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The truth about why CodeWalrus opened (warning: controversial)

Started by Dream of Omnimaga, August 25, 2015, 04:50:52 AM

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Yuki

Quote from: Lionel Debroux on October 06, 2015, 08:06:40 AM
There are worse failures than CodeWalrus... Under its new direction, Omnimaga has become one, to begin with.
That's partly why CW was founded, and became a success, Omnimaga changed a lot since DJ's tenure as admin.
  • Calculators owned: TI-83+ (dead?), Casio Prizm (also dead???)
  • Consoles, mobile devices and vintage computers owned: A lot
Read Zarmina!
YUKI-CHAAAANNNN
In the beginning there was walrii. In the end there will be walrii. All hail our supreme leader :walrii: --Snektron

if you wanna throw money at me and/or CodeWalrus monthly it's here

Ivoah

  • Calculators owned: TI-86 (now broken), TI SR-56, TI-Nspire CX CAS, TI-84+ SE, TI-84+ SE, TI-85, TI-73 Explorer VS, ViewScreen, TI-84+ CSE, TI-83+ SE

Dream of Omnimaga

#17
And now Kerm is at it, insisting with even worse stuff (the last part is the problem), despite me insisting otherwise during the pimath incident, when he first said that CW goal was to steal users from other sites:

Quote<@KermPhD> DJ_O: CodeWalrus was responsible for siphoning off Omnimaga users and activity, which I believe was the goal.

I'm done with Cemetech. We will also be discussing those matters with CodeWalrus staff to decide if we start a poll about if further action shall be taken about those repeated matters (EDIT: Done, and there won't be any for now.). The two people who shared this with me better not be banned for it (like what happened to Netham45 in 2011 when he privately shared logs of incriminating stuff), else the ban will be made public. I would rather not take any further action about those matters, but this is not the first time that such libelous claim is posted.
  • Calculators owned: TI-82 Advanced Edition Python TI-84+ TI-84+CSE TI-84+CE TI-84+CEP TI-86 TI-89T cfx-9940GT fx-7400G+ fx 1.0+ fx-9750G+ fx-9860G fx-CG10 HP 49g+ HP 39g+ HP 39gs (bricked) HP 39gII HP Prime G1 HP Prime G2 Sharp EL-9600C
  • Consoles, mobile devices and vintage computers owned: Huawei P30 Lite, Moto G 5G, Nintendo 64 (broken), Playstation, Wii U

Lionel Debroux

#18
Quote<@KermPhD> DJ_O: CodeWalrus was responsible for siphoning off Omnimaga users and activity, which I believe was the goal.
Er, what, Kerm ? Rather, a consequence of the goal of CodeWalrus...
As was clear (to me, anyway) from the initial public announcement, which post-dated the "Dear Omnimaga" episode by months, CodeWalrus aimed at providing a place where people would feel at home again, because the mood slowly imposed by the new lead at Omnimaga was increasingly being seen as hostile. AFAICT, siphoning Omnimaga users and activity was a consequence - not a goal - of strongly disgusting several of the most active and skilled users from posting, and the otherwise increasingly disrespectful atmosphere. IOW, people voting with their feet, like they did for e.g. the TI-68k/Nspire section of yAronet.

Omnimaga's new lead clearly didn't have in mind the mutual growth of community sites, especially TI-Planet, any longer. Just like Cemetech's lead, in fact, as is repeatedly seen by recruiting people on #ti for Cemetech (exclusively - not even their Omnimaga, let alone CodeWalrus or TI-Planet), making jsTIfied unusably closed down, etc. Omnimaga's new lead and Cemetech's lead are very good friends.

If I wanted to make claims as baseless as Kerm's (er, would they be ?), I'd state that I believe that one of the unwritten goals of the Cemetech + new Omnimaga vs. TI-Planet row (not all of which was explained, Cemetech pulled out of the discussion with major unexplained items...) was to diminish and later absorb Omnimaga, which was much more dependent on TI-Planet staff and activity, for the greater glory of Cemetech. And CodeWalrus saved the English-speaking community from Cemetech's domination and stranglehold - how annoying.


Kerm's general arrogance has been ruffling my feathers lately. Of course, getting a PhD is an achievement in itself, it represents a lot of work, and he made superior work, judging by the fact that he got at least one poster accepted to no less than SOSP, which I've known as one half of the pair of highest ranked conferences in OS design, since my 2-year tenure as an engineer in a systems- and middleware-oriented research team. And there are countries, such as Germany, where persons who got PhDs are highly regarded. But still - a bit of humility doesn't hurt, quite the contrary in fact.

EDIT: direction -> lead (lead sets the direction), it's better that way.
Member of the TI-Chess Team.
Co-maintainer of GCC4TI (GCC4TI online documentation), TIEmu and TILP.
Co-admin of TI-Planet.

Hayleia

(was writing it while Lionel was writing too so it might be redundant)

Can't just people read ? I'm going to summarize so that lazy people can understand Codewalrus...

Omnimaga used to be great, original and a great addition to the community.
Not anymore (wrong atmosphere, etc).
People still wanted to hang out, but not on Omnimaga.
People created Codewalrus.

For the people who still think 4 lines are too long to read, maybe the creation of Codewalrus is responsible for the fact there is no one left there, but Omnimaga is responsible for the creation of Codewalrus.

Now, Codewalrus "stealing" Omnimaga ? Not really, it's more Omnimaga not being able to fix the original leak.

Also, for those who speak before knowing, go back to the petition topic on Omnimaga, BEFORE Codewalrus was launched, where people say "we're fed up with what's happening, can't we all be friends again ?" and we were told "are you admin or something ? wait, nope" so we left and came here instead. This topic basically shows that no one wanted to kill/replace Omnimaga, otherwise we would have left without a topic. But we told them what we thought was wrong and they basically confirmed it in their answers.

Yuki

That's pretty much it, Lionel.

The direction here always been the mutual growth of community sites (no matter if said other sites like it or not) and we never aimed to replace whoever and steal users from anyone. We saw Omnimaga's change of direction, we saw its decrease of popularity and we pretty much said, did you liked Omnimaga as it was before, if so you'd like our brand new site CodeWalrus. The thing is, you can't change a winning formula and this can't be more true in this case, so this is pretty much why CodeWalrus proved popular since its foundation. If anyone is jealous, heh, can't help it :)

As Lionel said, it is a consequence of the goal of CodeWalrus rather than the goal itself and we do want to see Omnimaga thrive as it was before (again, that's also one of the goals of CW), as well as Cemetech.
  • Calculators owned: TI-83+ (dead?), Casio Prizm (also dead???)
  • Consoles, mobile devices and vintage computers owned: A lot
Read Zarmina!
YUKI-CHAAAANNNN
In the beginning there was walrii. In the end there will be walrii. All hail our supreme leader :walrii: --Snektron

if you wanna throw money at me and/or CodeWalrus monthly it's here

gameblabla

  • Calculators owned: None (used to own an Nspire and TI-89)

Dream of Omnimaga

@gameblabla don't you mean you'll make a n2DLib port of The Mighty Jill Off? :P

Also @Hayleia there is a difference between reading and caring. Just because someone reads info about something doesn't mean he will relay the info accurately.
  • Calculators owned: TI-82 Advanced Edition Python TI-84+ TI-84+CSE TI-84+CE TI-84+CEP TI-86 TI-89T cfx-9940GT fx-7400G+ fx 1.0+ fx-9750G+ fx-9860G fx-CG10 HP 49g+ HP 39g+ HP 39gs (bricked) HP 39gII HP Prime G1 HP Prime G2 Sharp EL-9600C
  • Consoles, mobile devices and vintage computers owned: Huawei P30 Lite, Moto G 5G, Nintendo 64 (broken), Playstation, Wii U

annoyingcalc

This reminded me of how much I hated the new omnimaga design at first.

ACagliano

This is a very worthwhile post and speaking as someone who will be a member of and use any number of programming "forums" without prejudice, I don't see why some members of other sites feel the need to make scandalous claims as to what other sites are doing to steal members and all that jazz. It's actually become exhaustive how personal and community rivalries lead to what they do. Every calculator site has its specialty, and some are more welcoming than others. I know of some places where an elitist mentality fostered among some of the "better" programmers causes those less skilled or more unsure of themselves (like me) to feel looked down on, almost unwelcome. My statement to every admin of every site who can see this is to stop blaming other sites for stealing your members, and instead think about what causes people to feel less welcome on your site.
  • Calculators owned: TI-84+ CE

Dream of Omnimaga

#25
More remarks but not as bad at least (I somehow had a browser tab open with both CW and Cemetech and happened to see I was highlighted):
Quote5:29:56 PM
  • [KermPhD] DJ_O and the TI-Planet staff are very interested in implying the Omnimaga is dead or dying.
While he is right that we sometimes implied that Omni is dying, it's not like we entertain ourselves in saying so non-stop all over the place on CW or TI-Planet. It's not CodeWalrus staff who tried to take users away from Omnimaga, it's Omnimaga staff that tried to get rid of them. Geekboy even stated himself before that Omnimaga was better off without the users that moved to CW.

But I guess that certain people would rather have just 1 type of mentality in the TI community and get rid of all the TI community users who don't want to get yelled at for saying "hex", posting SFW 4chan screenshots or complaining when unnecessarily nitpicked at. That's certainly would have improved community activity more than opening CW, does it? 9_9

Quote from: annoyingcalc on October 06, 2015, 09:26:19 PM
This reminded me of how much I hated the new omnimaga design at first.
I don't mind it personally, since it has the same color scheme as the TI-84+ calculator and was less bandwidth-intensive. But it definitively gave less character to the site since it's very close to SMF default theme.

Quote from: ACagliano on October 06, 2015, 10:12:18 PM
My statement to every admin of every site who can see this is to stop blaming other sites for stealing your members, and instead think about what causes people to feel less welcome on your site.
Best post in the thread so far @ACagliano . It deserves a +1 just for that. Of course, admins don't have to please every single member, but I think that trying to keep users around is something to consider when running a site, as well as what the leader says. I learned the hard way before that sometimes, as a leader, when we say things that don't please people, then the consequences are often much greater. We can say that our opinion doesn't represent the site's opinion, but it's impossible to prevent users from falling into synecdoche.
  • Calculators owned: TI-82 Advanced Edition Python TI-84+ TI-84+CSE TI-84+CE TI-84+CEP TI-86 TI-89T cfx-9940GT fx-7400G+ fx 1.0+ fx-9750G+ fx-9860G fx-CG10 HP 49g+ HP 39g+ HP 39gs (bricked) HP 39gII HP Prime G1 HP Prime G2 Sharp EL-9600C
  • Consoles, mobile devices and vintage computers owned: Huawei P30 Lite, Moto G 5G, Nintendo 64 (broken), Playstation, Wii U

Adriweb

What I said before, privately and more recently publicly on #cemetech :
Quote[Adriweb] regarding Omni's activity decrease, more precisely it happened when Cemetech + Omni admins decided critor couldn't post front-page news directly anymore. That was the death certificate for Omnimaga, but didn't change much for Cemetech. So all in all, Cemetech killed Omnimaga by proxy, kind of
which seems like an awfully trivial reasoning to make once you know the people involved.

Though of course, someone's denying the facts:
Quote[KermM] critor stopping posting news on Omnimaga and Cemetech had nothing to do with Omnimaga's decrease in activity
I mean, can't he look at the graph? The data is there.
  • Calculators owned: TI-Nspire CX CAS, TI-Nspire CX, TI-Nspire CAS (x3), TI-Nspire (x2), TI-Nspire CM-C CAS, TI-Nspire CAS+, TI-80, TI-82 Stats.fr, TI-82 Plus, TI-83 Plus, TI-83 Plus.fr USB, TI-84+, TI-84+ Pocket SE, TI-84+ C Silver Edition, TI-84 Plus CE, TI-89 Titanium, TI-86, TI-Voyage 200, TI-Collège Plus, TI-Collège Plus Solaire, 3 HP, some Casios
Co-founder & co-administrator of TI-Planet and Inspired-Lua

Dream of Omnimaga

#27
To be fair, there are many things that could have caused the activity decrease and it's hard to tell which one was the worst. Even the severe downtimes in Early 2012 caused a massive activity drop (UTI once went from 2500 posts a day to 800 in 2005 due to extreme site lag)

I'll go to bed soon but I'll soon edit my post with an edited Omnimaga graph with key events added on top of it. EDIT nevermind, I think the first topic post will do. Besides, the dates are there and you can just look at their graph.
  • Calculators owned: TI-82 Advanced Edition Python TI-84+ TI-84+CSE TI-84+CE TI-84+CEP TI-86 TI-89T cfx-9940GT fx-7400G+ fx 1.0+ fx-9750G+ fx-9860G fx-CG10 HP 49g+ HP 39g+ HP 39gs (bricked) HP 39gII HP Prime G1 HP Prime G2 Sharp EL-9600C
  • Consoles, mobile devices and vintage computers owned: Huawei P30 Lite, Moto G 5G, Nintendo 64 (broken), Playstation, Wii U

Adriweb

Nobody's saying it was the one and only factor, but considering 90% of the news were critor's, it's obvious that all posts that would have been written on new news don't exist because of that
  • Calculators owned: TI-Nspire CX CAS, TI-Nspire CX, TI-Nspire CAS (x3), TI-Nspire (x2), TI-Nspire CM-C CAS, TI-Nspire CAS+, TI-80, TI-82 Stats.fr, TI-82 Plus, TI-83 Plus, TI-83 Plus.fr USB, TI-84+, TI-84+ Pocket SE, TI-84+ C Silver Edition, TI-84 Plus CE, TI-89 Titanium, TI-86, TI-Voyage 200, TI-Collège Plus, TI-Collège Plus Solaire, 3 HP, some Casios
Co-founder & co-administrator of TI-Planet and Inspired-Lua

Yuki

Yeah, well, no one in the community, as far as I know, makes front-page news posts as regularly as Critor. I agree it's kind of a problem when you decide he can no longer do that on your site, but I don't think you'd lose that much posts directly because of that.
  • Calculators owned: TI-83+ (dead?), Casio Prizm (also dead???)
  • Consoles, mobile devices and vintage computers owned: A lot
Read Zarmina!
YUKI-CHAAAANNNN
In the beginning there was walrii. In the end there will be walrii. All hail our supreme leader :walrii: --Snektron

if you wanna throw money at me and/or CodeWalrus monthly it's here

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