspects of life (their) either school, professional or emotional and not necessarily project related.
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For me, it kinda seems like an old Yogi Berra quote, mixed with some recursion: "Nobody goes there anymore, nobody goes there."
Now, the only problem is how to get people back. I think grand projects like E:ToR help bring people back. I know for certain that the best updates and help with testing I can get is here. I'm not saying make anything Omni-exclusive, but maybe basing projects here would help to bring some people back.
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I've been suggesting for some time to drop the majority of the current "active projects" and replace them by active projects, like your ;) @123outerme
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I've been suggesting for some time to drop the majority of the current "active projects" and replace them by active projects, like your ;) @123outerme
Well when the active projects are actually discontinued we'll move them.
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I've been suggesting for some time to drop the majority of the current "active projects" and replace them by active projects, like your ;) @123outerme
That would be an honor if it happened! But of course that's up to the discretion of the mods.
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I've been suggesting for some time to drop the majority of the current "active projects" and replace them by active projects, like your ;) @123outerme
Well when the active projects are actually discontinued we'll move them.
Maybe we could add a hiatus section or something to overgo that issue of people miss-interpreting what discontinued means?
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I've been suggesting for some time to drop the majority of the current "active projects" and replace them by active projects, like your ;) @123outerme
Well when the active projects are actually discontinued we'll move them.
Maybe we could add a hiatus section or something to overgo that issue of people miss-interpreting what discontinued means?
I'd rather not have to keep moving the boards around and have to change URLs all over the place as projects go on temporary hiatus.
We only have 5 major community projects and 7 official projects that are not completed or in hiatus. There are probably a couple that could be moved to discontinued, but the last time we did a probe into if they were done or not (Which wasn't that long ago) they were not moved.