[XPERIA X10 General] acmbc:
Like many, I was more than saddened with what happenned on XDA/X10 forii regarding some development threads yesterday.

Without wanting to start yet another flame war, some suggestions to help to try to prevent this and other nastiness from repeating itself in the future:

TO ALL USERS

- XDA is a space meant for collaboration and sharing information. Use it for that

- XDA is not a chat room. Posts just to thank or put down another user do nothing to help its purpose (There is a reason for the "Thanks" button).

...Nor do posts whose only content is "Use the search tool" or "posted previously in this thread" (w/o further information) or similar - while some people may in fact be lazy enough to not to search/look in some cases it's kind of hard to look through 300+ pages of posts to find

1

link or piece of information. Or to sort through hundreds of hits to a search. If you know the answer to a question, please share it. If not, welll....don't say anything.

- USE THE SEARCH TOOL and HAVE A LOOK AT A FEW PAGES of the thread of interest before posting the question :D .Likely you will find your answer and it helps PREVENTING threads from reaching the aforementioned 300+ pages, of which maybe like 30 pages actually contain INFORMATION.

- REMEMBER that what you are getting, you are getting for free. That applies both to stuff developed and put up on XDA, be it ROMS, tweaks, patches, whatever and to the wonderful people behind XDA - moderators, etc... whose work is often forgotten. If we as users can't be expected to read through all posts in a forum, why should we expect mods to have to act as if they had the time to do this?

- Having said that, if you like a development/tip/tweak, whatever, use the thanks button and leave it at that. If you don't like something, leave it at that. Posts to the effect of "You are God" or "You sleep with the devil" do nothing but mess with egos. And this forum is about messing with mobile computing platforms, not egos.

TO MODERATORS

- Please refrain from deleting threads. If they get out of hand (and they sometimes do) I humbly suggest that you (a) close them and/or (b) ban any offending users, albeit if only temporarily (aka "suspension").

For all the crap that may have gotten into a thread, most if not all threads contain a lot of useful information that may/will get lost if the thread is deleted. so the non-guilty parties get shafted as badly as the guilty. And I prefer to think that the majority of users are actually interested in moving things forward.

- Just an idea - but rather than having a simple requirement to have an account to post, would it be possible for you guys to set up a system whereby certain forums could only be posted to by users of a certain seniority - and preferably with a distinction to starting new threads or replying to existing threads.

Following on to this, I believe that the seniority requirements can be improved in a relatively easy way - maturity comes from experience, which is not necessarily related to # of posts (any fool can type 30 irrelevant posts in a day). What would you say to a system where, in addition to a minimum # of posts, a user needs to have been a member/at his previous seniority level for a certain amount of time? That should not be too difficult to implement and would help people get into the feel of things before blabbing off. Short tempers usually can't hold off a couple of weeks/months...

- THANKS for this great place!!!! Your efforts are too often forgotten.

TO DEVELOPERS

- Thanks for your time, effort, patience and hard work. We really appreciate it!

- Please consider that the strongest point of Android (hey, I'm posting this to the X10 forum, which is Android, no beef against WM or any other platforms) is that it is OPEN, meaning we can ALL work on it, improve it, tweak it, etc...

- That means that users can by default consider whatever is posted as being OPEN and can do likewise. If you feel that whatever you have developed/done is NOT open, then say so. And if you want a stronger protection for your work, or users aren't respecting your work, then publish it under some kind of license so everyone else knows what to expect and you have legal grounds - GPL, LGPL, ASL, Berkeley, etc... there are a number of them to choose from.

- Collaboration means being open to new ideas, praise and constructive criticism. Attitudes like "THIS **** IS MINE AND NOONE TOUCHES IT" (pardon the profanity) isn't really very constructive in an open source environment. You are not god. Help and inspiration may come from even the least probable places.

Well, that was long-winded. If I have offended anyone (I hope not) pardonnez-moi