Rockbox General > Rockbox General Discussion

Rockbox forums (and some developers): has it become a 'nerd supremacy'?

<< < (2/2)

zenji:
I just think:
* it is an awesome piece of software
* that you've all put many hundreds of hours of work into

and therefore

* while it's totally fine to only do it for yourselves,
* it would be great to share it in an open and friendly way with the rest of the world, who really do appreciate it

and given this:
* i really, genuinely in all sincerity feel that the tone could be alot less snooty and some of the rules could be imposed (esp on newbies) with a bit more gentleness

____

I have NOT spent an hour of my life posting this based on some personal annoyance about some feature I want. I actually have forgotten what my first request for. And my hope to have the choice of which OS my player boots into has disappeared. I've reluctantly uninstalled Rockbox because - and this is NOT meant to cause offence - I am happy with Sansa's firmware in everything except the speed~tone options.

It was done as an exercise to try to reflect something back to a group who is doing something good but whose potential is, I feel, dampened in a major way by the TONE, and perhaps the attitudes of some.

With this, I say adieu and good luck to you all.
............

PS It wasn't aimed at 'hundreds' of people - but certainly most of the people I encountered weren't very pleasant.

torne:
There's two problems here:

The first is that you phrased this in a way which made it extremely hard to read it as constructive criticism - it reads like an attack and was probably received as one by most people. Even if you allow a very generous interpretation, your original post still makes a lot of implied reference to basically "being a good product" and "having a large userbase" and virtually everyone here simply doesn't care about those things - they care about it being good in other ways, but "as a product" doesn't enter into it. People are not going to start caring about those things either; the project is what it is. So, if you want to change the attitudes expressed (and nobody here is claiming that everyone associated with the project has a great attitude all the time) you would need to be very careful about exactly what you suggest and the words you use to explain it, and your post here simply failed at that.

The second problem is that any individual developer (or other contributor to these forums) who feels like it's worth their time to have a "different" attitude, whatever that may be, is already doing that, and the ones who *don't* feel that way are not going to change because some random person on the forum posted a big rant about it. The first group are most likely to be offended by the things you said, and the second group are most likely to ignore them. We already *do* have reasonably well understood community standards, though they are not spelled out (it comes down to common sense) and we do correct each other when we feel things are out of line, though you probably won't *see* this as it's likely to be done in private. You *did* aim this at hundreds of people, whether you wanted to or not; by talking about us as a group that's the result.

Ultimately, this is all volunteer work, and Rockbox itself (as well as the manual) is a pretty *high quality* piece of volunteer work which would cost a vast amount of money to produce commercially. This kind of output requires a large time investment from people with a high level of technical skill - we have lots of small contributors but without a core of skilled people willing to devote a lot of time the system as a whole just would not hang together. This kind of person is motivated usually by technical challenge, not by popularity or acclaim, and while it's true that most people developing for Rockbox started doing so to benefit themselves, it's also true that the "core" developers put in *far* more time and effort than would be required to serve only their own needs, not just into development but also into technical support, both at the level you see here on the forums for users, and also on IRC for users, people who want to get into developing for Rockbox, and the other existing developers (nobody knows everything after all).

Asking those people to give you *even more* of their time, which for many of them is *very valuable* time - most of us have day jobs and few of them are poorly paid - is a stretch in itself (you would have to be extremely careful), but posting the kind of rant that you started this thread with is, I'm afraid, just an insult.

The rules of the forum (like "read the manual") are applied in the way they are because it's very easy and quick for someone to tell you to read the manual. If we didn't do that then many user queries would probably go unanswered: the time required to find the answer for someone not willing to find it themselves is not worth it. For us, the purpose of "end user support forums" is, mostly, two things: identifying bugs that users may not be able to identify for themselves ("is it supposed to do X when I do Y?" "no, that's a bug, we'll fix it"), and identifying where our documentation is lacking ("I looked in the manual and I can't work out how to do X, the explanation in chapter Y doesn't cover it" "ah, that's true, we'll expand that section"). If *users* get a benefit out of it as well, by having their questions answered, that's a bonus, but the desired goal is that users would never need to ask for help in the first place, leaving us with more time to spend implementing cool features. :)

chileboy:
Zenji -

I don't feel I can really add much - the other posts pretty much address the points you make...Torne's in particular is excellent in enunciating the goals and "mission" (if that is the right word) from the developers' point of view, not just for Rockbox in particular, but open source in general.  There's also a lot of reasonableness in all the posts about basic forum rules and expectations - such as perusing the manual and performing a few basic searches prior to asking a question or requesting a feature.

Anyway, I'd like to respond as a relatively new Rockbox user.  I've been in I.T. "my whole life" and consider myself pretty proficient with most things technological.  Yes, even I feel a bit intimidated when I first wade into the waters of something like Rockbox, and especially when posting for the first time or two.  I mean, there's no question that the folks you are hopeful will respond are so much more knowledgeable than yourself, you feel you are running the risk of seeming ignorant.  And there have been cases elsewhere where I feel some new users are treated that way.  But not here.

I don't see anywhere that any of the developers, moderators or even advanced users are rude or belittling to anyone.  Certainly not in the original thread(s) you reference - the responses, while to the point, are polite.  When you say


--- Quote ---I'm just someone who wandered into this 'place' and therefore sees it with the fresh eyes of the outsider. And it is 'NASTY' ! Psychologically SFU !

--- End quote ---

I absolutely do not see that - even with "the fresh eyes of the outsider".

I truly believe you've taken offense where none was meant.  Remember, as Torne said, most, if not all, of these folks have "real" jobs - I often wonder how they find the time to respond at all, let alone continue development.

As a general rule, I've learned that you can earn a lot of respect if you can show you've put a bit of effort into learning about something you're obviously benefiting from, that others - as you yourself recognize - have put an incredible amount of time and effort into, for little or no personal gain.

Ok, I'm done.  :)

- Mark

TexasRockbox:
People tend to attack that which they don't understand.

Instead of adopting (or at least trying to understand) the Rockbox culture (for lack of a better word) he instead, proposes his own vision of what the culture should be and that it would be better for everyone involved.  It would be as if I just wandered into the UK, said nice country but get rid of the Union Jack, dissolve Parliament, boot the stodgy royalty and everyone speak Urdu.

If I was thinking that, I should at least get to know the people first, before proposing it.

Going to try out that 3.8RC on the X5L.  Thank you very much!

(Happy Rockbox user for 3.5 years -- with a little patience one discovers that most of the features one wants eventually gets worked in)

Tuffdog:
I've been watching the zune community for a while and have found it is much the same as the rockbox community. The best programmers are always people who are in the industry and have full time jobs. This is why they often do most of their work in their spare time. Most will make features they want because it will keep them motivated to finish the project. Support by the manufacturer of the device always effects the mod community, be it through offering incentives, or adding hack protection. If you want something done, do it yourself and if your lucky find someone to work on it with you. Always post your work at every major stage, as if you get tied up with other things (such as family, drama, work) no one will be able to work on the project, or be intrested in doing the idea from scratch as they are unsure if someone else is doing it from. I think some change in the culture would be nice by introducing a new feature to the site where you could offer rewards or incentives if people complete or do a decent amount of work on a plugin or feature. People or companies could offer such prizes and this would build some intrest on working on specific things (though science does say you still want to personally do something to go through with it, not the promise or rewards). You should frankly be grateful there still is a culture, rather than a ghostown of a project such as SansaLinux, or Ipod Linux at this point. We should reward developers for doing what they want, not ridicule for not having the same passion in certain areas as you do. More direction would be nice, but not a required at this point (though maybe in the future this may be needed)

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[*] Previous page