Can I just say to people who think Tablet Scene is a bad idea: ignore it, pretend it's not there. If you don't like it, don't take part. ITT will carry on just as before.

As Reggie says, the idea is to give new and casual users a relaxed place to hang out, and if they want to get a bit more deeply involved in the technology they can easily "graduate" to ITT using the same forum account. If they don't want to get involved in the technology, then ITT isn't the place for them anyway.


It's not direct unfriendliness that's the problem, but people being put off by the heavy technogibberish they see as topic titles in most of the forums.

Look at the General forum for instance, it currently has topics like "Why there is lack of interest Highspeed enabled kernel for the Nokia n800 and n810?", what font is pretty in xterm?, How to partition memory card (Ext2/Fat)?, Lack of Ogg Support etc. These phrases are meaningless to most people, they don't make any sense at all.

If you go to a forum and you can't understand a word of it, you probably won't post or come back at all, because you won't feel it's for you.



There are many ways of doing that, some of them politer than others.

Too often the replies to brand new members say absolutely nothing but "why don't you use the search?" That kind of reply isn't going to make people feel welcome.

For example a reply like this gets across exactly the same information but in a more friendly manner:

"Welcome to the forums! I can't help you with that question myself, but I think there was someone who gave a REALLY good answer to that a while ago. Maybe you could try the search link at the top of the page if you want to look for it?"


The Tablet Scene site is mainly meant for people who buy an internet tablet to use the built-in features, not people who want to do hacks.

The tablets going mainstream means people buying them and using them for the purposes suggested on the box, none of which involve messing around with OSes or application installations.


We did discuss it, but came to the conclusion that it might be best to keep the sites separate for the moment. In the future though, who knows...

I'll be linking to Tablet Scene heavily from ITS in the meantime.


Well, my approach with the Internet Tablet School has taken a totally different route to Wiki, I've deliberately kept a tight rein on what goes in it and how detailed it can be. I received some offers of help (and got an excellent guest tutorial from Thoughtfix) but I generally tried to keep the site in one style with one author.

That's why I mentioned target audiences earlier, I knew from the outset that everything on the ITS would be written for one kind of user. I also had a specific list of topics written down that I worked through until I'd covered all of the features that an average user might want to know about.

If I'd had to cover many kinds of user the ITS site might have become a lot messier and harder to navigate, and the list of topics to cover would have become endless.