Thread: Who volunteers writing a sticky thread for the N900 forum?
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Gadgety is offline Gadgety
2009-12-13 , 10:11
Posts: 220 | Thanked: 129 times | Joined on Nov 2009
#10
Originally Posted by qgil View Post
Hi, the N900 forum would benefit from a sticky post telling people where to find the appropriate forums.

Liknk to FAQ and the amazing power search (have youu tried it?)?

Anything purely relating to buy the N900, when it will arrive, prices, data plans, etc goes to Buy & Sell.

There is a forum exclusively for Accessories.

Anything related with preinstalled software, how tos, problems etc goes to Maemo 5.

Anything related with installable apps goes to Applications or its subforums (Multimedia, Games).

In the past we have done a technical distinction between platform and applications, but the border is not always clear even for technical people, even less for many newcomers.
I agree with you that a sticky is good by making it easy for newcomers to post. However I must say that the existing structure in this forum is not particularily user friendly for newcomers.

As a relatively new user I remember entering this forum and trying to find the N900 forum, as this was the device I was interested in.

As a potential buyer of an N900 I would like to find EVERYTHING related to that device in one place, whether hardware related, software related, user experience, pricing, delivery experiences etc.

As a new user I'm interested in finding out about the N900 as a whole package. Dividing it up makes finding relevant information pertaining to the N900 as a whole package harder to find for a new user.

Sometimes dividing it up makes it totally artificial.

Let's take the recent random shut downs on the N900. Is that a hardware or software related issue? Should that go in the hardware related N900 thread or in the software related Maemo5 thread? It may take a couple of hundred posts to identify the problem.

Furthermore regarding the Buy & Sell. I know it says the Buy & Sell is for "pre-purchase questions". However, Buy & Sell in most forums would refer to a second hand market. I find it unlikely a newcomer would go there to search for current availability of the N900 in the Nokia on-line store, or the delays at Dell etc.

For me when I first entered Maemo.org it simply offered too much information, and too many bewildering options. I just wanted to know about the N900.

At the time I didn't know what Maemo5 had to do with anything, and it took a while to understand the N900 runs Maemo5, and that is currently the only device running that OS.

To my mind, make it easier for newbies. They will be device centric. Keep a general heading "N900" and then sub forums "Operating System Maemo5", "Software Applications" "Buying the N900" etc. This would make a lot of sense.

If that requires too much work, or is not possible for technical reasons, or show too many other negative side effects, at the very least this forum could be made more user friendly by adding a tagline to some of the main headings, e.g. OS/Platform Maemo5 - and then list the devices that runs this OS N900 (the only one at the moment)