Forum forum and player types

[Mad Big Sausage]

I was about to make a topic to suggest that it would make life easier around here if members could enter what player(s) they had in their profile and they could be displayed to the left with the rest of the info.
But there isn't anywhere really suited for it to go. So I make a second suggestion to have a ROCKbox Forum and Website forum or something to that effect....

MbS

[Yotto]

I like both of these ideas, and with the new restructuring, now is the perfect time to suggest it (Well, aside from a day ago before the restructuring ).

[Llorean]

General Discussion is the proper place for discussion of the Website and Forums anyway. There's not really enough of it to warrant its own forum, at least in my current opinion.

I'm not really sure the value of a user showing what players he or she has. In a very few cases it'll simplify support questions, simply because someone offering help can look at what you have, but in many cases it may just lead to someone not distinguishing which player they're asking about (say if they have an X5 and an iPod Nano) and I feel the simplest way to let someone know which player you're asking about is to include it in the topic of your first post.

Of course, the idea is still up for discussion, just voicing my current opinion on it.

[Mad Big Sausage]

I was thinking along the lines of helping the newbies to the project. There's a huge amount of posts asking for help without enough information given or without any direction to follow at all. I know that rockbox is rockbox whatever it's on but button mappings, supported codecs, plugins, wps, port progress etc differ hugely from target to target.
Instead of having to reply to the post asking what they've got we could just see and go with that.

And if someone has rb on more than one dap then they prob don't need this kind of low level aid and already know how to ask for the specific help they want.

[Llorean]

Actually, on software-decoding targets, supported codecs are identical, the vast majority of plugins are supported on all of them (and those that aren't, should be soon), and the keymapping (as well as included plugins, again) is covered in the manual (where users should always be encouraged to look) so player-specific help should *always* be preceded with "What you're trying to do is covered in the manual. Please, try to follow its directions. If those don't help, come back and tell me exactly what you pressed to try to get it to work, and what player you're trying this on."

The whole idea of the forum redesign was to get people away from thinking about Rockbox as "Different Players Running Rockbox" but rather as a software that has different hardwares under it. The primary difference between any given build are whether they have recording, FM, a clock, or a color screen, and their button maps.

[Mad Big Sausage]

Suggestion sucessfully shot down.

Thanks for the forum ideas thread too.