koitsu wrote:
orlaisadog wrote:
This went from a technical question about NES/Famicom detection to a debate/discussion about emphasis bits.
Now you understand why earlier I said "aren't you glad you started this thread?" People on this forum being unable to stay focused on the topic at hand is a recurring problem. You never really get used to it -- instead, you learn to filter out all the unrelated/irrelevant tripe, while facepalming and drinking hard liquor.
I was also under the impression the OP question had been answered.
But the way i see it, Bulletin Board Systems !=
Stack Overflow. If the purpose is to ask questions and get the best answer upvoted and then lock the thread, then forums aren't the best infrastructure. If you on the other hand want to encourage a more dynamic discussion following the initial topic that occasionally propels productivity/creativity and/or disseminates less self-articulated knowledge, it is.
Another difference is that S.O. works because it has a really big user base. With the handful of regulars here, i'm just glad for what discussion there is. Had there been hundreds of active users, filtering measures had been more important.
Or would a
Page Overflow fly?
There is on topic, slight derail, as in you switch tracks that were connected and then there is NESDEV Teleportationtm.
So the NES 2006 register what is up with that....
...some posts latter....
Personally I think the 68K was the right choice for the Amiga and the 3.5Mhz RAM lets you squeeze more performance out of the Agnus when you use the right combo of instructions during a blit.
...many posts later ....
Its to slow on my Atom CPU, btw I'm using Mint and not my bag, AREOS looks lite anybody used it?
..many posts later ....
Do you think this SMS game could be easily ported to a GB?
There are times when it's been an annoyance, and usually at those times someone might suggest/request starting a new thread (or just start that new thread themself) to redirect.
That particular thread, though, I don't see the problem? The only people who commented on its slightly meandering nature seemed to be doing so in jest. I did not get the sense that it was interrupting or interfering with the OP's attempt to ask a question, and the topic stayed mostly relevant to the spirit of that question anyway.
In most cases I think this freedom is very good. It allows people to express ideas in response to the topic at hand that they wouldn't have thought or wanted to start a thread for, and we very often good ideas and good discussions come out of this. Occasionally it is actually annoying, or detrimental to the cause of why the thread has started, and for those cases we can call for it to get back on track. I don't recall any time here where anyone's fought against a request to "take it to its own thread".
As far as Stack Overflow goes, I actually strongly dislike that site, and it is not at all a model for how to have healthy discussions anyway. It's trying to be a question and answer reference. We have the Wiki for reference, and as far as questions go we have a lively group of people who actually answer them personally. (There have been multiple
past discussions about Stack Overflow vs NESdev, incidentally.) Unlike that site we don't have a culture here of being rude to people who ask familiar questions.
An "NESdev StackOverflow" should just be a static page saying "you are doing PPU stuff outside of vblank"
FrankenGraphics wrote:
But the way i see it, Bulletin Board Systems != Stack Overflow. If the purpose is to ask questions and get the best answer upvoted and then lock the thread, then forums aren't the best infrastructure. If you on the other hand want to encourage a more dynamic discussion following the initial topic that occasionally propels productivity/creativity and/or disseminates less self-articulated knowledge, it is.
I couldn't have said it better myself.
I'm usually a fan of staying on-topic in forums due to their archival nature, but when the user base becomes small, and genuine discussion rare, any off-topic rant that gets people talking has my support. Also, it's harder to sort threads into very specific topics on a forum such as this, as opposed to more general video game forums, where you might have individual threads for each individual game, etc. Things are much more interconnected in the world of video game hardware and development.
I think that off-topic discussion is good. You shouldn't need to start a new thread for everything.
Me, as one of the guys who generally takes out the original focus of a thread, apologise for that, but I also don't see much problems other than "seachability".
Sometimes I wish to do something in a way that I think is the easiest path, but find out there's a better way and ask for more info about that, generally getting great answers.
Others, I just try to open a parenthesis that sometimes steals the focus, others I just get a face palm and am ignored.
Maybe language barriers play some hole here, specially when I try to say something that seems funny or trying to be a little sarcastic.
@Sumez
Or it should be "You're holding your ppu wrong" (and the joke is so bad that hell just froze over...)
Jokes aside, in a small community like nesdev, I guess it's hard to stay on topic for too long anyway. As long as the question is answered and people want to post, I don't mind too much. Of course, if the main question is never answered and it's completely derailed then and only then it is not polite to the one that asked the question.
Did you guys finally get that NESDev is the king of off-topic tangents? Took you guys a while.
That being said, no need to babysit those threads just because they're veering off course, let users be free to discuss whatever they want on a discussion board, don't kill this forum with excessive pedantism. If it's not beneficial for the thread the OP will usually request a thread split anyway.
I've seen forums with way worse off-topic tendencies than this one
This is a features of forums in general, not just nesdev. Most of the time, it's no annoyance, except for searchability, which by the way is very difficult here on those very forums.
The only case where it's an annoyance is if for example I ask a question (it doesn't matter whether it's the OP or not) and someone else directly comes with another questions that gets discussed before my own question, which remains completely ignored. This is fortunately sufficiently rare.
Bregalad wrote:
This is a features of forums in general, not just nesdev. Most of the time, it's no annoyance, except for searchability, which by the way is very difficult here on those very forums.
I almost always just use google: "nesdev [topic]" instead of bothering with the forum search. Unless I need some sort of advanced search that only the forum search tool provides.
Oziphantom wrote:
There is on topic, slight derail, as in you switch tracks that were connected and then there is NESDEV Teleportationtm.
So the NES 2006 register what is up with that....
...some posts latter....
Personally I think the 68K was the right choice for the Amiga and the 3.5Mhz RAM lets you squeeze more performance out of the Agnus when you use the right combo of instructions during a blit.
...many posts later ....
Its to slow on my Atom CPU, btw I'm using Mint and not my bag, AREOS looks lite anybody used it?
..many posts later ....
Do you think this SMS game could be easily ported to a GB?
I can't find that post with search. Which one is it? Or did you make it up?
My opinion is NNTP is better. (You can also add additional MIME headers for special purposes if you need to do so, such as denoting questions and so on whatever.) Hopefully, you can then make a SQLite virtual table that can be used to search (although the SQLite virtual table mechanism does have some limitations that makes some things less efficient than they should be).
Quote:
As far as Stack Overflow goes, I actually strongly dislike that site, and it is not at all a model for how to have healthy discussions anyway. It's trying to be a question and answer reference. We have the Wiki for reference, and as far as questions go we have a lively group of people who actually answer them personally. (There have been multiple past discussions about Stack Overflow vs NESdev, incidentally.) Unlike that site we don't have a culture here of being rude to people who ask familiar questions.
Funny, when someone posts a familiar question, I want to just do a search on nesdev for that topic, and then post a link to that other thread.
This is probably from seeing this behavior from S.O....half of the responses there are "this has been asked before, link, link, link".
It's not rude to link to past conversations about the same question, that's perfectly polite. Though on this place it's often the case that past threads are discussions and not succinct and palatable answers to the question (e.g. linking tepples' open-bus thread wasn't going to be of any direct help to oralisadog, even though it was technically a relevant answer to the question, and worth sharing for the discussion). Stack Overflow is very different in this respect, though I've seen overzealously links there too.
Stack Overflow is full of useless and rude responses of "you didn't ask this question in the arbitrarily right way/place", "this was answered, and i'm not going to help you", "use the search feature before asking a question like this", "this has been answered, here's a link you could have found by searching (to something that answers a different question)" etc. and maybe this stuff eventually gets cleaned up a little bit in editing, but I run into things like this every time I've ended up at SO through a google search. (I've never asked a question there, though.)
It's really hard to deal with millions of users though. Eternal septemer kicks in and politely saying 'please' doesn't stop it.
I'm glad this site is small enough that we can have our pleasant culture.
orlaisadog wrote:
Oziphantom wrote:
There is on topic, slight derail, as in you switch tracks that were connected and then there is NESDEV Teleportationtm.
So the NES 2006 register what is up with that....
...some posts latter....
Personally I think the 68K was the right choice for the Amiga and the 3.5Mhz RAM lets you squeeze more performance out of the Agnus when you use the right combo of instructions during a blit.
...many posts later ....
Its to slow on my Atom CPU, btw I'm using Mint and not my bag, AREOS looks lite anybody used it?
..many posts later ....
Do you think this SMS game could be easily ported to a GB?
I can't find that post with search. Which one is it? Or did you make it up?
It's a slightly over the top, hyperbolic take on things that do happen, but most of them are roughly things that have happened, although across different threads
Simple solution: use threaded instead of flat forums. Then all digressions go into separate sub-threads, being nicely and automatically separated from the original topic.
NewRisingSun wrote:
Simple solution: use threaded instead of flat forums. Then all digressions go into separate sub-threads, being nicely and automatically separated from the original topic.
I knew this one forum software called
Matt's wwwboard which was amazing for this sort of thing! Even better, it had fantastic other features like referring to the year 2000 as 19100 and basically having every security hole known to man. We should definitely run that, because as we all know, solving social and behavioural problems with technology totally works!
There is plenty of modern forum software that supports threaded discussions.
koitsu wrote:
We should definitely run that, because as we all know, solving social and behavioural problems with technology totally works!
Yes, in fact it is much more preferable to use technology to allow people to be themselves and have their fun without disturbing others, instead of "solving social and behavioural problems", i.e. forcing other people to behave as you want them to behave.
Threaded discussions used to be popular on really old internet message boards. Nowadays, pretty much only Reddit uses it. Even Facebook did away with it (for more than a single level down).
I can see the appeal, but in practice it makes it hard to follow the discussion. It's very helpful for the people who branch off into a different discussion, but for someone like me who just likes to browse through all the discussions for an entire community (or search through archived threads), it's a huge useless mess.
Sumez wrote:
Threaded discussions used to be popular on really old internet message boards.
Man, I loved those! I remember finding it really odd when forums started switching to the new style... I honestly considered it a downgrade.
tokumaru wrote:
Sumez wrote:
Threaded discussions used to be popular on really old internet message boards.
Man, I loved those! I remember finding it really odd when forums started switching to the new style... I honestly considered it a downgrade.
Same!
I guess I was shielded from a lot of the switch to flat mode because I'm a regular on Slashdot and SoylentNews, both of which still do the nested thing.
I remember those threaded one, it's been a while that I have seen one like this. For now I'm used to this one thread thing, it actually easier to follow when we don't go multiple direction ^^;; In that case making a new thread manually makes more sense.
NewRisingSun wrote:
Simple solution: use threaded instead of flat forums. Then all digressions go into separate sub-threads, being nicely and automatically separated from the original topic.
Jesus Christ no. NO. This breaks the nice flow of conversation and makes bigger threads a pain to read. Might as well convert NESdev into a mailing list type message board.
Wasn't the old nesdev forum like that? I can't remember. I was a lurker back then, I only registered when the new forum went up. I did participate a bit in the mailing list though, which was also active back then.
Maybe it was but I was not a user (before 2004?). I think there is still an archive of it somewhere.
edit:
Found the link:
http://nesdev.com/cgi-bin/wwwthreads/wwwthreads.plI checked some of the threads and it's quite hard to navigate. Don't want to go back that way ^^;;
Nobody wants to go back to that ancient forum software, as I already stated. In particular, nobody wants to have to click on each message separately.
I am talking about simple hierarchical indentation of the actual message bodies. I suppose that view is called "nested" rather than "threaded". That keeps the flow of a discussion while optically separating digressions.
Punch wrote:
NewRisingSun wrote:
Simple solution: use threaded instead of flat forums. Then all digressions go into separate sub-threads, being nicely and automatically separated from the original topic.
Jesus Christ no. NO. This breaks the nice flow of conversation and makes bigger threads a pain to read. Might as well convert NESdev into a mailing list type message board.
Quote:
Slashdot and SoylentNews, both of which still do the nested thing.
Threaded/nested views are great for a large site like Slashdot or Reddit, where people like to have big arguments about a single article. It naturally breaks giant discussions down in a bunch of different sub-conversations. But for smaller conversations and communities, flat mode lets you feel a lot more invested in the entire conversation. Which I like.
(I didn't include Soylent News because as best I can tell, it has about 10 active users, and doesn't really benefit from a threaded view)
Punch wrote:
Jesus Christ no. NO. This breaks the nice flow of conversation and makes bigger threads a pain to read. Might as well convert NESdev into a mailing list type message board.
My $2, but I agree with this. I like when each post just continues the flow of the discussion, rather than having it like a complex tree which is unnavigable. Also, why should you be forced do 2 separate answer posts if you're answering two separate previous posts ? It just makes more sense to answer everything in a post, using quotes to refer to what you're answering.
I don't know... The fact that we have to constantly quote other posts to specify the context of what we're about to say seems like a waste of time on both ends: the person who's posting has to spend time looking for the relevant parts and putting them inside quote tags, and then the ones reading the post have to waste time reading things they have already read just so they know what the following text is about.
Quoting is still necessary in nested discussions if you need to address very specific points, but you usually don't need them for contextualizing the post, so I guess it's easier and faster to follow a specific line of thought without being interrupted by the noise.
But I agree that it can be convenient to address many topics in a single post, so I guess that in the end, neither method is perfect. I remember threaded discussions very fondly, but by now I'm so used to flat discussions that I don't know if I'd be as comfortable with the old style now as I used to be...