Not having a Newbie Safe Area forces all posters of all threads in all forums to be nice to newbies.

You can turn this omelette by saying that there is plenty of places in the Internet that welcome huge amounts of newbies every day without the need of having a Newbie corner. They just have a good architecture able to make happy newcomers and regular users.

Real architecture had this problem too. First there were not buildings welcoming people using wheelchairs. Then they patched special accesses for weelchairs on those buildings. Now buildings of organizations caring about weelchair users are designed with common accesses making happy everybody.

Yes, I have been active in all these processes. In a quite transparent way. My goal is probably your goal as well: to have a place where the Maemo community can discuss, help each other and have fun. Being a good entry point for newcomers is an essential factor of success.

Originally Posted by SD69

But here you are advocating helping newbies by removing the newbie forum? Would you help handicapped people by removing the handicap ramps?

Originally Posted by SD69

The objective from my pov is categorization of threads by subject matter, not to guide conduct which should be the same across all forums.

But many of these forums are not part of a developer centric organization, which is what I see when I look at newstyle.maemo.org. The news are all developer related items, as are the announcements and events. If you click on "Intro" button, you get a developer minded page. Most Internet forums are stand alone and dominated by regular users or enthusiasts. I think, in our case, because of the maemo.org environment, a different structure than most forums should be used to reach out to newbies and regular users.

But here you are advocating helping newbies by removing the newbie forum? Would you help handicapped people by removing the handicap ramps?

We have the same goal in this respect. Where would you say the entry point for newcomers will be if the newbie forum is removed?

...

Originally Posted by me

I read the original sticky and like a good soldier did as I was instructed.
Unfortunately a change was made while I was doing my thing. Now there is no mention of the original instructions and I feel like I'm in an episode of the Twilight Zone.

You will survive, will you? With the previous policy your thread was moved and with the new policy you thread has been moved as well to the same location. A big deal?

... for whatever reason, when a change is made, please announce it first. Leave the announcement up afterwords for awhile pretty please.

Wow! I Must have the worst luck...

As said, after moving every single new Newbie thread to a better destination I don't see such "Newbie" categorization really exists. Newbies post also in General, N810 and other forums. Many threads starting in Newbies are posted by people that actually are no newbies at all. This is the reality we have now.

It's maemo.org what needs to be improved to receive end users (and not just newbies) better.

- We need to talk about how to expand the planet (which nurtures the news you see in the frontpage).

- We started discussing about Announcements that should not only be posted by Nokia employees about developer related stuff.

- The Intro can be radically changed as soon as maemo.nokia.com and Forum Nokia cover the description of the Maemo platform and its main features.

And more, I agree. Keeping a Newbie forum doesn't solve the problems you are detecting, really.

Originally Posted by sjgadsby

This echos some of the discussion that took place when Tablet Scene was announced. We've since seen how segregating newbies to their own site turned out, and I wonder if that provides any lessons in terms of a separate newbie forum here.

Originally Posted by geneven

2) How about an area colorfully named "free-fire zone"? This would be an area for short easy questions. The thing is, it would be announced at the top of the area that ALL q's and their answers would be deleted after a couple of days.

Originally Posted by YoDude

Choosing not to respond to a reasonable request like this... ...for good or ill, could be a big deal to both veteran and newbie alike.

Could an announcement or "Read this" sticky be placed in the old "Newbie" forum at least. I just answered a question in there for a new user...

1) How about amnesty for all users? There wouldn't be need for a Newbie area if people with supposedly dumb questions or who hadn't searched enough weren't treated with contempt. (My unofficial observation is that most users criticized for not searching protest that they DID search -- and I believe they did, just ineffectively.)

2) How about an area colorfully named "free-fire zone"? This would be an area for short easy questions. The thing is, it would be announced at the top of the area that ALL q's and their answers would be deleted after a couple of days.

Originally Posted by qgil

Keep a changelog of ongoing discussions about changes? What about discussing, deciding and executing the changes, leaving the forums in peace after that?



If you want to write one... I'm still for moving the forum to Old as soon as possible.



This is fully in line with the proposal of rmoving the Newbie forum and being friendly with newbies everywhere. +1



Do you find appealing to answer the same questions every now and then? Anyway, why not starting a sticky thread in General and see if it works? And then creating a forum only if th traffic justifies it.