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Topic: "Forum quietness", lack of official announcements (Read 5119 times) previous topic - next topic
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"Forum quietness", lack of official announcements

This ninja-like "publicity" for new features still puzzles me. In other communities every small improvement is officially announced... here users may discover them.

"Forum quietness", lack of official announcements

Reply #1 –
Quote from: ojdo on
This ninja-like "publicity" for new features still puzzles me.

If we're ninjas, we must be the same type as this guy.
elevatorladylevitateme

"Forum quietness", lack of official announcements

Reply #2 –
Quote from: Canar on
ojdo, sometimes we keep quiet because we like to see how the community responds. We find it amusing.

The community is pretty quiet these days, IMO far from vitally discussing, you basically gave a reason why that is-

"Forum quietness", lack of official announcements

Reply #3 –
Sorry for OT

@ Canar

I agreed with Squeller, I came to thought that the quietness (which is not really a bad thing sometime..) of foobar forum (actually, hydrogenaudio forums in general) is what the DEV & the higher up want.

I was wrong? 

Quote
most of us in the know were waiting for some random forum user to open up the discussion.


Why?

"Forum quietness", lack of official announcements

Reply #4 –
For what it's worth, I don't find it entirely amusing nor intentional. I think it's just that nobody really cares about promoting such things here, people will (and have) find out themselves anyway. What exactly would a big announcement achieve?

I am a bit afraid this will result in the old empty debates like "why isn't component XYZ included?" (because his author didn't ask Peter for access) or "what's wrong with the old 3rd party component site? you just want dictatorship control over everything, right?" (it contains a lot of outdated information and it's nice to have everything on one domain; it is also fair to let the site generate some ad income as the application is otherwise provided for free, it helps to pay the costs of running this forum as well, if you didn't know).

People have been mocking foobar2000 setup as a hunt and collect adventure for a long time, because it is a tedious process to go through various websites of third party authors to find relevant latest versions of whatever components you need. This new components site is definitely a step in the right direction in that regard.

Also I don't know why you think this forum is "quiet", almost hinting towards something like "silenced". What kind of discussions are you missing specifically?
Full-quoting makes you scroll past the same junk over and over.

"Forum quietness", lack of official announcements

Reply #5 –
I suppose the real reason for the forum's quietness (if so) is the fact that it is vacation period at the moment, at least in Europe.
This is HA. Not the Jerry Springer Show.

"Forum quietness", lack of official announcements

Reply #6 –
On the subject of announcements and such in general, I, at least, look to this forum for news about component updates, new fb2k versions, etc. Maybe I'm in the minority, though.

I haven't actually noticed the forum being that much quieter of late, except to the extent that it usually is between major fb2k releases. It's not exactly a high-traffic forum to begin with (that's not a criticism, except when it's 3 PM, I'm bored out of my skull, and am praying for *something* on the web to update  )

It does seem to me that, to be successful in its mission (if this is its mission) of being a central repository for most/all third-party components, that the site needs participation from as many component authors as possible, especially since it's the responsibility (as it should be) of those authors to contact Peter to get their components up there. And for that, at least, a "big announcement" seems like it would be very useful, just for the sake of getting the word out to those authors. But I'd say that this very topic serves that purpose.

"Forum quietness", lack of official announcements

Reply #7 –
Quote
Also I don't know why you think this forum is "quiet", almost hinting towards something like "silenced". What kind of discussions are you missing specifically?


I meant it's quiet relative to... I don't know, another board I guess.  I don't mean that it's a bad thing since it make the forum...  "more reliable" but also make the forums less "lively" if you know what I mean.

For example, Feature request to the official foobar DEV are extremely low compared to another program with the same popularity.

The reason:

The DEV already seem to have there own vision and plan about what's ahead and what foobar should be and should not, but rarely share it, and while I knew that the DEV did read every one of requests and have some thought about it, there is no response from the DEV whatsoever if they don't like the ideas and might response if they do.

This lead to users ask for something over and over again that might never happen (EX: "Now playing" playlist) yet some might ask for it since the DEV rarely said no, some just simply became scare to request something after there failed attempt and old users to have no idea what they could request.

Discussing about new idea rarely happen and not really go that far since no one really know what the philosophy of foobar is suppose to be. (Do I dare ask what it is? No.) and general discussion about foobar was already done to death. 

So, what's left is the general question. It's nothing bad actually, it just "quiet"

Regard

PS. Mod should split this discussion to new topic.

"Forum quietness", lack of official announcements

Reply #8 –
Would it make sense to add things like "Now Playing Playlist", "System date universally accessible through titleformatting", and whatever other Things That Won't Ever Happen get asked about all the time to the stickied Feature Request post as "Won't Implement" items?

"Forum quietness", lack of official announcements

Reply #9 –
Great analysis for what I wanted to point out (in posts that got split from this topic). Obviously it isn't obvious enough for (new) users what things are not going to be implemented ever (or near future). It should be near the featurelist sticky (or in it) or in the FAQ on foobar2000.org itself.

Discussing this with examples (and elaborating about it) is not done (#TOS 5-violation).

"Forum quietness", lack of official announcements

Reply #10 –
Quote
And most of the problem is because certain types of users don't want to think that their bizarre feature requests have been [WON'T FIX]'d, no matter how sternly or clearly I or any of the other moderating staff tries to communicate this rejection.


Adding "Not-to-do list" to the feature proposals topic would be nice, and some guideline about what kind of feature the DEV might interest would be great.

Quote
Do you really want your favorite project's dev wasting his time personally replying to every left-field feature request, or would you rather he spends his time developing?


I knew someone going to say this 

Well, my above suggest should cut a lot of "bizarre feature" away, and some info about what the DEV "developing" should also make some users stop whining for some features for no good reasons and instead, discus something about it.

"Forum quietness", lack of official announcements

Reply #11 –
Quote from: Yirkha on
it is also fair to let the site generate some ad income as the  application is otherwise provided for free, it helps to pay the costs  of running this forum as well, if you didn't know

if you rely on ad revenue to cover the costs, then it seems to me that you should want users to visit the site so they see ads, so why would you shy away from making announcements?

if it's worth developing something for the people, then why wouldn't it be worth telling the people about it?

if you're just doing this for your own sake, then why release anything publicly at all?