I think reprap deserves better

Hey,

I personally think that the website and the forums are outdated now. I think it would be much more friendly to new people and make it easier to get more people involved with innovation if the whole thing was redesigned, and added new things to make it easier to view information. It takes me so long to find something on the wiki! Why does the forum go down sometimes! Does nobody want to change the site the way it is, or are you open to new ways

Thanks, Sorry if i sound mean, i just think reprap deserves better!

- Jaysen

It is an open wiki so it is up to the user that sees the issue to fix it.

Also this comes up a lot with new people and my answer is always the same. Personally I like it a little hard to use as it weeds out the people not willing to put in the required effort. Also you say "easier to get more people involved with innovation" and I say if they are unable to find the information or come up with it themselves I do not think they will help with innovation a lot. You were clearly able to find the info yourself so you will most likely be able to contribute and you will never use the wiki again except for specific machine stuff for the latest machines being released (as well as to contribute your work).

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j4ysen Wrote:
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> I personally think that the website and the forums
> are outdated now. I think it would be much more
> friendly to new people and make it easier to get
> more people involved with innovation if the whole
> thing was redesigned, and added new things to make
> it easier to view information.

Examples? A mock layout? Even just a few links to other sites and how they're doing it and how we could learn from them?

> It takes me so long to find something on the wiki!

Examples? What are you looking for, and is it really reprap.org's aim to provide such information? We can't provide everything to everyone, and some of the stuff people have "shoehorned" into the existing wiki (such as supplier pricing info) are actually things that probably shouldn't be here anyway.

> Why does the forum go down sometimes!

Why does anything fail? Why to spammers love to hammer websites that are providing useful services like user editable wiki's and public forums to their users? Why to many software developers constantly add new features to software that accidentally break old features? Why do security holes exist in software? Why to some people try and exploit such holes? How much ram and disk in a server is more than "good enough" for a few years so there is no need to change and update it every couple of months (which impacts the users)? Answer these questions and you've got a good start on the sort of problems that the reprap.org website/wiki faces every day, and that's only the tip of the iceberg.

Many of these things create very hard problems that are not easy to solve, even if you throw lots of money at them. We're quite lucky that many people are willing to freely give their time to actually help run this place, whether it be as a webserver admin, wiki admin or forum admin. Quite a number of people have been burnt out over the years trying to keep this place running. We're quite lucky that some of them have stuck with it for as long as they have. Disparaging remarks on their abilities, even if not meant to be, do affect these people, and can drive them from doing any work (especially if they do it for free) as all they get is grief in return.

> Does nobody want to change the site the way it is, or are you open to new ways

From what I gather there are changes coming, but you don't rush stuff and break it for everyone. Sure this means progress is slower, but I'd rather have progress than absolutely nothing for 6 months while people re-engineer stuff from scratch 4-5 times to get it right. If that re-engineering can be done in parallel while keeping everything running, then fine. But sometimes it can't.

> Thanks, Sorry if i sound mean, i just think reprap deserves better!

Sorry if I sound condescending and annoyed, but that's because I've heard whiny rants from people before that are only intent on vaguely suggesting things but not doing anything to back it up or wanting to get involved.

And yes, if you can come back with genuine ideas and examples, rather than negativity, I'm sure that people will look at what you say rationally and may try to adopt some part of it, especially if they believe it's viable and doable.

... we're working on impovements, but this is mostly done in background and with respect to the integrity of the 'old' base ... so maybe there will be changes/upgrades, but this can take some time until there's a stable structure, not conflicting with the present system

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Viktor
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It takes me so long to find something on the wiki!

Using Google to find something in the wiki indeed gives much better results. Just start your search with "reprap" and almost always you get the first hits into the wiki.

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Why does the forum go down sometimes!

Likely a thing of the past. The server has received a number of tuning measures a few weeks ago. Since then I've never experienced downtimes for more than a few seconds.

Like the others said, the wiki is open to everybody, so it's up to you, the user, to design it.

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