Forum Upgrade

Re: Forum Upgrade

Postby BobAGI » Wed May 28, 2014 8:25 pm

Tom Maier wrote:David, your .sig on the microchip site is a good idea. Subtle, yet obvious.

And subtle as it is I believe it will be visible on ALL past replies as well!
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Re: Forum Upgrade

Postby Tom Maier » Wed May 28, 2014 8:39 pm

We have the members with the skills now, but we need content and the look of this being a "live forum".

- leave a tab on your browser set for this site each day. It shows as a guest login and shows forum activity.
- or stay logged in each day. People are more likely to use the forum if they see people in it.
- contribute a thread about something. It's too barren out there. The founding members need to bring life to it.
- search google for this pic forum, and then click on the search result to train google that this forum does exist.
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Re: Forum Upgrade

Postby jtemples » Wed May 28, 2014 8:57 pm

Tom Maier wrote:If you did that with all the threads microchip could declare that to be "interference of trade" and really make trouble.


Somehow I think they'd be thrilled if they didn't have to run a forum.
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Re: Forum Upgrade

Postby Tom Maier » Wed May 28, 2014 9:18 pm

They certainly will not mind if there is a new independant forum that encourages people to use microchip parts and they don't have to spend a dime in making it happen. Maybe if the site takes off they might want to advertise on it?

But anytime you mess with the image of a company the lawyers (who are on retainer) will imediately want to get involved and that leads to infringement charges and other scarey stuff.
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Re: Forum Upgrade

Postby ric » Thu May 29, 2014 1:39 am

Tom Maier wrote:Being a dial-up modem user, you have my vote for no heavy downloads. I think just having one banner ad can more than pay for a site.

Personally, I loath banner ads.
They eat screen space and bandwidth.

Right now, this site is piggy-backed onto a Godaddy webspace I already pay for, so it's costing me nothing.
If it gets busy enough to require its own web hosting account, that will still be a pretty small charge, nothing more than say $5 a month. I think we could raise that with a small donation drive.

If I was making advertising revenue from this website, I think a lot of people would question my motives for starting it.

Tom Maier wrote:1.) Don't be restricted to trying to be a mirror image of the microchip forum. Maybe their layout is not the best.

I agree. Some of it is messy and not well organised. I recreated most of it to get started and give this forum a bit of a similar feel, but I think we can improve it a lot with some community feedback.

2.) Most all of us are "answer people", and are not used to starting threads. There will not be "question people" for some time until we build up enough to have search engines find us and build up more users.

Agreed. I'd like to see a few "FAQ" type topics at the head of each forum, e.g. this one about read-modify-write I just started, which still needs lot more work:
FAQ: Read-modify-write (RMW). What it is and how to avoid it

3.) Everybody should contribute some thread every now and then. Doesn't have to be long and complex, just to enough to be informative and keep the activity going. What can people contribute? I was thinking of drawing up some more schematics about electrical interfacing.

Each to their own, but certainly if anyone has a pet topic they keep giving the same answers to, then write up a definitive answer, and I can make that topic "sticky" in the appropriate forum.
Latest test project, an LED matrix display made from one reel of addressable LEDs. here
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Re: Forum Upgrade

Postby BobAGI » Fri Jun 13, 2014 6:48 am

Seems like Microchip has killed the "Forum Upgrade" thread on their site!
Whenever I try to locate it by clicking the link in an email I am now getting to a "Welcome" page rather than the thread post...
They might have finally seen the discussion and rather than addressing the issues they removed it from sight.

It seems like the last post that made it into the thread such that an alert message was sent is this:

From: s***s

Re:Forum Upgrade
If everyone sent an email to this person about the forum, maybe it would get some attention:
S***.S***@Microchip.com


Maybe the publishing of that email address was the final straw???
Last edited by BobAGI on Fri Jun 13, 2014 7:54 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Forum Upgrade

Postby Ian.M » Fri Jun 13, 2014 11:09 am

BobAGI wrote:Seems like Microchip has killed the "Forum Upgrade" thread on their site!
Whenever I try to locate it by clicking the link in an email I am now getting to a "Welcome" page rather than the thread post...
They might have finally seen the discussion and rather than addressing the issues they removed it from sight.


Unfortunately that's removed my Greasmonkey user script for fixing MCHP forum titles, and I cant attach it to a post in Welcome@MCHP so am reposting it here. See attachment.
Attachments
MCHP_fix6.user.js.txt
Greasemonkey Userscript for Micrtochip's own forum
(1.84 KiB) Downloaded 370 times
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Re: Forum Upgrade

Postby Tom Maier » Fri Jun 13, 2014 4:13 pm

OK, I've officially given up on the microchip forum and have deleted it from my bookmarks. I just spent an hour trying to make one post and then it got deleted by the server. "Acress Denied", "Server Not Found", deleting posts after spending a lot of time writing on them... it's a nightmare. It's not a big deal, because I just solve my own problems anyway and don't need it for using the products.
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Re: Forum Upgrade

Postby BobAGI » Fri Jun 13, 2014 5:25 pm

I sent Steve Sanghi a complaint e-mail on company letterhead stating that we are very disappointed with the way the support forum has been mis-handled.
Let's see if it results in anything.
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Re: Forum Upgrade

Postby Jim.Nickerson » Fri Jun 13, 2014 6:04 pm

BobAGI wrote:Seems like Microchip has killed the "Forum Upgrade" thread on their site!
Whenever I try to locate it by clicking the link in an email I am now getting to a "Welcome" page rather than the thread post...
They might have finally seen the discussion and rather than addressing the issues they removed it from sight.

It seems like the last post that made it into the thread such that an alert message was sent is this:

From: ***

Re:Forum Upgrade
If everyone sent an email to this person about the forum, maybe it would get some attention:
**@**.com


Maybe the publishing of that email address was the final straw???


I suggest re posting this without munging the original posters name and the subject he suggested mail bombing might not be the best choice.
I have not seen the original poster for a bit.
This action would seem to indicate Microchip does watch the forums.
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