As discussed on UnitedTI, several signs point to ticalc.org waning and dying. Its annual traffic is down for the first time in a decade, news has slowed from weekly to bi-monthly, and many feel the staff has shown increasing arrogance regarding both new hires and publication of news. In particular, the staff hired our own Pseudoprogrammer to be one of the new file archivers, then fired him unceremoniously when they felt he was not fulfilling his duties, even though he had spoken to them and discussed his situation. Indeed, they failed to even send a courtesy response to the other twenty or so applicants, including myself and elfprince13. Michael Vincent has a nearly oligarchical hold on the site news, and has repeatedly and directly insulted specific authors that he has felt do not deserve featuring. Indeed, he has expressed personal and unbased bias against specific projects, including some of mine and some of Omnimaga's, a position that is highly unbecoming of the now-sole news editor of a community-leading site.

What are your thoughts on the whole ticalc.org situation and the future of the community as a whole?

My thoughts...

I need to finish getting the tutorials on my site posted.

I need to finish getting a working archive system on the site.

And possibly get that projects manager system going, if I can ever get around to finish reading that php book of mine, and learning a bit more about the language.


Oh, and dont forget I was an applicant myself, and got nothing back... <.<

Yeah, I need to get my archives finished and Cemetech6 running once and for all; I should do that over my winter break.

In my opinion, I think it has a lot to do with what I call the "newb factor". Essentially, there are more and more newcomer programmers uploading either the same old trite programs or stupid, pointless "widgets". With little "fresh blood" in the TI Community, the guys at TICalc are getting frustrated. Their site has basically devolved from "one-stop shop for all your cool programming needs" to "we have so many quadratic equation solvers, we can't count them all. We can't even COUNT that high!"

Simply put, they're frustrated with the endless amounts of absurdity at the back-end, dealing with all the crap/trite/stale programs uploaded there. This frustration has nowhere to go and thus back-flows into the front side of the site in the form of said events (the firings and slowdown). After all, who WOULDN'T get sick of having to deal with the EXACT same things everyday for a long time?

To some extent I'd say that's true. However, more than fresh blood in the community, it seems that the ticalc staff needs some fresh blood, or at least the site itself. The site has changed very little since I joined the TI community (around 4 years ago), and I feel it just can't keep up with the new, 'exciting' sites (I'm looking at you, unitedti). They need to have more dynamic content (Feature a program every month? Sounds like fun!), or maybe even add a 'real' forum. Right now, it plays a vital role for the community as a download hub, but it should be revamped to be a true community hub where you can find what's 'hot' and 'cool' right _now_.

I feel like I should send some of these thoughts to the admins..

Perhaps it would help if there site was not so depressingly boring
I was shocked at the beginning of the school year that they seemed to accept just about every program that was submitted. As for the fresh blood, how about making me in charge of ticalc.org

Yeah I think we need to set up a ticalc2 or something and transfer the archives but do some filtering first, like delete files that don't work or crash. and then see if there can be a higher standard for the files that are uploaded or updated. We would only keep one of a kind math programs that are complex or hard to make, and maybe set a current cool projects page.

Sure, that's a good idea . I will be in charge of that site too

Perhaps, if that is set up, we can set up stuff like the following:
A large team of trusted moderators that can sort files whenever they want and upload them with no obligations
Forms for creating new project pages, with update features.
More featured programs.
These are things I'd like to see.

Even a mockup of a new site would be nice, maybe one that shows some new features...

does on MV ever come on #tcpa?
someone needs to yell at him, and IRC works better than email because you can ensure he's actually the read message, and isn't just deleting them

He just ignores people who yell at him, or kicks them off the chan.

So who is willing to sacrifice themselves for the cause?

I just wanted to point out that after a brief spurt of activity, ticalc.org is once again quickly dying, as far as I can tell. The last news item was on September 18th, over two months ago, and the last archives update was September 23rd, also more than two months ago. Interestingly, only 180 files are pending processing, which would indicate that it's the community in general that's dying. Inevitable, perhaps, but still tragic.

at this point the most active calculator community is probably UTI. Revsoft and MC are still cranking out the magic, but the forums are pretty inactive. The Detached Solutions forums were dead last I checked. Cemetech has definitely had a spurt in activity to match UTI, but we don't have quite the same focus on calculators that we once did

Definitely true. I was actually thinking today, if we really want to revitalize the site, the trick would be to find something new and current to focus on. Web development? PHP programming? Torque? You guys tell me.

we seem to be doing well on the web development, torque, lego, calculator, hardware modding, and graphic design/3d modeling fronts. I was thinking that the Blockland forum should be split into two subsections:
one for showing off any lego creation (IRL/Blockland/TBG), and one for discussing TGE development topics.

Agreed on that list of topics that are our primary foci, but I think we should stress one or more of them particularly if we are to stand out, otherwise we'll be spreading ourselves too thin. Either that, or post information-packed topics on all of the above so people end up here for Google searches and then stay once they see what is around.

Are we still talking about TI-Calc? I think it'd be nice to have authors create their own pages that fit the program they uploaded or their style. To keep things organized, that would be done with CSS.

I can entertain the idea of web development on TI-Calc, mainly HTML/CSS & a simple user PHP (sort of like Wiki, where a author can create a dynamic link easily, but still can't do harm to the display of the page if the destination link doesn't exist.) Though you just being a web developer and not a TI programmer would be pointless (since you wouldn't be able to showcase your site/layout) I could see alliances between Web Developers & Programmers.

TI-Calc focuses to much on the singularity of the users, assuming the program was made by one person. Yes there are co-author fields, but the respected form felt distant from the community. It'd be nice to see TI-Calc embrace a grouped community, where you can choose to be alerted for new author activity - whether file submission or project progress/blog.

We're not in a static web environment; the most dynamic element of TI-Calc is the fact that it counts downloads. That's fun to look at but honestly, it's boring as hell. The number of downloads is nice to compare to other programs if there are no screen shots.

Speaking of Screen Shots, I believe screen shots should be mandatory to a project being submitted. It's nice to see what the program does rather than read some half-assed description.

That's all I got so far

EDIT: It'd also be nice to easily edit file descriptions rather than e-mail someone - or completely resubmit your file - to change one error. I also think descriptions should be proof read. The legibility/readability should also hold something to the programs acceptance to the archives.

No offense to the people who have English as their second language, but it's hard to understand what your program does when you guys leave out nouns, articles and other essential words (and not all of you do!) to understanding the program.

And no 'All-Caps' descriptions, those just get annoying. A program should be rejected just for that.

Speaking of rejection: It'd be nice if your program stayed in a que once it has been rejected. You make the necessary edits as depicted in an e-mail and/or notice on the page and you click re-submit. Your program will go to another que - for resubmitted rejects - and if it fails again you have one more try to fix it.

I occasionally see us on Gmail, and I think having TBG integrated with the site (SAX, use the archive system to host the files for the autoupdater, maybe integrate private messaging, and add a way to post iGob's and pictures of builds to the forum from in game. We should discuss rolling out the new features+any subforums simultaneous with the first release of TBG on AIM.


and I like the idea of having several concentrations. web design, 3d artwork (including lego builds), and continuing our concentration on calculators.