Hi,
I think it is about time we do a general cleanup of the forums. Some of the forums here are not used anymore since many years, for various reasons (shrinking community, ROMs/distros not being used anymore...). I'm sure most of you will be now tired of reading on the front page about Omicron's Linux solution, the gizmoforyou.com website and that Portabase was put on Kickstarter smile.gif
I believe that it would be better to only keep the forums which are being used in the last few years, and consolidate more forums into one if they have been only rarely used. Furthermore, now that we have the new GPD forums, the forum's structure as is now would confuse any newcomer, as it is still taken for granted that the whole forum is devoted to the Zaurus. I believe this is what offroadgeek and dz were planning to do in the future when they renamed the forum from ZUG to OESF, i.e. to make this a generic support forum for many handhelds and portable devices based on Linux.
I have checked which forums have been used in the last year, here's the list:
Site Suggestions, Requests, and Updates
General Discussion
GPD Forums
Angstrom & OpenZaurus
New products and alternatives
Hardware Mods
Arch Linux ARM
Off Topic forum
pdaXrom
For Sale / Wanted
My idea is to create a new forum called "Archived forums", where all the unused forums would be moved to, while still regaining the original forums structure; for example, Distros, Development, and Model Specific Forums->Everything Development->Python would end up in Archived forums->Distros, Development, and Model Specific Forums->Everything Development->Python, and so on. All the archived forums and posts will be set as read-only, so it will be still possible to access them.
Since this will be a major update, I'll make a backup of both the forum's files and the database before starting the cleanup, so that in case something goes wrong I can quickly put back the old forum online. This is my proposed new forum structure, all the forums which are not listed below will be stored in the Archived section:
General Forums
- General Discussion
- For Sale / Wanted
- Off Topic forum
- New products and alternatives
Model Specific Forums
- Sharp Zaurus
- - Zaurus - Hardware discussion
- - Zaurus - Arch Linux ARM support
- - Zaurus - Other distros support
- GPD Devices
- - GPD Pocket - hardware
- - GPD Win - hardware
- - GPD - Linux OS
- - GPD - Windows OS
Everything Else
- Embedded Linux Hardware / Software Index
- - ELSI News
- - ELSI General Discussion
- - ELSI Development
- OESF Wiki
- Site Specific Forums
- - Site Suggestions, Requests, and Updates
- - OESF Announcements
Archived forums
Note that almost all the "new" forums are the same as the old one: I'll keep all the old posts in there, and make it possible to reply to all the old threads too; only the forums in the archived section will become read-only. The only new forums are Zaurus - Hardware discussion, Zaurus - Other distros support and Other Devices, which will not have any old post. By the way, with this new structure all the subforums inside GPD Devices will become visible in the main page. Remember that we can add any new forum at a later stage, if required. I'll keep for now the same structure for the Elsix forums, we'll decide how to handle them later, when the site will be back online.
Feel free to add any comment, I'll wait for a couple of weeks before proceeding (and I'll anyway announce it before starting).
Varti
