The main reason I registered on this forum was to learn more about maemo and get help with my n900.
A few months ago this forum seemed to be a nice place where people can discuss and get professional help.
But recently I got the impression that more and more threads get spoiled by useless troll-post and silly comments like the N900 s**ks and Nokia is evil and will kill us all.
That´s a very sad development, instead of looking at the great things some programmers in this forum are doing to make our N900 a better device and allow a "neutral" and professional discussion on relevant topics, this forum slowly drowns in a river of hate and troll-posts.
How can be get the forum back on topic?

I declare today "International Hug-A-Developer Day"

I'm sure it will invariably get stated... but even this isn't helping.

Back in the iTT days (internettablettalk.com) days, people helped each other. There were some angry posters; however people genuinely helped each other.

In these cases, the anger is coming from not having answers and having less patience.

I've more than likely admittedly have added to some of that - my grievances are somewhat well known to some/those that pay attention - but to let some things continue as they have... it has to stop.

Disarray leads to anarchy and disenfranchisement. Would be a damn shame to see this place disintegrate into some argumentative haven for those that have little positive to say and are all negative.

It's a community. We can change the entire place by starting with ourselves.

Gerbick: if there was a double-thanks button, I'd push it. I've read some of your more controversial posts before, and it's nice to hear your comments on this. Trolls aside, I think there a lot of people who are just genuinely annoyed (and sometimes ignorant), and even that can kill a forum community if it's prevalent enough. Forum dynamics ensure that a board this size will always have some of that, of course, but we do need to take responsibility to not let it take over.
Some of the initiatives like the "Maemo Greeters" seem to have worked well in their own areas; I think we should brainstorm more possible things like that.
Does anyone familiar with the forum engine know if it's possible/practical to add some sort of "canned response" feature, for the questions that get asked excessively? It's easy to say "search the ****'n forum", but people who have never used a forum before may not easily find things, and t.m.o. is large enough that there are likely plenty of those people - more than enough to provide an excess of already-answered posts. On IRC, it's easy to do this with wiki-bots and such, but is there anything that could accomplish that for forums?

For me it is very clear what needs to be done.

There will be no clean forum without strong moderation. I mean posts that are against forum policy should be moved to trash and poster should get a warning. 3 warnings should result in ban for some time (a week or so).

Without these measures we can only expect that more than half posts here is trolling.

Well i cannot agree with you at all... This would be a total censorship.
Actually there are many clean and good forums out there as far as Open Source Society is concerned... Just go and look around the KDE, GNOME etc etc forums... And there is no strong Moderation there...

In fact forums can stay clean if the people do not waste their time replying to threads they consider throlling, disgusting, not interesting etc. Because it is a fact that "throlls" in any forum are just as guilty of making a thread "unclean" as the people that reply to them with things like: "Oh not again, leave.", "Would someone pls moderate this one"... etc.
When you want to get rid of a thread that you do not like... the only thing that will work is not posting in it... that is the simple truth..
As for the "community" here.... well it is a good example of what happens when Open Source Code is combined with Propriety Source Code.... And the only one that really profits from all this is Nokia... 'cause the support of a product when involving the Open Source Community is much less expensive :P

Well said, gerbick. As the Nseries tablets became more popular, and their appeal broadened, they started being bought in greater numbers by people who did not buy them as portable linux computers you could do cool things with, but as PDAs, slates, gadgets.

Thus, the composition of the membership here has changed from primarily developers and early adopters interested in exploring the technology to end-users who expect their shiny new gadget to just work. Of course, expecting the gadget to just work is a perfectly reasonable expectation, but the response to it not "working" is very different depending on your primary focus.
As a developer or early adopter, the first response is generally to try and fix it yourself, or come to the community and ask whether anyone knows of a fix for the aberrant behaviour and - perhaps - collaborate if no answer has yet been found.

As a consumer, the first - and mostly reasonable - response is to complain, either to the manufacturer or, in this case, the perceived "support forum"; maemo.org.

There really is very little that can be done about this to be honest except for us old-timers (Although I'm not active much I still use and enjoy my N800, I'm hoping that qualifies) to lead by example, and be courteous, honest and helpful.

As the N900 was the first of the line to garner a broad appeal from the relatively non-tech public, it is inevitable that both maemo and meego will see influxes of people for whom the innards of the device are much less important. We should be prepared for that; let the charm offensive begin!

I think that the N900 is a more commercial product than the previous tablets, as it has the telephony feature. I think Nokia had a hard time designing marketing just right, so that ordinary phone users that would be more happy with, say Android wouldn't think of the N900 as an equivalent. On the other hand, there's no point in Nokia marketing the N900 as a "don't buy if you want to do this, that and this" product, but rather as building on the N900's strengths. This is only natural for marketing strategies, of course.

I think the most fustration comes from exactly those people, who weren't prepared to truly face and accept the shortcomings of the N900 as a phone. I think this is one source of fustration that then surfaces on these forums as negative posts.

Other sources of this fustration on the other hand, might be the people who understood exactly what the N900 was, and can't stand misinformed people whining over something that's self-explanatory to them. These people are also often the people most content with their device, and so hearing people whining about it can be somewhat hard to take.

The general tech-junkie who might get along with the idea that the N900 is more a computer might also value the fact that he holds the latest and greatest technology in his posession. Therefore for him announcements like the ones about MeeGo not coming for the N900 might hit hard in a very negative way.

Then there's the overall "this vs that" mentality that exists very strongly in our "smartphones popularized" era, where expensive devices have become much more respected and sought after items. As people pay more money for their devices, the slightest shortcomings really seem to have an impact on them, and functions and features are compared almost to a neurotic degree. This situation is then bloated by (false) expectations created by very large-scale marketing by the leading manufacturers, who naturally want to pit their devices against everyone else's as the best. This is again, the most natural part of marketing.

To make sense of the chaos that results from comparing numerous manufacturers' devices and OS's to eachother, people often form fanhood relationships to some companies, devices or OS's. Challenge these and again the results might be very negative.

So what would I suggest that should be done to maintain a healthy and constructive community? Well, there's nothing we can all decide upon that will make everything allright. There will always be posts that are posted before reading a thousand other posts that would have significantly changed the contents of that post. There's no way of controlling someone coming in from the already established common-knowledge base inside this community.

Therefore everyone has to decide for themselves, how they want to present themselves and their case when confronted by differing views. One must decide, if a constructive reply is something they can achieve, even when facing statments that seem completely unplausible and destructive to them. Sometimes simply not replying can be the most constructive thing to do.

Perhaps the responsibility then falls hardest upon frequent and oldest users of these boards and older members of this community to attempt to not "feed the trolls" and "throw gasoline on the flames" once things heat up. This is also the hardest kind of responsibility, because having stuck around for the longest time might mean that they are the die-hardest enthusiasts.


Just my 2 cents in the form of Social theory on the Maemo community!

Can only agree with you

Maybe we can feel mature when reading them?????

Or the mods can laugh their asses of????