yashsingh1/xdaforums huggingface dataset:
[8525, TyTN, MDA Vario II, JasJam ROM Development] Siezmik:
Although I mostly lurk . . . and read . . . and search, I do have a few suggestions to clean things up.

1.) Turn on vBulletin's rep system. Set forth some policies based on rep rating in regards to posting frequency, ability to download, etc. Of course, the rep system can be abused, but it's fairly obvious when that happens.

2.) Enable a waiting period for new users. A minimum of 7 days, but no more than 30 days.

3.) Enable a thread creator to be that thread's moderator. In essence, allow the person who created the thread to self-police it. There would need to be some stipulations for this to work effectively (eg. be a senior member, have a high rep rating, etc.)

4.) When all else fails, drop the heavy hammer. Typically I don't advocate the wanton deleting of posts, but I believe that temporary bans of 24-48 hours can be an effective "training tool". It's like house-breaking a puppy . . . sometimes a few swats on the ass are required to enforce the rules.

Some have mentioned that having new users read and agree to forum rules will help. I disagree. That's no different than the EULA that comes with most software. Rarely does anyone take the time to read it before they agree to it. They just hit the button to agree to the EULA and move past it as quickly as possible.
[8525, TyTN, MDA Vario II, JasJam ROM Development] shogunmark:
OK, so after reading all of these i will jump back in here, especially since its starting to run off course and i dont want to see this thread turn bad, there has been tons of good suggestions... but allow me to interject:

A subscription based xda would be a bad idea, as mentioned we would be singling out the people who can afford it.. and we all know most developers are broke and we definitely dont want to turn them away.

Better housekeeping is a good idea, and something i started already. If someone pose's a good question then we can answer it, someone could update the wiki, then we can lock the thread.

I do think a waiting period should be invoked IF the user doesnt know how to read or search. This idea might be better served through a rating system or the before mentioned 3 strikes your out policy. ~ i will have to bring this to admins to see if its even possible..

An entrance test might be good as it will teach them how to use the search function, but this isnt good for everyone... if your a PPC software developer and you dont care how the phone works, then why bother to register here if you have to take a test on something you dont care about..

Something else i would like to bring to the admins is making a power user type group. My thoughts on this are to give the developers and chef's a way to edit **only** the threads they have created.

Oh, and 1 more thing... here is the link to WM7 photon for hermes
[8525, TyTN, MDA Vario II, JasJam ROM Development] sergiopi:
We are too many now, that's the simple, big problem

In a large community were we have any member with full posting rights, isn't easy to manage bull****.

Even the first message in this post, after a while, even if cathcing and sticky, will "disappear"

May I suggest to have, if forum shell could support, some different posting rights? Some posts are open to all members, other to senior members, other to .... but everyone could read.

All info's available for everybody but writing related to experience. May be the signal/noise ratio will increase!

Now we have 10-20% interesting(signal) and 80-90% boring (noise) 2/10 !! I will suggest 50/50=1 will be great!
[8525, TyTN, MDA Vario II, JasJam ROM Development] chrisjasper:
So thats what happened to Bubbles.....
[8525, TyTN, MDA Vario II, JasJam ROM Development] texazzpete:
Has anyone actually cared to check how many of these irritating questions came after mrvanx started publishing his guide? As far as I know, after guide was made a sticky, it seemed like a significant drop in dumb questions happened.

Perhaps that's what the new people need. Big, bright screenshots and colored links telling them what to do. A hermes is pretty expensive, and God knows there are lots of guys here who are VERY eager to post reports of Bricks right there on the front page. See, no matter how many times i had read the wiki, when i was about to flash the LVSW rom the White Screen issue just came out, and i had to read and re-read the guide before i went ahead.

Another solution could be a 'Post issues with ROM XXX' thread, so issue goes in there. Even newbies can be of help to others, sorta like an open source community, i dunno. anyone posting issues outside that thread could be banned. In this way, if a question has been answered before, it'll be in that particular thread and any newbie would have read it before getting to the last post in that thread. Hope this makes sense!

70% of the people in this forum have been obnoxious and annoying to someone at one time or the other. That runs the whole gamut from senior members to newbies. Does that mean we're almost all noobs here?
[8525, TyTN, MDA Vario II, JasJam ROM Development] fella:
My first.....:)

In total agreement with u, I read the posts and all tutorials on this forum for 3 months before flashing and don't have any problems. Flashing is easy when you read:D

http://xdaforums.com/forumdisplay.php?f=306
[8525, TyTN, MDA Vario II, JasJam ROM Development] mrvanx:
@shogunmark, the power users group and the rep system i think sound like the solution, Obviously anyone who abuses the power user capability can be stripped of it correct?? (obviously only by mods)

And the power users system would be nominated depending on the contribution to the forum in general....not a post count or membership length?

Already your housekeeping measures are "sound as a pound" and i think if power users can have that sort of control (only when reasonable) it will cut down on the needless threads being left open to fester?!
[8525, TyTN, MDA Vario II, JasJam ROM Development] shogunmark:
you have no idea how true that statement is... i work in a call center type enviroment with 500 technicians.. we do work with customers and field technicians, as well as do our own troubleshooting/investigation (its a maintenance department).. i had recently put together some training material and the thing that helped people the most was exact screenshots of what they are looking for... it makes the subject easier to understand if they can see what they are looking for..
[8525, TyTN, MDA Vario II, JasJam ROM Development] Wiper:
Yes, there will always be noobs, impatient and annoying ppl around everyone, but flaming? I find that very immature and arrogant behaviour.

Behaviour like that won't solve anything, only makes the forum threads annoying to read. If you don't bother to answer properly, don't answer at all (that goes to some gurus here).

And the search simply sucks. It's pain in the ass unless you know exactly what you are looking for. For new ppl it is quite breathtaking and time consuming to start reading all the 1000's of threads with 10000 of posts. Unlike the old users that have been here for years and have been reading everything from the message zero, it's quite an easy task to read maybe 10-20 new messages / thread a day.

Everyone (including me) probably asks for something that has been answered in the n:th thread on nnn:th message

burried deep in the dusty shelves on the forum. And btw, I have read quite a lot of them, mostly just for the kicks and curiosity because I like to know what kind of problems ppl have with their devices, what has gone wrong

with the flashing and how they have managed to cover from disasters. So far I have flashed my phone with different

OS's, radios, full updates without any serious problems, but you never know. I guess I just want to be prepared. I mean come on folks, when you brick your device and are not an expert, you will feel the pang of panic flowing in your body and can't think straight, so you turn to the only source that you think could help and it's here.

It's always easier to try fix your phone than to send it to service.

So unless you are not suffering from god complex, just have patience (as I have found pof to have) to answer with either a link to the answer or just type it again and again and again.

If it pisses you to see the same questions over and over again, close your eyes and bite your fingers.
[8525, TyTN, MDA Vario II, JasJam ROM Development] duttythroy:
This could be a solution

i think we should have a prompt of sort before any user access the main page of this site which entails the importance of material provided by this community and ways and rules in which we should behave and penalties involve if rules are not abide i.e retention period

This could be a base of sort if edited accordingly by the moderators or senior members.

The owners of this Internet page located at the Internet address xda.developers.com (hereinafter - "Internet page") and(or) the ISP(s) hosting are not responsible for any damages cause to your device by any means or by any negligence in which supported material provided i.e {the wiki, relevant posts provided, utilised search , etc} wasn't utilised before personal use . All the contents of this Internet page are for {user own risk only}. Any downloads and flashing of material provided by this forum are at users own risk which help can be provided as long as users cannot find the answer possible by the wiki etc. IF YOU DISAGREE TO ALL THE TERMS SET ABOVE YOU ARE NOT ENTITLED TO ENTER THIS INTERNET PAGE AND (OR) ACCESS THE CONTENTS OF THIS INTERNET PAGE BY ANY OTHER METHODS AS A WHOLE OR IN ANY PART!!! IF YOU DISAGREE TO ALL THE TERMS SET ABOVE YOU MUST LEAVE THIS INTERNET PAGE IMMEDIATELY

<http://xda.developers.com>
[8525, TyTN, MDA Vario II, JasJam ROM Development] TechBill:
Leave rules at work or home, it doesn't belong on a hobby site.

No need to have "restrictions" on forums unless someone is clearly abusing the forums ie spamming or trying to hack into a member account or clearly trolling for trouble on boards then ban them.

As for the coders, everyone is aware that they are taking a risk when they try to flash thier 400 dollar or company's or friend's device but it went sour so instead of accepting the mistake/blame for themseleves, I am sure they are sending you PMs blaming you for damaging thier devices in hope that you would fix thier mistakes. It's simple just ignore those PMs, trust me I maintain a huge hobby site/forums and I get most idoitic PMs everyday but never once reponsed to any of them and they always go away.

XDA been around for how long? 2-3 years? And it been doing fine all those years and will countine to be fine so no need to make changes to it.

Folks need to learn to torelate those idoitic post or PMs and to simiply ignore them.
[8525, TyTN, MDA Vario II, JasJam ROM Development] Arktronic:
I think that is an excellent idea. Combined with some of the other methods mentioned, this would certainly prevent most of us from having to deal with the noobs' excruciatingly annoying posts. I have no idea if vBulletin has such capabilities, though.
[8525, TyTN, MDA Vario II, JasJam ROM Development] slimsaturn:
IT WOULD BE GREAT...BUT THEY WOULD STILL CLICK OK..
[8525, TyTN, MDA Vario II, JasJam ROM Development] texazzpete:
I think a problem here is that the newbies are leaving far too much work for the coders, the chefs and the senior members who are already being swamped with PMs and requests. I guess we new guys could find a way to help more. As i said before, guides with big screenshots are the best way to put people through some of the difficult tasks. The hermes is an expensive device, so people will be a whol elot more reassured if they see stuff like this.

The point i'm trying to make is, instead of just downloading and running, i feel some of us who can do that should try and contribute such guides to the community. For instance, many people ask on the forum here how to downgrade from WM6 to WM5, some have learnt how to do it already. wouldn't it be nice if a newbie could upload a video of him downgrading on youtube so we could also create a sticky guide for downgrading to retail WM5 roms? that way, we the newbies can contribute too and remove the hundreds of posts asking for tips to downgrade.

advanced newbie created guides and solutions could be a way of contributing to the forum, and we could have a senior member or coder run a one-time check on the guide for errors!
[8525, TyTN, MDA Vario II, JasJam ROM Development] khoo88:
The problem with the noobs is that they're too lazy to click anything other than the rom release thread. They just want to get straight to the rom, download it, and install it without reading the instructions first.

1) Maybe each new rom release could include links to the wiki and other relevant information necessary for the upgrade. Then nobody can have the excuse of "I searched and couldn't find the answer". All of those useless posts can either be edited to say "read the wiki" and then a link to the wiki or just deleted.

2) Setup a forum specifically for questions about the roms. Maybe the noobs can be restricted to only being able to post in that forum. The noobs can threadcrap all they want in there, and if a developer or knowledgeable member wants to dig in, they can choose to do so. All useless posts in the rom or other important threads can be deleted and/or moved to the other forum.

To be perfectly honest, nobody really has any excuse for not being able to find the answers to questions they may have. Every question or problem I ever had was solved in the wiki or some extremely informative thread (which I found through SEARCH).
[8525, TyTN, MDA Vario II, JasJam ROM Development] Wam7:
I've been a member of Doom9 forums for 7 years and they had a time delay before posting. They also had a 3 strike rule and if you posted a question that had already been asked and answered then you would get a strike against you. The two rules in tandem made the newbie and noobie posts pretty much extinct. It certainly forced people to not only use the search but LEARN how to use the search.

I found the later of the two a little draconian but I am definitely in favour of the post delay of at least a week (I prefer two) before being able to post. This should be implemented ASAP.
[8525, TyTN, MDA Vario II, JasJam ROM Development] texazzpete:
And why does that surprise you? hell, i've just gone to investigate on the Black V 1.2 and LVSW ROM pages, and guess what? None of them have any sort of Disclaimer or "This can Brick your device!!" in the initial ROM post. Only Black v2 (jasjamming) has a helpful link to the mrvanx upgrading guide. As far as LVSW is concerned, anyone who has flashed an official HTC retail ROM downloaded from the Cingular website will download a file similar to the retail roms (with WWE and RUU) in the filenames, so lots of people CAN be misled into flashing like that.

Go to any PSP forum, whenever there's a new Dark_Alex custom firmware, it's clearly written underneath that the coder has no responsibility for bricking your device. That forces people to READ so there's no danger of a brick.

i think the ROM chefs should try as much as possible to indicate the risks involved in flashing, cos if a newbie has a brick, he comes here and creates more noise!

Also, not every question is answered in the forum already. and we need to get realistic; Besides, there are things here designed to confuse newbies. if a newbie using LVSW searches for Wifi fix, he'll probably see a thread where someone said 'Wifi fix for WM6 Xda Live'. There are so many cab files listed this way. if the poster had just indicated that this would work for all WM6 versions here, the newbie's problem would have been solved. But in this case the guy'll think that the Wifi fix doesn't apply to LVSW Rom and he'll go off to make a post asking for help, only for someone to refer him back to that same cab with a few choice insults. so you see...perhaps we could be more informative in our posts.

There's a realistic time limit anyone could spend in searching for anything, and if the answers are buried deep, it's tempting for someone to ask.

Once again, it's ridiculous seeing the way some ppl are competing to bring about more draconian measures! There are simple solutions that could help ameliorate these issues, and loads of people seem to deliberately overlook them in their bid to create an xda-devs elitist class for themselves. that's wrong. It beats my imagination how there's so little warning on the ROM release pages, and there's only limited attempt to guide newbies to the upgrade guide. That should be improved in future.
[8525, TyTN, MDA Vario II, JasJam ROM Development] icemantwilight:
I agree, simply delete any obviously crap posts. It's getting very difficult to trawl through the 'omg thx', 'is this wm6', 'installing now :D:D:D' posts to find information about a new build.

Also, posting 'OMG STFU NOOB' only doubles the amount of crap in the thread, so instead, why not PM the person.
[8525, TyTN, MDA Vario II, JasJam ROM Development] Penske MB:
I guess your suggestion might have to be delay too... why "ASAP" if you have to waited 2 or more days for a reply? com'on.:cool:
[8525, TyTN, MDA Vario II, JasJam ROM Development] ach2:
Big Thank You

I didn't want to start a new thread for this but...

A VERY BIG THANK YOU to Shogunmark. Since he started this thread, a lot of people have vented frustrations, contributed good and not so good ideas and, possibly more importantly, the forums are settling down again to a nice place to be.

I don't know if others have noticed but Shogunmark has taken on it himself to moderate posts, advise people to keep on topic and close threads where necessary, and more - maybe this has helped bring Jas back.

So, once again, thanks for the hard work - I appreciate it :) :) :)
[8525, TyTN, MDA Vario II, JasJam ROM Development] khoo88:
Yeah, you're right. A lot of the new cooked releases do not warn new users of the dangers of upgrading without reading the wiki/relevant threads first. That's why I made suggestion #1.

I did not say that every question has been answered. I was just relating my own experience using the Search feature and the wiki. A lot of the problems that people have can be answered there.

I agree. It does take a little more time and research to find truly relevant information now. Suggestion #2 sort of deals with that indirectly. People can post what they want in there and not threadcrap the rom threads with posts that aren't useful to the developers. Maybe a better idea is if an expert would kindly donate his time to update the wiki and create How To threads (or collect current ones into one place), which would be stickied in that forum.

One thing that I've noticed is that when someone posts a question that has already been answered, people just respond with "USE THE SEARCH" or something of that nature. In my opinion, this makes you just as bad as the original poster, since all you're doing is threadcrapping. Chances are, the person who posted it was being lazy and didn't search, but what about the people who DID try to search and couldn't find it? If you're going to post anything, at least point them in the right direction WITH your flaming. Maybe they don't know which search terms to use.

I second that. And also thanks to all the users/developers who took the time to create the fixes/roms and write the detailed guides that makes life easier for the rest of us.
[8525, TyTN, MDA Vario II, JasJam ROM Development] tedd1:
You "non-noobs" need a private forum so you will not be "bothered" by noobs.
[8525, TyTN, MDA Vario II, JasJam ROM Development] Wam7:
Sorry I am not sure what you meant as the grammar unfortunately makes it unclear. Just recap on what I was saying. I see no problem with implementing a delay in being able to post. This can be done immediately as it is not too deleterious or radical for the forum users.

I agree and often thought that a link to a relevant page or disclaimer could have been included with new ROM releases. Saying that, I doubt it would have stopped most people but at least it was there.

You totally miss the point. Every body starts off as 'new', even Pof et al but the difference is there are those that take the requisite time to read and understand and then there are those that don't. We refer to the later.
[8525, TyTN, MDA Vario II, JasJam ROM Development] kogir:
Minimum Read Threads

I don't contribute much, but I've enjoyed reading this forum for some time now. I've donated to contributing members on occasion as well.

One thing that might work is to require that users have read 50-100 threads before they can post. All the information most noobs really need is already here in the forum or on the wiki, so at worst this requirement would keep lazy people from posting. Those that did the proper background reading and tried to solve their own problems would be able to post.

I don't know if this is possible to do with vBulletin, but if it is I think it would greatly reduce the noise.
[8525, TyTN, MDA Vario II, JasJam ROM Development] duttythroy:
That should cover it

i think all above or most of what you said are very good ideas and i can see this forum improving with everyone doing there homework before posting silly questions
[8525, TyTN, MDA Vario II, JasJam ROM Development] arc:
xda-developers now it is not interesting.

90 % of questions recurrence.

Earlier there was a discussion now only questions where to take wm6 and how to make CID unlock.

I have ceased to answer on PM and in a forum.

People have ceased to investigate.

Many decisions lay on a surface - on xda many programmers and many source codes but nobody wishes to think.
[8525, TyTN, MDA Vario II, JasJam ROM Development] uniqueboy:
Where can I download your rom?
[8525, TyTN, MDA Vario II, JasJam ROM Development] arc:
http://www.htc.com !!!!
[8525, TyTN, MDA Vario II, JasJam ROM Development] Bimboy:
I didn't call anybody a ****wit, nor do I think anybody has a right to call others that in any case, like I'm being called by jazjamming. Personally, it very much appears to be emotional problems being enacted upon. I actually remember reading it was against the TOU I agreed to when I signed up here. I am ashamed this is allowed here, regardless of who contributes what. He seems more than content feeling better about himself because of the size of his... PM box, obviously.

Stupid questions come from all shapes and sizes, and knowledge level too. Now that the Hermes is a lot more common, expect new users. I neither call myself a noob or a person ready to post a cooked ROM, although I have attempted cooking a few.

I used to read these forums long before I joined, and all of the older phone's forums had similar issues, except without the abusive responses as seen here. It's pitiful. Some of the guys here are acting as if they are the first in history to get questions about roms you cook. Why don;t they simply ignore the posts they want to, like is the norm everywhere else on the internet.

Btw, hofo are great forums for what they are. I've been a member there a lot longer than here. There are lots of people who do not care about modifying their gadgets, like we do. Btw, I am happy that there's a bunch of new people here.. not because they bother people, but if you lock out new people, this place will wither and die. I have donated to the cause here, and am glad for doing it. People will tend to not keep giving, so why not have the benefit of fresh people realizing the worth of this place and continuing the keep it going, both financially and expanding the knowledge base.

I will again suggest that the name calling and incredible amounts of abuse be a reprimandable offense, as they should be.

How about a "RTFW" emoticon, and leave it at that, if you're sure the answer is there? :eek:

Apologies for responding "late". I've been on a business trip and not keeping up with things here. If the issue is self resolving, as I've read a few posts up.. I'm glad for it.