Is Ticalc.org Still Relevant?
Do you guys think ticalc.org is still relevant today, or is it just a relic of the past?
Moreover, what would you guys change about ticalc.org to get more community involvement/support?
Is Ticalc.org Still Relevant?
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» Is Ticalc.org Still Relevant?
I think it is still the center of the calculator community. It's where everyone uploads their files, no matter what forum the are from.
While it is much much less active, it's something that still keeps the community together. Without ticalc.org I think the community might start to fracture.
I think ticalc.org could use some update in it's interface. Currently however the back-end is severely outdated, so making little changes can be really hard. In order to change some parts it should be FULLY rewritten .. and sadly enough the managers don't have time for that.
TI-Nspire projects of me:
nCreator | PCspire | Klondike Lua | LogoMagic | EEPro for the TI-Nspire | Other
I guess that explains why ticalc.org seems so stagnant and bland. I wonder if Magnus would be willing to let a group/team create a new design/backend for the site? Have you / anyone else ever asked him?
I also think the lack of regular news hurts ticalc.org, as people will rarely visit a site if they don't see any new updates or changes.
What kind of updates to the interface are you referring to?
I agree with rewriting the systems from scratch. A lot of us actually have lots of ideas, it just seems lack of time is the large factor holding things back. For me personally, it's also a tough decision deciding between spending some time making small, subtle bug fixes/improvements here and there (some of which I've already been doing), or to sacrifice those to instead spend it to work on a new system, which will of course take far longer, and without knowing if the community will still be around to care by the time it is finished.
Why not just use an open-source CMS?
I think one of the problems that ticalc.org suffers from is that it is so closed off from the community; there has always been a real sense of secrecy about its policies and what is going on behind the scenes.
I think making ticalc.org into a true community-centered, portal-style site would be the most effective approach to take. Besides better highlighting the great content coming in and already on their site (ala Dimension-TI), they could also bring together news from around the community by allowing the community to really be involved in the process (ala TI-News). I know time is the limiting factor (as Travis alluded to), but I think the process could be hastened if ticalc.org allowed the community to help out.
@burr, Archives mainly, and searching.
TI-Nspire projects of me:
nCreator | PCspire | Klondike Lua | LogoMagic | EEPro for the TI-Nspire | Other
Well, currently is can be quite complex if you want to look for a program with many clones (or a common word).
I think there could be some tweaks in how the results are sorted. But that's just me :)
TI-Nspire projects of me:
nCreator | PCspire | Klondike Lua | LogoMagic | EEPro for the TI-Nspire | Other
I think one big improvement is if we allowed filtering by or at least show the calc models for the files on the search results page when searching for files. It also only searches descriptions and not the filenames, which causes some programs not to show up in the results when I feel they should be (e.g., a search for “ALCDFIX”). For these kind of cases, sometimes a Google site search actually works better than our own search function.
Honestly, I use Google first whenever I need to search ticalc.org. In addition to the filtering issue you mentioned, I also routinely run into the short search string error and the invalid character error; those issues make using the ticalc.org search function very frustrating.
Yeah, the short string error check is pretty pointless, since it's easily circumvented (just repeat the word) and doesn't really seem to cause performance issues on the server anyway. That should just be removed. And invalid characters should probably just be ignored.
Actually one trick to bypass the short string filter is to type your query twice. For example, instead of RPG, you have to type RPG RPG.
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ticalc is very well-known, old - almost nostalgic, it works consistently, pretty easy to use, covers all basic needs.
News are too infrequent and it's spammed with quadratic solvers. Also the sorting and categories are bad imo.
Could be updated really, if they gave access to the database (over 1 TB)…
A lot of us actually have lots of ideas, it just seems lack of time is the large factor holding things back.
Yeah, there have been multiple discussions about improving ticalc.org, although most suggestions weren't acted on:
- http://www.cemetech.net/projects/uti/viewtopic.php?t=7892
- http://www.cemetech.net/projects/uti/viewtopic.php?t=7426
- http://www.cemetech.net/projects/uti/viewtopic.php?t=1390
- http://www.ticalc.org/archives/news/articles/10/106/106037.html
…and without knowing if the community will still be around to care by the time it is finished.
Looking at the visitor stats for ticalc.org does indeed reveal that the site has continued to decrease in activity over time.
That makes sense given the downward trend of the larger TI community, but that does not bode well for the future.
The first link has quite a few good points that even I've overlooked. The good news is that a lot of those are things I should be able to fix relatively quickly and easily, so I may look into that sometime soon.
It varies quite a bit; some days I don't do anything (though I try to avoid this for too many days), others it's just a few minutes (for archiving/emails, usually), other times I may spend a couple of hours for more involving things when I get an inspiration or motivation to do them. Ironically, the latter case seems to often happen as a spur-of-the-moment thing rather than being planned.
Nikky and Duncan are (or were) active to semi-active. To me, it seems their activity has been dropping off a bit over the last year or two. Magnus doesn't play a role in main day-to-day operation, but still does maintain the server, fix major things that break on occasion, and reviews ideas/suggestions/patches for the site.
I would actually like to help with something if you needed to. I don't think I would be longer than a week inactive, which is pretty active imo.
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Well, one thing off the top of my head that could help save me some time (for anyone who wants to) is to go through sections like http://www.ticalc.org/basics/calculators/ and mention any suggested info to add, corrections, links to resources, etc., that you happen to think of. I know the pages for the Nspire calcs in particular are still missing a lot of key information, especially about ASM, programming, and Ndless. You can email this to gro.clacit|esivart#gro.clacit|esivart.
Actually for some reasons, it seems that the website traffic in 2012 seems to have increased over 2011. January, February, May and June all got more page hits than their 2011 counterpart and both March and July (the latter which isn't done yet) are very close. On the other hand, it seems news comments are still decreasing. To me it really seems people still continue to visit ticalc.org, but only for downloading new stuff.
One thing I notice, however, is that whenever Ticalc.org posts fewer news in time, every other calc site activity seems to decrease for a while afterward (the only backward trend being TI-Basic Developer). It's like if people still check Ticalc.org first for updates and that it still had a big influence on overall community activity.
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Personally I think ticalc.org still does have relevance. Unfortunately as a site it does appear to be slowly fading, which is a shame. As has been pointed out, it's running on an old system, and thus manually updating everything all the time would be a real pain without having the magic of automation.
I think if there were more regular news items it would help attract some attention to the site again; just a news item every week or two would be great. Also it would be great to have a newsletter again. Years ago we used to get a monthly newsletter, which eventually stopped. I think even having a quarterly newsletter would be good, and again, generate some interest & traffic to the site.
Unfortunately, the biggest issue that users probably have with ticalc.org is the convoluted file archives, and ironically, fixing this would be one of the most time consuming jobs I suspect. No doubt a shiny new database would make categorising / sorting out programs so much easier. Easier said than done though..
ticalc.org has been around since the early days of the community, and I think it would be a big negative to let this site fall apart. Even though I have limited free time, I know I'd be willing to help out with whatever I could to keep ticalc.org going.
The archives could be improved, and they're even worse from an archiver management standpoint. :-) We (or I, at least) have outgrown the management interface long ago with all the complex stuff I do now, so it tends to get in my way more often than it saves me time. :-( Replacing this is one of my ultimate goals, especially since I consider the archives the most important/popular part of the site, though I'm having to learn from scratch everything about server stuff, CGI, databases, and SQL, on top of actually writing and testing a whole new system in a reasonably competent manner. I have a pretty clear idea in my head of how I will want the new system to be implemented, and haven't lost my vision or motivation for it—this is something I've been wanting to make happen for the last couple of years or more. But I'm still just not there yet. Making small fixes and changes to the existing stuff is helping me to gain the experience I need, though.
We were doing better about news a while back, but it seems to be falling behind again. I remember back before Ryan was hired when I was posting news items to try to keep things going. Unfortunately, I just didn't personally enjoy it that much, although I write well. Development work is much more fun and rewarding for me.
Another thing that bothers me is that pending reviews are hardly ever handled. With the number of files in the archive, reviews are important, and it certainly doesn't help motivate people to submit them when it can take upwards of a year or more(!) before they get approved. Not really anything I can do anything about, though—Duncan just doesn't do it often, but he doesn't seem interested in opening up the review editor position.
I really just want to see ticalc.org alive and evolving again. Maybe part of it is that I wasn't fortunate enough to have regular Internet access back in the days when ticalc.org was lively. I always regretted missing out on that time, and I feel like this is a possible opportunity to give myself a second chance to experience something like that. :-)
It's great to hear you're still working away at it Travis! There are many of us that appreciate your time & effort :)
Any idea how many reviews come in for approval per week or month? That's certainly something I'd be happy to help with if required.
Omnimaga & Cemetech are both proof that the community still exists, so I'm sure you'll have a chance to see ticalc.org thrive again :)
What about switching to PHP ? That should make it much much easier to handle. You could basically copy the html from the current version, and then add some $variables in it.
Although of course you need to know the language …
TI-Nspire projects of me:
nCreator | PCspire | Klondike Lua | LogoMagic | EEPro for the TI-Nspire | Other
Taking a quick glance at the reviews queue, it looks like it's about half a dozen a month or so. Duncan (still pretty active on EFNet as ‘chronomex’) would be the one to talk to.
By “lively days”, I'm thinking the period from somewhere around 2002–2003 and earlier. At least, that's where the most activity on the message boards/mailing lists appeared to take place, in addition to features and enhancements frequently made to the site, even though web traffic in terms of requests interestingly didn't peak until around 2004 or so.
I think it's safe to say that PHP is going to be a big “no, thanks!” among the staff :-) A lot of the site is actually automated with good (and secure) software tools, though the system was written quite a long time ago, so it didn't take a lot of the things into account that have developed since then. It's somewhat primitive, utilizing mostly software-generated static HTML pages, but on the other hand, that's how we've been able to get away with using servers with 200MHz Pentium Pros and getting slashdotted without missing a beat. :-D Now that we have much better hardware these days, maybe we can start implementing more dynamic features some day in the future.
I agree more community activities on ticalc.org would be nice, but they are simply not sustainable. The problem is that any activity that requires community support to succeed will undoubtedly fail, as the community suffers from major participation inequality. Since I have been in the community, I have seen that pattern time and time again. For example, there was a discussion in August 2011 on Omnimaga to create a TI community site similar to TI-News either on Reddit or on ticalc.org as a subdomain. Even though there was a lot of initial excitement and interest, including people saying they would help put together the site, nothing actually came of it. Heck, even the goal of creating a TI community history site was discussed at length on Omnimaga, but nobody there stepped up to create it…
Have you guys noticed the same pattern? How do you change it?
That's very true - I think in a community where everything is volunteer work, there will always be members joining & leaving. Some will return and others won't. The test is for that community to be able to continue through periods of low activity.
Unfortunately in regards to the trend of people showing interest in building new sites / fixing existing ones, etc. I don't think it's an easy thing to change. What it takes is for someone to get the ball rolling, like you've done with TI Story. Well actually, you've done much more than get the ball rolling with this site, you've done a great majority of the work! The good news is that it seems to have slowly gained interest and it's great to see some different names popping up as having contributed.
The problem is that for most people, calcs are a secondary or third hobby to them. They only do it when they have nothing else to do. As a result, it is next to impossible to find someone dedicated enough to step up together and create something big like this. Also there's the issue of lack of time which doesn't help at times. As James says below, it takes someone to get the ball rolling, but that is rare. By the way thanks a lot for starting this site.
Now active at https://discord.gg/cuZcfcF (CodeWalrus server) and music links available at https://dreamofomnimaga.page
I think the main issue was that ticalc.org had huge periods of lack of news posting over the time, even though during some of those periods there were quite notable releases. For example between 2005 and 2007 several programs were missed, same for late 2010 and early 2011, even if e-mails were sent to the team. Although that was addressed later, more than often the programs were noticed faster on other sites than ticalc.org at times.
Also the ticalc.org system worked very well for many years, but then web forums and social networks got more popular, web 2.0 arrived and then ticalc.org started aging the wrong way (although I still like the layout/design). Those didn't help keeping people around to comment on news and nowadays it seems most of the visitors are people uploading or downloading programs.
Also, from some forums posts I saw in the past, and in some cases, what I think, there was some lack of impartiality from Ticalc.org staff at some points in time, including very recently. For example:
-From 2004 to 2007, it took everything to get anything from Kerm featured due to past grudges some former staff or news editor held due to his 2002-03 releases. It also happened a year ago a few times, although not as much as before.
-There was also some grudge against United-TI I think, because in 2004 the entire staff sent ticalc.org e-mails to get their BASIC contest featured, which upset a ticalc staff, according to what I read. Afterward a bunch of UTI-related material (such as Contra 83+) got ignored until years later (when the former news editors had long since retired
-And in the past one and half a year towards Omnimaga. For example, Ticalc recently updated their links section on the front page, adding Cemetech, TI-Freakware, TI-BD and WikiTI. Yet, they didn't even list Omnimaga, even though it almost led the entire community in program/releases activity! That said, they didn't include TI-Planet either, but it's affiliated with Omni so that could explain it. In addition to that, in two occasions Omnimaga was not even cited as news source even when the news first appeared on both Omnimaga and TI-BANK. Instead, alternate sites would get listed. Good thing that Ryan isn't involved, else I bet that ticalc.org news would have omitted anything coming from Omnimaga, like UTI back in the days. I'm not sure if it's past grudges from 2005-08 and/or the fact that Omni and TI-Planet also post a lot of calc game news and that they see it as competition, but both sites got more than that and boycotting one or both would be like TI-Files vs Ticalc.org vs Dimension TI, a backward step in uniting the community. Again, maybe those are just coincidences, but just the fact that Omni was omitted from their main TI site links section even though they all know about its existence and status is rather suspicious. Those biases, especially recently, along with the lack of news posting, have in turn caused several Omni members to become relunctant about putting their files in ticalc.org archives for a while in 2010 and early 2011, although this seems to have changed. Also they no longer have a link database, so adding Omni through their Other links section that used to exist would not be possible either, so they're now just linking the site they like.
Because of that, I wouldn't say that ticalc.org is the very centerpiece of the community, as to be the case, it would need to have absolutely zero bias against any site or community member (except maybe Hays). It's still the main place to get files and upload your work, though. It just kinda lost the community feel it used to have, and getting it back would be hard now due to already existing forums such as Cemetech and Omni.
Now active at https://discord.gg/cuZcfcF (CodeWalrus server) and music links available at https://dreamofomnimaga.page
As far as adding links to the front page, I added the first few people suggested to me, and just haven't had enough time yet to finish the job and consider what should be added and how it should be organized. I'm recovering from a recent illness, too, which has partially slowed down the process.
As far as news goes, I've no longer been involved with that for a while now, so I can't speak for that.
Please try not to jump to conclusions and entertain conspiracy theories. Having to deal with these kinds of things whenever I am simply trying to improve the site for the first time in ages does not necessarily help. ;-) Thanks.
As said to stefan below, was saying because Nikky (Allynfolksjr) is part of ticalc staff and he hates Omnimaga with a passion. If I recall, Duncan (Chronomex) isn't a huge fan either, but won't make too much noise about it anymore.
As far as news goes, the news I was talking about were neither by Ryan nor yourself. Ryan joined shortly afterward. I do not have any issue with you Travis nor Ryan either.
Now active at https://discord.gg/cuZcfcF (CodeWalrus server) and music links available at https://dreamofomnimaga.page
Thanks for the clarification. I hope my reply wasn't too forceful or anything; I tried to make it as polite and understanding as possible. I know you've been through a lot of things in your life, and I'm just trying to help by helping you remember to stay positive (and hopefully to save me some stress as well). :-)
I also tend to lose track of how ticalc.org appears to people outside the staff and that it's not obvious who is responsible for what changes. I may have accidentally thought the message was somewhat directed at me even though it wasn't. I have to try to remember things like that, too.
Nah it was fine. It is mostly issues there were between one staff and Omni/myself years ago, or rather vs how Omni is ran since 2005, which I kinda find stupid if it causes ticalc.org to lose parts of its neutrality. If ticalc would lose its neutrality almost completely it would end up being like the TI-Files vs Ticalc wars or at least a cold war version of it.
Now active at https://discord.gg/cuZcfcF (CodeWalrus server) and music links available at https://dreamofomnimaga.page
I noticed that a link to CalcG was added to the ticalc.org links section on the homepage, even though the site is basically abandoned; the last news item is from November 2010. Maybe it's just me, but I think I would remove that link.
Talking about those links. I think TI-Story definitely deserves to be there too.
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Oh yeah, TI-Story is a good idea. I'll add that. Regarding CalcG, it does have archives and I think the forums are still there (though they get very little activity, though there has been some this year). I may first ask some others about whether CalcG should be there.
Eh, I'm not sure Ryan is biased against Omnimaga, since he featured several things such as: An Exercise in Futility, My First Quantum Translocator, Absolute series, ColorTetris, Trapped, Zedd Physics Library, Grammer, …
So I don't believe he has anything against Omnimaga. He even visits it once in a while.
So what made you think this?
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Nah not Ryan nor Travis. I was saying because Nikky (Allynfolksjr) is part of ticalc staff and he hates Omnimaga with a passion. If I recall, Duncan (Chronomex) isn't a huge fan either, but won't make too much noise about it anymore.
As far as news goes, the news I was talking about were neither by Ryan and Travis. Ryan joined shortly afterward. I do not have any issue with you Travis nor Ryan either.
Now active at https://discord.gg/cuZcfcF (CodeWalrus server) and music links available at https://dreamofomnimaga.page
Oh, I see. Sorry, I made a misunderstanding.
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So what are the database and server details? What language is ticalc programmed with? How are uploaded files stored? What automation tools are really used? How do the admin panels look like?
I think files/reviews could be crowd controlled. It cannot be that only a handful of people decide about these and it takes soo much time to read and check everything. Also the news submission could be more "transparent".
Heh an API for file meta data would be neat… dreams…. :)
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