Hey everybody, it's Spud again! Recently I've been wishing that some of the tech forums I frequent were run a little more openly. Sooooo... I started The Red Rock Forum. Now this does NOT mean that I will stop useing Cemetech or any of the other forums the I frequent. But this does mean that I will be online less. With this in mind I kindly invite you to join me on The Red Rock Forum

For anyone who tried to sign up earlier, sorry for the difficulty, but I need your usernames. I am going to reset your accounts and you need to sign up again, but this time you should have no trouble and should receive your registration email.

Does this mean you will be on your forum more?

Yes but I will still stalk Cemetech like a fox. I love the community here so how could I leave.

Umbrella Labs things your site is compromised:

You might want to look into that.

That's weird, although there's not much I can do.

Spud, I asked you to remove the misappropriation of my username, and I see you have not yet done so.

Just keep in mind it will be very hard for a brand new calculator forum to take off when there are already four established ones that struggles getting high activity. It was already hard before the iPoop Touch existed so I can't imagine how hard it must be now, unless the site is really unique (in my case the first successful TI forum I had was entirely devoted to RPGs and a rather unique moderating policy before finally branching out).

I know how calc forums go captured after some time, due to not enough contributors. Ti-84-plus.com (forum linked by my sig) is only me and contra.

I'll help contribute where I can, but I cannot garentee that this will be an easy task for you, spud. First, answer yourself this: what do you offer that omnimaga/cemetech do not? What does your site have that makes it appealing?

Why Red Rock, might I ask? What is Red Rock meant to mean?

Many of the other calc forums that exists today or lasted a long while had something in common: When they originally started, they offered something unique other forums didn't offer (although in many cases it changed over the years once the userbase was large enough to support it or its growth required forum expansion):

-MaxCoderz: advanced calculator RPGs and other notable programs
-Cemetech's 2nd forum: most post-2004 Kerm programs and heavily hardware-oriented talk.
-Omnimaga's 2nd forum: strong focus on RPGs and xLIB. Moderation discouraged singling out users of specific programming languages and combos (note: at first that board only had news and featured projects. General discussion was added only due to high demand and then the board rules a month later)
-Ti-BASIC Developer: Had a very complete BASIC and optimizing wiki
-United-TI: Not much besides Contra 83 and heavy BASIC focus, but it was the result of the merging of several smaller sites so that gave them a kickstart.
-Revsoft: Spencer's Zelda and WabbitEmu.
-Epic Programming Studios: The first ever forum to cover multiple calculator brands (TI and Casio) and the cross-platform calc language project.

Also, when those respective forums started, their original staff were much more active than the rest of the users for the most part. If you start a forum but never show up there (or if when you do, you only post in the topics named Word Association and Quote the Post Above You), members will think you don't care. And of course unique discussion != BASIC shell discussion: Nobody cares about those enough (if at all) to join a forum about them.

That's not reassuring... but OK!

Well luxen (and everyone else), I offer the delight of an open forum. I don't mean trolling but that people are free to be themselves at red rock. And if a member wants a feature in the forum I will most likely add it as long as it doesn't pose a security risk.

And as for the name egeek, the name has to do with the look of raw iron found in the ground. Raw iron is often rusted and looks red.