looking for gigabeat port forum

[godofrandomness]

Howdy,

I'm trying to find the forum for the gigabeat port, but i haven't located it since the forums got renovated.  More specificly, I am looking for the link to the IRC log; I am trying to follow its progress, but i haven't been able to for obvious reasons.  Can anyone point me in the right direction?

[Llorean]

http://www.hack.id.au/files/gigabeat/irc/gigabeat/

There are no longer player specific forums.

[godofrandomness]

why is that?  Since every player deals with RB differently, especially ones currently in development, it would make more sense for there to be different forums.

[Llorean]

Actually, 90% of questions relating to player-specific issues, if not more, are actually covered in the manual. The user interface and features of Rockbox are nearly identical (in the scope of hardware capability) across all players. For development, activity should actually be taking place on the developer mailing list, though the development and hardware forums exist for discussion, as well as the New Ports forum where a thread may be started for an in-development player.

Also, all relevant information should hopefully be collected in the Wiki by those working on the port.


All that being said, what topics necessitate player-specific forums?

[godofrandomness]

I just think it would make more sense to keep things a little more subdivided, like they used to be.  Not really a big deal one way or another I guess.

[Llorean]

*How* would it make more sense. You've not explained what benefit it would offer to discussion. All it does is split up posts like 'How do I get doom working?' into 20 places when it could be answered in one.

[godofrandomness]

I just think it would make more sense to keep things a little more subdivided, like they used to be.  Not really a big deal one way or another I guess.

I meant to say here that it would make more sense to me.  I was tired when I wrote that post, and missed that little bit there, however I will still try to give a bit more explaination as to why I think so.


Take the example "How do i make Doom work"  that you used.

First, some users probably do not understand that 90% of the problems they may have are either plain user error (example hitting the wrong button) or universal problems that affect all or most players (example Doom requires a wad file).  Theoretically, you still would have the same post several times being listed as "Cant work doom on X player" and "how do I get doom on Y player" and so forth because most people do not understand that issues like those are on every player.  All that taking out the player division would do crowd the repetition posts into one section and make that one section a bit harder to search through.

On occasion however, there would be a issue relevant to a specific player and it would be harder to find because of the extra crowding.  An example could be "Whats the control layout for doom on X player" because some players have a completly different button style than others.  For example, the X5 uses a joystick style knob for most of the controls with a button underneath and only a couple buttons on the side, but the gigabeat has a t shaped sensor thingie in the front and like a 1/2 dozen buttons or so on the side (dont know the exact account, mine's not on hand).  

Also, even if the current organization style does condense repetitive posts into one section, in a sense in the older style they were only really repetitive to people who browsed the forums for different players all the time.  For example, I only really cared what was happening on the gigabeat and iaudio X5 forums because they were the only player specific forums that had relevence to me.

Anyway, I hope this made a little sense.  I'm not too good at explaining stuff.  As I said earlier, it doesn't really matter one way or another too much as long as the forums are there in 1 form or another.  And i forgot to say thanks for the link on my last post, so thanks for the link.

[Llorean]

The control layout for Doom on a specific player should be covered in the manual. If they're asking in the forums, they're not following the forums guidelines anyway.

You're saying "It's better to have the repetitive posts spread out so that users of different players are MUCH less likely to notice that their question is already answered in the forums."

You said that people might not realize that 90% of problems are not player specific. The whole purpose behind the forum redesign was to force that knowledge to the forefront. In the past the forums reinforced the idea that it was different software on every player. Now the forums reinforce the idea that it's the same software on different players.