For a long time there have been no official rules of conduct for this forum nor any of its individual boards. So long as it's not necessary I think that is a great way to go, but it just hit me that the 'Free Announcements' board might benefit from a simple ruleset.
What type of posts would you like to see in this board? Should it be strictly JME-related?
I noticed that we just had a promotion of a games creation service of sorts (presently unlaunched…), and I thought "is anyone even going to read this?". I for one am not interested in third party vendors or service providers coming in here to flash their goods. I think that's best mediated through the members themselves when they've had a (un)pleasant experience they'd like to share.
How about they pay us 5$ every day to keep their ad on top of the 'Free Announcement' forum?
Yeah that ad seemed a little grey area. That said, a number of threads on the forum have to do with game theory more than jME.
I think its important to not alienate potentially interesting third-party projects. GUI engines, for example, come to mind. I also know that lwjgl has put up courtesy threads in here before about new versions being released. We definitely want to keep those (I think) and I'd vote to keep allowing indie jME games to be announced.]
Now, we'd need to fit that into some sort of wording.
On a larger scale, however, I see this sub-forum as good for:
- jME users to learn about projects that might be helpful in their work
- jME users to advertise their projects and releases
I don't think rules would be in order. As the first post suggests, unless there's a compelling reason for them then better off without them.
It might be better not to have posts that are targeting other engines with no mention of jME at all. On the other hand, right now there are very few posts advertising supporting products and services at all. Yet this forum is frequented primarily by coders, and the majority of us need a lot of these other things to produce polished finished products.
Were there more traffic of this nature, one post aimed at Torque would fall into the "err you're on the wrong forum" bracket not the "shall we ban it?" one.
One thing I'd be inclined to change is the name "Free Announcements". User Code & Projects also implies that they're free in the text. All of the projects that are used to showcase jME are commercial, and yet at a glance the jME forums seem to have no place for commercial projects, products or services. I think this is a mistake.
Yes, I also think we should better distinguish between user tools (tools+snippets), user projects (requests for devs, small project showoff) and user games (complete games that have a team and want to show themselves).
Alric said:
One thing I'd be inclined to change is the name "Free Announcements". User Code & Projects also implies that they're free in the text. All of the projects that are used to showcase jME are commercial, and yet at a glance the jME forums seem to have no place for commercial projects, products or services. I think this is a mistake.
You touched on a good point there and I think normen's approach is quite rational
normen said:
Yes, I also think we should better distinguish between user tools (tools+snippets), user projects (requests for devs, small project showoff) and user games (complete games that have a team and want to show themselves).
I might word it differently so it doesn't sound like games are more important than projects or vice-versa
Sorry that I dropped away from this conversation; I sort of put it aside in favor of working on the project portals because I knew they might have an effect on any possible new forum structure for user’s content.
So since we’re soon there I would like to resume this debate. I get why separation would be desirable, but how to go about it is tricky to me. When does a useful tool become a project? When more than one person is working on it? When it’s composed by more than X lines of code? This missing (and I dare say impossible) separation makes itself seen in wiki posts such ‘code snippets for jME2’.
In my opinion we need some dedicated space to post code snippets in, which I believe by common definition is a rather small piece of code that in and by itself is understandable and highly re-usable. Anything bigger should find itself in a googlecode project or branch. Some research has already been done, so I’ll be looking further into that tomorrow.
Please share your thoughts.
Edit: Perhaps http://jmonkeyengine.pastebin.com/ will suffice?
erlend_sh said:
In my opinion we need some dedicated space to post code snippets in, which I believe by common definition is a rather small piece of code that in and by itself is understandable and highly re-usable. Anything bigger should find itself in a googlecode project or branch. Some research has already been done, so I'll be looking further into that tomorrow. A board dedicated to 'snippets' might still suffice, but it would require certain thread-style conventions.
The logical thing to me, then, is to just split the "User Code & Projects" board into two. "Code Snippets" and "User Projects". The question then, is what is left for the "Free Announcements" forum? Just product release info?
erlend_sh said:
Virtual penny for your thoughts.
I'll PM you my PayPal for that vPenny ;)
sbook said:With Joomla! in the playing field it might be rendered useless. I was thinking we'd let our users submit 'community news' items for editor approval. With JFusion's 'discussion bot' any approved article would also get a new thread set up for it in the appropriate forum; we'd just disallow posting new threads there, but everything else like default.
The logical thing to me, then, is to just split the "User Code & Projects" board into two. "Code Snippets" and "User Projects". The question then, is what is left for the "Free Announcements" forum? Just product release info?
About splitting it up into 'code snippets' and 'user projects', I suppose that'd work. I'll refer to the pastebin sub-domain as a 'if your code is too long'-option. I still wanna hold this off until we have Joomla! in place though.