By now everybody must be aware of the excellent new wiki's that the team has been putting hours of work into and really doing a fine job of it. You might have also seen the Community drop down menu at the top of the page at http://www.ardupilot.com under that you will see a links to here and APM Forum, this is where our forums will migrate to over time.
Stefan has done an excellent job of improving the functionality of the forums, making it less spammy in the process.
Its attracting questions from wiki users now and as such we need some more of the experts that hang out here to be on hand to help new users there.
The platform that this website uses is about to undergo a major change and this will give us an opportunity to make this site a little more curated with the best of peoples builds and ideas getting more attention.
So come on over to the new forums and lend a hand.
Comments
I totally agree, I come to diy drones for news, info AND to see any issues that others are having with APM. Updates etc that may affect my system. It all must be in one place.
@Stefan, you interpret criticism, a right we should still have to express different opinions, as "negative agitation". Is it so strange that other people might not think in the same way you do ? What may seem obvious and simple for you might seem totally unfriendly and unusable for others. This is the case as far as I'm concern with this awful new forum. As I knew that this would trigger a debate, I purposely proposed a vote. Let people choose instead of imposing what some may think is an improvement, which is really not.
My argument is that the tools should not be confused with objectives. This require the objectives are first define before choosing a tool, which is always hard for IT people to understand. Was the community asked to participate in defining objectives for a new forum ? (Not that I know but I may have missed an episode) What do we try to improve ? What do we try to solve that does not work well enough in this forum ? Was the community asked in evaluating eventual alternative tools ? Not that I know of but again I may have missed a second episode. This community made the success of the current forum and indirectly of 3D Robotics, as Chris recognizes himself. Now that 3DRobotics has got funding from a VC should not mean that decision should be taken unilaterally by 3D and not care so much about what the community thinks or wishes. Or it should be made clear : 3D Robotics pays so the community just has to follow imperial decisions even against member's wishes. Is that the spirit ? I do not think so and I will fight harshly against this kind mentality, would it be the case.
The new forum will be the official 3DR hardware support forum with 3DR engineers answering hardware support issues in the respective subforum. Additionally, it will be the primary support forum for the related open source software. For those purposes it is much better suited than the Ning platform. One very good examples for improvement are the insanely long APM:Copter release threads on DIYD. The new forum has a dedicated subforum for each copter version with the release notes being sticky on top. Every question/problem will have it's own thread. That is significantly easier to search and much more transparent.
Additionally, it is simply more logical to have the software/hardware support closer to the documentation which is on ardupilot.com.
The new forum is based on phpBB which is one of the most widespread forum systems on the net and it's surely far from unusable or user unfriendly.
Of course, that's all a matter of personal taste but I for example find the Ning forums very unintuitive, complex and user-unfriendly. However, while personal taste is fine, agitation is not! The 3DR team has invested tons of work into trying to make things better for the users, so in my opinion that massive negative agitation is very much misplaced here!
I would propose a member's vote or at least opinion survey to really know if it is worth migrating to the so called new forum. Indeed I think this new forum is just UNUSABLE AND USER UNFRIENDLY. There is no progress when things are made more complicated with more administration.
I may be wrong but you will loose lots of participation moving to an inadequate tool.
@Gerry: Right now Diy Drones is playing host to multiple parts of this community (Tech,News,Personal Builds, etc). This community has grown so large that it makes it almost impossible to organize and answer tech related issues and questions. People post tech related questions in random spots throughout the website and this makes it very difficult to provide people with the help they seek. We want to provide people an organized and centralized location to deal with all Ardu related tech questions, support, and provide a place for our community members who are knowledgeable with the APM/Ardu Software an organized place so it is easier to locate and help people who are in need of assistance.
All in all I don't think it will break up the community or change anyones experience much. The only thing that will change is that information will be greatly organized and provide the users of this community a much more easier experience when searching for technical help. I think the overall goal is for Diy Drones to focus 100% on Drone News, Blogs, Peoples FPV Videos, peoples personal projects and anything non tech related. Users who only come to Diy Drone for Technical related things will find it to be much easier and enjoyable to discuss and search for Technical help or conversation.
@Gerrit:At some point the Diy Drones Forums could be used to organize community members Personal Builds, FPV Content, Drone Events/conferences, Drone Contests, and much more. It will be highly refreshing to see the millions and millions of documents and information on Diy Drones organized, easily accessible, and easily searchable.
@Gerrit:The transition is going to be gradual. At some point I'm sure the forums on Ning will be removed or repurposed to fit the needs of the Diy Drones Community. For a little while you may see items like the Arducopter 3.01 release have multiple forums. The reason for that is we are migrating over to the new forums for tech related issues, advice, questions, etc and for the duration of the migration we want to provide users a place in each one of the sites until the move is complete. I can talk to some folks though and try to see if I can help assist in the migration and I can address your concerns at that point.
:/ Isn't there some concern this is going to fragment the community? What is the purpose behind dividing the users between the two sites like this? Now I have to go to twice as many locations to read all DIYDrones content.
I think the new forums are a great thing, good job!
@Joshua
So is the intention of these forums (for example) to replace the 2000+ replies item 'Arducopter 3.01 released!'?
If so then I suggest closing off the Ning forums or at least make it very clear where one is supposed to go for what information.
It looks there are now three 'official' places to discuss about the current arducopter 3.01 release: here and here on diydrones.com and now also here in the APM forums. That seems confusing to me.
Ning will still be the operating platform for DiyDrones.com
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