Thank you Jaffa and dneary for your participation in this thread. I got pulled away for a work related issue and could not respond until now.

The reason for my original post was to respond to the numbers that were used to justify the logic of recent actions.

I was also trying to say that Maemo Council, the administration of this forum, Council elections, and maemo.org are all different things and this would be in agreement with you, I believe.

(In the spirit of the topic of this thread I want to add how difficult it was to compose that last sentence... I still fear that someone will jump in at anytime to correct my capitalization, punctuation, or some other trivial thing in the name of meamo.org and that this correction will bring the thread to a screeching halt. Any point that was being made, idea proposed, or direction that the threaded conversation was taking would then be lost. )

I also agree that no malice aforethought or gaming took place by any of the participants and I wish to re-emphasize that as strongly as possible.

Now on to my threaded response:

Actually I was trying to point out the involvement of Nokia and the motivation for many of the changes in this forum as well as the unintended consequences.

Me? With regard to the forum why are you asking? IMHO and as I have posted before, forums seem to work best when there is a benevolent dictator directing and administrating changes. Moderation is limited and almost anonymous. Forums that try to engage members in some sort of democratic process of administration quickly loose focus on their intended subject and become forums about forums.

In this case the selection of moderators was public and the criteria tied to karma. And again, those forum members who had not registered with maemo.org may have felt they were SOL.

If mods were selected by a benevolent dictator for their commitment to the smooth operation of the forum, and they were notified via private message, we would have seen less tumult.




With regard to maemo.org I would have looked first at why there was not more forum member involvement. At the very least I might have acknowledged the differences in forum, mailing list, and IRC cultures and familiarized myself with the individual etiquettes of each mode of communication before jumping in and making changes.

Imagine if a gang of primarily forum members logged on to a scheduled maemo.org event on an IRC channel with a big “Howdy” to everyone and immediately asked “Where do I get some cool downloads?” with out regard to the topic at hand?

Well the same could be said about people who “troll” to “thread crap” a forum or attempt to hijack a forum threads topic and redirect it when they don't particularly like the way things are going... Turning a topic back on a respondent could also be considered a thread hi-jack, but it's done by proxy. The results are the same as the conversation gets redirected to something not related to the point being made or the question that was raised.

A lot of that^ started happening here all of a sudden.

...Until changes are made.

***

BTW, my heckles (I know what you meant, Dave ) have never been raised by the direction or intent of this community. The community has provided for me very well over the years. I try to pay it back by sharing what I have learned through posts and threads on this forum. A forum IMHO, has been the best form of community communication since Caesar was a plebe.

The last recreational mailing list I belonged to was in the early ‘90’s and its credo was “Live to Flame and Flame to Live” (DoD #76 ). Relay chats seem to me to loose effectiveness the larger a group becomes. Some eventually turn into what could be best described as cocktail parties where side conversations about obscure sci-fi novels determine who is heard instead of relevance to the topic at hand...

However, a mailing list is the best way I know to communicate the status of a group project and relay chats, provided they have specific agendas are a very good way for smaller sub-groups to manage assigned tasks.

The problem is/was to most forum members they didn't think this forum was a “project” and the first time they even heard of a sub-group or committee was the Community Council. To me there is no wonder why some are confused.

Perhaps now that the changes are made we should all wait for the dust to settle and I think that was one of the purposes of this thread.

Now that leads us to my motivation...
None of the changes in particular bothered me. I rather liked the new lay-out and colors. I load up the new posts page when I visit so sub-forums and where a post is placed is of little importance to me. The problem I had when a thread of mine was moved was that it was done within minutes of my posting it and in doing so it was taken out of the new posts queue so that even I couldn't find the dang thing again.

When I inquired about new thread posting criteria in an active thread about forum changes, I was directed to an instruction sticky that had been substantially changed since I had posted the day before. Moving threads without giving the author a reason and making rule changes without showing an edit are not what most forums do. A simple Mod edit: (Mod edits are usually small instructional posts made by a moderator within a member’s post.) in both cases would have sufficed.

The reason I speak up on other issues may have something to do with how I was brought up... I come from a large family where I was the child born right smack in the middle of all the others. I had an equal number of older siblings as younger ones. When we walked in a group, the older ones longer strides put them ahead of the younger ones, yet the younger ones worked harder and faster just to catch-up... I was always taught to stick-up for the little guys.

Also: I don't usually get "hot under the collar".
However I do tend to talk louder when a point I’m trying to make is being ignored.