chipKIT® Development Platform

Inspired by Arduino™

Useless forum software

Created Thu, 14 Jul 2011 04:09:21 +0000 by ron.dunn

ron.dunn

Thu, 14 Jul 2011 04:09:21 +0000

The most useful function in any technical forum is search. Why is it so badly broken here? Almost every word I search for is rejected, either too short, or too popular (!?)

Please just replace this pile of crap with something decent.

ron.dunn

Thu, 14 Jul 2011 04:47:51 +0000

In a slightly less-grumpy frame of mind ...

... there must be something special about the mind-set of microprocessor forum administrators that they have a lust for horrible software. The original Arduino forum lacked usability, the Fez forum is horrible, the Netduino isn't much better ... but I have to say they're ALL better than Chipkit :(

svofski

Thu, 14 Jul 2011 08:01:00 +0000

Try e.g.

PWM site:chipkit.org/forum

in google. Sure, there's an indexing delay but it tends to be short.

cobbj

Thu, 14 Jul 2011 15:12:03 +0000

Glad to hear that our entire forum is judged on the capabilities of one function... ultimately it comes down to free tools available to particular people working on the project. Like svofski said, there is more than one way to search a forum. This thread talks about it more:

http://www.chipkit.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=201&p=890&hilit=site%3A#p890

I don't think it's a mindset of MCU/MPU admins - I think it's more of a first time ever setting up forums for people and using the tools at your behest. If you have other suggestions for free forum packages that you've enjoyed using more I'd be happy to review them.

Trev

Thu, 14 Jul 2011 22:51:06 +0000

You can please some of the users all of the time, and you can please all of the users some of the time, but you just can't please all of the users all of the time. I wouldn't lose sleep over it :)

ron.dunn

Thu, 14 Jul 2011 23:32:19 +0000

cobbj, why "free" ?

Isn't chipKIT a commercial product?

Perhaps I've misunderstood the nature of the forum ... is this an official chipKIT site, or is it something personal/independent?

hairymnstr

Fri, 15 Jul 2011 10:05:57 +0000

I believe this is a community site, the domain name is not registered to Microchip or Digilent.

Supporting non-technical users is not a commercially profitable thing to do for a large component supplier. They provide the documentation for experts to program their chips and I think they're donating a little developer time for this project, but supporting such a high-level abstraction library isn't really Microchip or Digilent's business.

Although I'm sure the hobbyist/maker community and small bespoke applications are an interesting market don't mistake it for a major source of revenue compared to traditional companies employing their own low-level programmers.

cobbj

Fri, 15 Jul 2011 14:58:18 +0000

@hairymnstr - much more eloquently put than I am capable of :)

This is the "official" chipKIT forum - it is administrated, moderated, and in general run by people who are very passionate about the hobbyist community, some who have worked on the Arduino project for a long time, and some of which happen to work at Microchip and Digilent. This community was created in recognition of a need for it to complement the chipKIT project, but it 100% belongs to all of you to do direct as you please - I started a "Forum Suggestion" thread for just that reason. And since my time is donated by me personally, I also donate what I have at my behest for web hosting, and free simple to install forum/wiki packages that go along with it.

@ron.dunn - does that make sense? Also, to previous comments... do you have any suggestions on other free forum software, or a way to enhance the search function with phpBB?

ron.dunn

Fri, 15 Jul 2011 22:09:37 +0000

Quick-fix solutions:

http://www.bing.com/search?q=phpbb+search+common+words&qs=n&sk=&form=QBRE

Best solution:

Would you like a donation to go buy/host vBulletin?

cobbj

Mon, 25 Jul 2011 15:03:24 +0000

I've been playing with the search features - I've turned off the "common words" block totally, and re-indexed the boards. Let me know if ya'll run into any issues with the current settings.

Ganapoes

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 06:05:24 +0000

Perhaps I've misunderstood the nature of the forum ... is this an official chipKIT site, or is it something personal/independent?

EmbeddedMan

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 11:55:40 +0000

It doesn't get any more official than this! At least as far as forums are concerned. All of the open source hardware chipKIT dev team regularly visits this forum and tries to provide as much help as they can. Official releases are announced here. Etc.

*Brian

EmbeddedMan

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 15:46:58 +0000

So the exact same question got asked 2 posts above, which I tried to answer accurately. Was my answer not clear? It is not personal, it is not independent. Since chipKIT is open source hardware, it doesn't have a 'company' per se behind it running and controlling everything. All of the various parties contribute to the success of the design. This forum is run by the same people that designed and build the chipKIT, so it is as close to an official forum as you're going to see.

*Brian

jasonk

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 00:17:59 +0000

Hi Brian,

It looks like all of the posts from that account were duplicates of other messages in the corresponding thread. Must be a spambot... banned!

EmbeddedMan

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 03:07:55 +0000

Dang it! And I thought I was smart enough to catch that. Lesson learned.

*Brian

Jacob Christ

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 18:55:30 +0000

Hi Brian, It looks like all of the posts from that account were duplicates of other messages in the corresponding thread. Must be a spambot... banned!

How devious. :twisted:

Adriel

Sat, 14 Jul 2012 22:10:44 +0000

Its a thecnical. I used it. Its a common softwaer. Its a easy way for every time. I hope all users are like it. http://www.alacraft.com.au/

majenko

Sat, 14 Jul 2012 23:06:16 +0000

If you don't like the way the forum works, why don't you write your own forum software and give it to the ChipKit admins - maybe they will adopt it.